Peter -

If each of the 10 websites are able to stand on their own, I think a strategy of slowly linking a few together might work, but I would be cautious.

I would avoid having each of the 10 websites link to each other. That's probably where you'll get into the most amount of trouble.

Instead, draw a diagram with the Websites that visitors would feel are the most similar. And test and watch the traffic. If you see a high bounce rate from one site to the other, you might want to reconsider.

I'd also evaluate if the sites that you are linking together are hosted at the same location, with the same C block of IP addresses. If so, that could raise a virtual eyebrow or two with an algorithm.

You might want to go with a strategy like this, where site 1 links to sites 2, 3 and 4:

1
+---+----+
2 3 4

And site 5 goes to site 6

5
+-----+
6

But don't go with a strategy where:
1 -- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5 -- 6 -- 7 -- 8 -- 9 -- 10

Hope this helps!

-- Jeff

Jen - I agree with Eli.  It's best not to use the TM symbol in a URL string  - it will confuse the end user when it's URL encoded and scrambled.  Rather, put the mark on your pages and in images.

If you have gone through the registration process with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), you should be using the  symbol next to your mark, and not the TM symbol.

According to the Trademark FAQs on the USPTO site: http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp#_Toc275426682

Do federal regulations govern the use of the designations "TM" or "SM" or the symbol?

If you claim rights to use a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim of a “common-law” mark.  No registration is necessary to use a "TM" or "SM" symbol and you may continue to use these symbols even if the USPTO refuses to register your mark.  Those symbols put people on notice that you claim rights in the mark, although common law doesn't give you all the rights and benefits of federal registration.

You may only use the federal registration symbol "" after the USPTO actually registers a mark, not while an application is pending.  And it may only be used on or in connection with the goods/services listed in the federal trademark registration and while the registration is still alive (you may not continue to use it if you don’t maintain the registration or it expires).  Although there are no specific requirements on where the symbol should be placed relative to the mark, most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark.  Note: Because several foreign countries use “” to indicate that a mark is registered in that country, use of the symbol by the holder of a foreign registration may be proper.

From another section_:  There are no specific requirements on where the “” symbol should be placed relative to the mark, but most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark._

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

Have you checked the age of your domain name, compared to the age (both forward and backward) of their domain name?  That could factor into the ranking analysis.

It's possible they bought likes, but it's likely that the people running the other organization are spending a lot of money sponsoring Facebook posts that get people to like their site.

This might be the case where the social component of the ranking outweighs a site that has other high metrics from Moz (Google doesn't use PA and DA; Moz ranks based on these estimates).

It could be that their site content is more recent and topical, so the site is ranking for fresh, new content, instead of a page that has withstood the test of time.

I'm happy to take a look at both your site and the competitor's site to see additional differences, and look at search results, if you want to post them here...

Thanks,

-- Jeff

It sounds like it could be a few different issues, but my initial look at the site makes it seem to me that it's duplicate content, and that Google is only returning the results for their PDF and not for yours.

Google does hate duplicate content, and this is probably why they are only showing their PDF.

It may be that they posted theirs first, or they linked to it first.

As you probably know, not all PDFs are created equally. Some are more difficult for a search engine to read (i.e. might have text tied up in graphics). And PDFs are really not a great end user experience.

If you really want to rank for this, I might suggest creating this page as an HTML page instead of a PDF, as it might be able to be indexed more easily, and you might rank for it better.

I hope this helps?

Thanks,
-- Jeff

Sharla - That is indeed problematic.  I think that you have a couple of options:

1. Through an attorney, send a certified letter asking for the removal of the information from the job history.  Have this followed up with a defamation claim for doing harm to a business for fraudulently claiming employment.

2. You can Report a Violation of the Facebook Terms of Service, even if you don't have an account by using the form here: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/274459462613911

3. You can go the person's profile page, and click on the gear icon next to Message, and click on Report.  You can use this feature even if you're not friends with the person on Facebook.  This might fall into the bullying realm, too.

Hope this helps

Without seeing the new and old sites, my first impression is that this might have been caused by having the older site on a different server; the newer site might be on a newer, different Web server.  If this is the case, and the older server is still online, I'd check your DNS zone files to make sure that the older site isn't somehow still accessible?  I've seen cases where there's two A records for the www. version of a domain; not ideal, but it can cause issues.  I'd also set the robot.txt file on the older server / older site to no-index / no-follow.

Hope this helps?

