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If you want to increase the domain authority then I always suggest option 3. The reason for this is that Google has most likely already assigned some authority to your main domain name www.domain.com. If you decide to use blog.domain.com or a brand new domain then you will have to build both up with their own separate authority (yes some authority goes transfer but nothing worth the effort). So rather use option 3 am make one primary domain stronger. Far less work on your part and far better results. Lastly, by adding a blog to your main domain you in turn offer fresh content to your domain and we all know that Google loves fresh content.

Google takes a while to catch these things and believe me, white hat SEO if much harder than black hat so I understand your frustration.

The best thing you can do is locate the site and then submit a paid link report then hope that Google gets around to penalizing them, the competition will soon gain no value from the links and the link-juice may be reversed. The Google part is that a Google Quality Expert will likely follow the trail and treat your competitor according to how much they violated Google's TOS

I always use non-www, as it makes my domain name shorter. So long as you choose what your preference is in webmaster tools and 301 redirect the www to the non-www (like you did) then you will have no problems from Google.

The links to your website containing www. will not affect your link juice at all.

There is no fault in redirecting the multiple domains to one domain, however, do not go overboard, if the domains were never indexed by Google before then rather just get rid of them.

I do however suggest that you never redirect your domains to internal pages or section on another domain, so never redirect http://www.domain1.com to http://www.domain2.com/products as this is bad practice. It should always be http://www.domain1.com to http://www.domain2.com as it may be picked up as spam (this is my opinion)

You can read up a great explanation on redirection in learn SEO > Redirection

Hi Brad, it sounds like you are doing everything right, you can't get much better than quality content.  My question for you is: If you have the quality domains, blog and articles do you even need the "Spammy" blogs? I would do away with the spammy blogs and rather add the a blog of quality content to your e-commerce site. This will add value to your primary e-commerce domain.

It would be best to use A/B testing (by Google) to figure out where the traffic changes are taking place. This is done by using a utm_content variable in the URL tag.

Here is the link: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=55589

If you are running Adwords then the Website Optimizer is a good place to start.

I would always prefer to use text based navigation for my main menu. Google likes text and looks for text in all elements of the page including the "alt" pictures, however I always feel that for both robots and human users text based menus are the way to go. What happens if your image menu does not load? What happens if the images take a while to load and slow down your site? There is nothing quicker that a text menu. Don't forget, you also lose your anchor text. If you feel that the image menu if the only thing that will work with your design then go ahead and use it, but make sure:

1. It is fast

2. Uses "alt tags"

3. Add some text links to that page... maybe as footer links.

I am not a big fan of automated software myself as I prefer to experiment with different descriptions and titles on different social media sites to see which gets the better response, but each to his/her own. As a word of caution, just make sure that the software that you use does not throw out spam links (or powered by X links) attached to your article as this looks unprofessional and your attempt to get readers should always be professional. Maybe test it under an alias first before using it with your own website or company name. Is see you are from SA (Cape Town), I took a look at your site, are you a Drupal expert?

When writing articles you are always get strong article pages that come up before your home page on curtain terms. If it is a major topic as you have mentioned then just make sure you link to your home page and also make sure the home page contains the main topic keyword. You must make sure that all your article pages have very strong and clear call-to-actions otherwise it defeats the point of them ranking well and acting like valuable entry pages (which they should)

Hi Prasanth,

If you are going to change the design of a website it will not affect your SEO so long as you keep your URL structure the same. So if your URLS are www.mysite.com/mycategory/my-page then you want to make sure that you use the same URL when implementing the new site. It is the URLS and the page content that have gained Google trust and authority over the years and not the design itself.

If you are changing the type of code your site uses (aspx to php) and just cannot keep the URL structure then you will need to make sure that you 301 redirect every single page to its matching page on the new site. (Eg www.mysite.com/mycategory/my-page.aspx will need to 301 redirect to www.mysite.com/mycategory/my-matching-page). Unfortunately, when you change the URL structure there is always some loss of page authority even when you have a 301 redirect in place. As for linkbuilding, make sure that all target pages that have incoming links 301 redirect to the new URL, then notify the site linking to you that your URL has changed.

Curse words will not affect your ranking, however Google may indeed filter you with their "safe search" filter if you use too many words that they do not consider family friendly. As to what these words are I cannot tell you however I think we all have an idea of what is considered family friendly.

The general rule is to always 301 redirect the page to the closest match page on your website. I would never just delete an old page as even the least popular pages have page authority over time. Secondly it never looks good to land on a 404, rather land on a similar page or the home page. So 301, every time. Once Google has removed the page from the index then and only then can you delete the page.  (however if it has lots of links then 301 is still the way to go)

"Wordpressing" a site does wonders for old outdated sites, mostly due to the ease of content creation as well as the automatic pinging serves & rss feeds built in. Almost all my websites have been redesigned into Wordpress and the results have been fantastic. Just remember to do those 301 redirects and things will work out eventually.