Thanks,

• Jeff

Reed - You should be fine to use the "hide" function in Magento to not have the duplicate

tags show up on the site.  If you want to jump into the code a bit more, you can likely change the way that the titles are displayed, but this might be a deeper dive into the design layer of Magento.

Hope this helps!

-- Jeff

The simple answer is that Google Places allow you to designate service-area businesses, such as a lawn care company that goes to people's homes or businesses.  Most of these businesses are run out of someone's house or have a PO Box.

A Google+ Page, though, does not allow you to "hide" your address.

The confusion, though, is that a few months ago, Google started allowing you to merge Google+ Pages into Google Places pages.  I work with these all the time, and I still find it confusing.

According to this Google Product Forum:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-plus-discuss/YEoxcSdOWGI
... you are not supposed to create a Google+ Page for a Service Area business that has a hidden address.

Google+ Pages do not support hidden addresses.

A service area business is also not available for Google Business Photos (think street view photos inside a business).  That's only for a buiness where you can have customers come into a store or a physical location.

Instead, you should create a Google Places listing, from the new Places Dashbaord, and add your service area into it.

This forum has a bit more detail as well:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/I0Royu8V9x8

I hope this helps!
Thanks,
-- Jeff

I'd also recommend putting in an IP restriction for any of the demo sites.

So that if anyone visits the demo sites from a non-whitelisted IP address, then you can display an error message, or simply redirect them over to the live site.

That will likely have the search results quickly removed from the search engine.

Hope this helps!

-- Jeff

Rikomuttik-

There are a couple of reasons why 404 errors might be showing up again, even if you've fixed them in Google.

1. Moz might be using an older crawl that still lists pages that don't exist on the site.

2. If you're using a soft 404 error handling (i.e. all 404 errors redirect to the home page), then Google might not see the errors, but perhaps Moz does?

3. It's possible that you have inbound links from other sites that point to your site, that is throwing 404 errors, and that's what it being seen by other search engines.

4. It's also possible that the 301 redirects you might have set up in your .htaccess file have been changed, or are no longer working?

5. It's also possible that an older page that used to be on the site, was removed, was added back in, and that page has links that go to 404 pages?

Hope this helps?

-- Jeff

Loan -

I'm also a professional photographer and when Google+ first launched, I think the biggest community that embraced it was the photographer industry.

I went into a photoshoot about a year and a half ago (I was shooting a very high-end home in Boulder, Colorado for an interior designer), and the first thing the owner of the house said was, "Hey... I follow you on Google+"

Honestly, that's the only time that's ever happened though.

Google+ for me and photography has allowed me to connect with other photographers all around the world. I've seen some amazing work by other photographers, that I wouldn't have seen anywhere else.

That said, I think that the biggest thing that Google+ has done is that if I write an article or content page on my site, a Google+ posting (especially if it gets +1'd by many people) ensure that the post is indexed pretty quickly.

Here's a Moz article about the correlation between Google +1 and search rankings:
http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations
After Page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, the correlation of Google +1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook shares, and even keyword usage.

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

We've recently launched a number of responsive designs for eCommerce companies.

I'd love to tell you that there is zero risk in launching with the new site from a rankings perspective, but because you kept all of the content and the URL structure the same, you've mitigated a lot of the risk.

Google has come out in the past and said that it prefers a responsive design framework, as opposed to an m-dot mobile site + a desktop site, as it doesn't have to worry about duplicate content.

That said, most of the risk is going to be based on how well the responsive site actually performs when a user is on a desktop, tablet and phone.

If the design works well, and isn't confusing to the end user, then go for it.

But if the design is buggy or looks a lot worse (due to the limitations of responsive design), maybe do a bit more testing.

If you'd like, post a link to the site and I'm happy to take a look at how it looks on different devices...

Rikomuttik-

If you do, indeed, have inbound links from other sites pointing over to your site, this is a really good thing.  This often happens when people want to link to an article, image or other page within the site.

I'd do a crawl on Open Site Explorer, or within Google's Webmaster Tools, and see if you can find any inbound links that are pointing to non-existing pages, and your system is giving 404 errors.

Then, I'd use a 301 redirect to take the inbound link and direct it to the proper location.  Or, if you really want, you can re-create the page at the older location, but just make sure that you're not creating duplicate content on the site.

Hope this helps!

• Jeff

Loan-

I do both.  I think that it's important to share your work with others, and join the community.