If bad anchor tech could hurt your quality then every competitor would be linking to you with bad anchor text. You simply do not get the same quality benefit as good anchor text. Put it this way:

Site A = Vet
Site B = Dog Parlor
Site C = Car Sales

Site A ---> Site B with Anchor Text "Wash Your Dog" = 9/10 Quality Link
Site A ---> Site B with Anchor Text "www.dogservice.com" = 7/10 Quality Link
Site A ---> Site C with Anchor Text "Car Sales" = 2/10 Quality Link
Site A ---> Site C with Anchor Text "ww.carsales.com" = 1/10 Quality Link

As shown above, relevant links are what counts, Anchor text just gives you a added benefit

Exactly right, and remember, Google does not only use the alt tag to determine what the image is about, it also uses the surrounding text to get an idea. You can see it uses this method when searching in Google images, many times the target image does not even have an alt tag but Google seems to be relevant.

Hi Macky,

I personally would 301 redirect site 2 to site 1 if site 1 is more than 5 years older than site 2. The reason being is that I think that site 1 is likely to have more authority over so many years (even though it may not be ranking and is dormant). However, if site 1 is really outdated then I would say redirect site 1 to site 2. As mentioned by the others it is important that you do not just redirect the whole domain from one to the other. Try and match as many pages as possible with relevant, matching 301 redirects.

Lastly, I would also check the amount of backlinks on each domain, if one heavy outweighs the other then this should be a factor in your decision.

So in summary, your decision should be based on the following order:

• Domain Age
• Keyword in the domain www.healthinsurance.com vs www.drwho.com
• Backlinks
• Modern Website build with modern code

I would not be able to tell you the exact best method unless you PM your domains so I can give you an indepth report, as there are many other smaller factors like tables vs divs, sitemaps, penalty history etc.

Wordpress uses the wp-cron.php for scheduled stuff like db back ups, email postings, scheduled posts, calenders etc. So if you have plugins that do this like "calendar" or "events" plugins then this page should show more often.

Secondly, if you are using Google analytics then you really should not have the tracking code running on the wp- pages as this will slow your website down and can cause many other issues

Ok Roland, My main guess that the position is changing due to the type of content that your blog is posting. You may have had a more relevant article on the top of the front page (it was likely the only article when you first posted). Now as you write more and more posts, you older articles move down and the relevancy of your page content changes.

I suggest you do the following:

• Make sure that the home page of your blog only shows a summary (excerpt) of the article rather than the whole article as we do not want to duplicate our content across multiple pages. You can see an example on my blog.
• Your title is very important, so rather get to the point and mention what you do right away. I suggest: Airline Games | Air Traffic Control Games (ATC) | Best Flight Sims
• I see you are using the All In One SEO Pack, I suggest you remove the keywords tags altogether as they are more a waste of time and do not affect your SEO results at all.
• You are a new blog so I suggest you write more quality content. Three articles is just not going to cut it just let. If you want to rank under "online flight sim" then you need to write a post that highlights all the top online sim games and back up your opinion with great facts.
• Try not to make your post names to similar: "The best of the airline games!" & "The History of Airline Games " are very similar.
• Are the 7 social media buttons necessary for a new blog? Rather stick to FB, Twitter & Google +1 for now until your blog becomes more popular.

When you first published you blog I am guessing that Google's FreshBot (A bot that looks for new content)  was giving your pages priority as they were new and fresh (this is why we post new content). A FreshBot listing can usually puts you way up on page 1 for a few days until the Google Deepbot comes along and puts you in your rightful place.The easiest way to tell if your listing is a temporary fresh listing is to look and see if there is a time stamp on the listing (eg: Posted 2 days Ago), if there is then it is likely that Google is giving that page priority for being fresh.

So do not be discouraged, rather keep writing good content and eventually your organic listings will get stronger. There are many many signals that affect your ranking, but if you do the basics your site can perform well.

I don't advise 301 redirecting /insurance as it looks to me like it is very strong. It will lose most of its link juice when redirected. Rather optimise your homepage with the desired keyword. Google chooses the most relevant page which is why /insurance is showing up for insurance. As it should! Don't worry about your home page, rather link to the /insurance page and your entire domain will gain strength over time. Actually the deep linked /insurance page will likely get stronger quicker than trying to get the home page stronger.

Once you link all everything to the home page it will eventually get stronger so long as it contains Insurance in the title and is optimised for this word.

I would tell you MD about over optimisation, there is nothing natural at all about creating  tons of content all about one keyword "liquidation"... maybe you are trying to hard. Sometimes our SEO skills are our own worst enemy as we fill in all the cracks and make everything perfect and Google turns around and says "this is too perfect".

Turn his focus to conversions/goals and away from a keyword you will likely not hit for a while. Rather try get your users into your conversion funnel and to the products/services that are important. As Ray-pp mentioned, if your MD wants instant results he needs to put money into Google AdWords.

On a side note, if we are talking about the "wilsonfield.co.uk" website and you want to have good ranking on the word "Liquidation" then the word needs to be in the home page title towards the front of the title:

HOME PAGE
Not Optimised for Liquidation : Business Recovery, Insolvency & Personal Debt -Trust Wilson Field
Optimised for Liquidation:  Liquidation | Business Recovery | Insolvency And Personal Debt -Trust Wilson Field
Then, on your Liquidation page the title should be:

LIQUIDATION PAGE
Not Optimised for Liquidation : Liquidation does not have to mean the end of your business!
Optimised for Liquidation: Liquidation | Company Compulsory And Voluntary Liquidation

Hope that helps, will not get you first but you will jump quite a lot.