Also, a quick follow up to my earlier post; although the Moz article claims a high correlation between Google +1 and higher rankings, Matt Cutts tried to set the record straight here:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2290337/Matt-Cutts-Google-1s-Dont-Lead-to-Higher-Ranking

Thanks!  And let's connect on Google+
-- Jeff

Felipe -

Cars used to be sold via classified ads in newspapers, until Craigslist came around.  Craigslist removed a huge source of revenue - classified ads - away from newspapers.  That, and the fact that nobody receives newspapers anymore.

I would say that any classified car site, even one focused on Utah, has to compete with Craigslist.  How to do that?  Craigslist has the audience of people looking to buy cars, and a ton of people who want to post cars for sale.

Craigslist, due to it's minimal, almost text-only design, loads really fast.  It allows people to upload images, and list a price.  It makes it really easy to find cars.

Whatever this site that you're building for a client needs to do everything that Craigslist can do, but more.

One thing I don't love about Craigslist is that you can't search specifically by car model, year, type to hone in on the results.

A better search option would be really helpful.

That said, if you're just starting out, you'll likely face an inventory volume problem - so you don't want to have too many empty categories.

Another thing that doesn't work as well for Craigslist is that the quality of car images tends to not be great.  Probably this is my bias, because I'm a professional photographer.  But an iPhone shot of a car just doesn't work well to sell a several thousand dollar car.

Perhaps one idea is that to launch the site, anyone who wants to list can drive the car to a location in Salt Lake City, or somewhere else, and have someone on the classified team take professional photos of the car, against a nice backdrop, and also give nice detailed macro close up images of the cars and trucks for sale.  Including one of the open engine compartment, the odometer, etc.

One other idea for functionality: allow users who come to the site to get an email alert when a car matching the description of what they're looking for (i.e. I want to buy a Toyota 4Runner w/ a manual transmission).

You'll obviously want to do tie-ins to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, to allow people to pin something they want, and share when they list something.

That said, posting on Craigslist is free.  And it's touch to compete with free.  (Craigslist makes their money for job postings, and everything else is free.)

It's not ideal to have such a massive .htaccess file that it slows down your page load time significantly.  But if you have a lot of inbound links to pass that matter, you'll likely want to keep your SEO value intact and use 301 redirects to handle this properly.

My $0.02: Test!

Do a page load test with the .htaccess file off / removed, and then do another one where it is on and live.  If there's no significant time difference, you should be okay.

We have sites with hundreds or even thousands of lines in the .htaccess file and they run pretty quickly.

That said, here's why 404 pages aren't ideal to serve:

According to Rand Fishkin's Moz blog writeup, Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO?
http://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

"When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page:

A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this)
B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic
and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach

It's OK to let it 404."

According to Moz's Redirection SEO Best Practice:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
... you want to use a 301 redirect to indicate that the content has moved permanently.

Finally, here's a post that describes how to create a more SEO friendly migration, here's a great info graphic:
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

Hope this helps!
Thanks,
-- Jeff

Larry -

In Pinterest, the little heart button is just like the Facebook "Like" icon.  (But they had to be different, so it's a heart, meaning you love it.  But not in the till-death-do-us-part way.)

Here's a link on how you can like other people's pins:

https://en.help.pinterest.com/entries/22980372-Pins-and-likes#like

From Pinterest:

What's a like?  (The Heart Shaped Thing)

Liking a pin adds the pin to your profile’s likes section rather than a specific board.

To like a pin, hover over the pin and click on the heart icon in the top right corner.

What's a pin?

A pin is an image or video you add to Pinterest that leads back to the site where it was found. You can pin anything you find on Pinterest or around the web.

Having lots and lots of people pin a product on your website, or an image or video on your page adds to it's social media profile, and should help with both consumer engagement and possibly rankings.

Hope this helps!

-- Jeff

If you switch to the "Classic" View of Google Maps, you'll be able to see the Google + page for the Ticket King Inc site:
https://plus.google.com/+TicketKingInc/about?gl=us&hl=en

On this page, I don't see that you have hours listed for your Google Places page.  Other companies often have this listed.

If you have the ability to log into this page and edit it, that might help.  It could be that it was a places page, that was converted into a Google+ page, and now not using the class map function.

When I drill all the way down on the editing of the Google+ page, I do see that you have your hours listed correctly, with just the 1 pm time listed as the closing time for Saturday.  (M-F is listed as 8:30 am - 6:00 pm).

It's also listed correctly on Facebook and Yellow pages.

I might recommend going through this form / system and updating this again, as it might (hopefully) override the 1:00 pm closing time on the Google result:

ticket-king-inc-google-plus-page.jpg suggest-changes-for-ticket-king-inc-google-plus-page.jpg google-results-ticket-king-inc-google-plus-page.jpg

It appears that the Adobe Business Catalyst system does allow you to create 301 redirects through the admin system:
http://helpx.adobe.com/business-catalyst/partner/redirect-page-urls.html

… as well as be able to upload a .csv or .tab file to do a bulk listing.

I'd recommend 301 redirecting pages to a similar top-level category, so that the end user isn't confused when they arrive there.

That said, going from 230 pages to 20 is going to reduce the content of the site by 10x. I'd imagine that doing so is going to kill most of your SEO rankings. I'd just make sure to let the client know in writing that this is a pretty bad idea from an SEO rankings perspective.

We have a similar client that ranks extremely well for seminars and conferences, and their older conferences are still available on their site for people to reference. Some of them rank very well, even years later. The client wanted to remove these from their site, but we did some tracking and measurement and showed them that they were getting many new clients based on these older pages. As well as taking up spots on search results pages that their competition wouldn't get.

If there's one thing that Google likes, it's relevant content on a site. So I would make those 20 pages really count. Make the content extremely engaging to the end user. Watch the bounce count.

Hope this helps!

• Jeff

Peter - no worries at all.  Beers on me next time you're in Boulder, Colorado...

Eli -

I took a look at the site, as well as a view of the site through the Wayback Machine.  If you did keep all of the links intact on the site, then there are two possibilities:

1. Your traffic is down by 20% because of the redesign to a responsive WordPress theme or some other factor that caused Google to dislike your site.  Usually Google likes responsive themes, but perhaps something changed in ranking due to other competitors in the space?

It could also be due to seasonal traffic fluctuations.  Can you measure the traffic not from month-to-month, but from year-to-year?  Perhaps counseling and life coaching interest is strong as kids go back to school each year in September (people might want a fresh start), but wanes as the challenges of life grind on with homework, job stuff, etc?

2. Your traffic is really the same as before (and not down 20%), but the way in which the traffic is gathered has changed, due to the responsive theme on your WordPress site.  The site tracking code for the new version of the site might be positioned in a different part of the page, and, due to the responsive design layout, might not be working like it did before.  The javascript calls might be happening well after the site "responds" using other javascript.

If you still have a way to view the older version of the site, a waterfall test that shows how everything is called from the page might be a way to eliminate this second possibility.

Hope this helps…
-- Jeff

Are overall conversions down

Michael -

I don't see any major SEO issues with forcing an SSL session, other than:

• SSL is usually a bit slower, due to the encryption overhead.  You might want to benchmark this to make sure it's not affecting your site load speed times.  If things are slow, more hardware and caching might help.

• Make sure that all of your content is being served from secure links.  For example, if you are displaying a graphic on the home page of the site, use relative paths (../images/super-impressive-graphic.png).  If you have content that uses absolute links, such as: (img src="http://www.1099pro.com/images/super-impressive-graphic.png), this will throw an SSL warning and tell users that the site is not secure.  This is important with CSS, as well as Facebook, Twitter and other plugins.

Looking at the site, it looks like your Google and LiveZilla tracking codes are set properly to auto-switch to https, but I'd try to test this.

• Also, if you're changing the URLs, you'll want to make sure that older pages with the non-www are 301 redirected to the secure pages properly, too.

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

• Jeff

Jim-

I'm not a big fan of articles that are broken up onto many pages.

The thinking in the past has been:

• Break up the pages, and you get more page views.  (Great if you are serving advertising.)
• The page will (possibly) load more quickly because you have less content on each page.
• Many marketing agencies want everything above the fold, so shorter pages "look better."

The reality, I think:

• Users hate having to go to the bottom of a page, then to click on the "more" option, and then wait 3-6 seconds for the page to load.  Especially on a mobile device.
• It is more complex to have duplicate page titles.  I'd recommend the rel=next / rel=previous tags, that could help in this case.

My $0.02 is that you should go with the single, long page articles.  I have found that search engines love, love, love pages that have a lot of content (as long as it's well written).  A page with 12,000 words of content will often outrank something with 250 words of marketing fluff.

If in doubt, though, test it out, and convert one or two over and test out how they're ranked.

Thanks!

• Jeff

Chris - I wouldn't worry about duplicate content on the privacy policy.

I have, though, seen where people copy-paste from another site, but forget to remove the other company's name.  (That's a little embarrassing, though.)

Just my $0.02,

-- Jeff