Google "strongly" suggests not using and/or removing meta refresh tags:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022447.html

Although they may pass some juice, it's not nearly as effective as a 301, especially for a site migration. In my experience, a page that tells visitors they will soon be redirected risks high bounce rates and abandonment.

Really like Zachary's suggestion. A brief message, based on referrer data (Zachary may be able to help with this) seems to be the way to go, and safely delivers your visitors where they need to be.

Hi Andreas,

Looks like you're doing everything right, but I want to make sure all the bases are covered. Depending on the size, link profile, link structure and domain authority of your site, it can take several weeks for Google and other search engines to complete migrate a domain. Here are some important processes not to overlook.

1. Did you file a change of address within Google webmaster? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

2. When migrating domains, it's important to leave an old sitemap up, so that Google will try crawling the old URLs and register the 301s. If you neglect this step, it may take much longer for Google to crawl the old URLs to see that they've moved.

3. As Joel pointed out, make sure to update as many internal and external links as possible.

That should cover the basics, but there are a million more details you can explore to make the process go more smoothly. For a detailed approach, here's a couple of excellent guides written my some very smart folks.

• https://seogadget.co.uk/domain-migration/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

Hope this helps. Best of luck with the migration!

Blocking googlebot is a quick and easy way to disappear from the Index. Not an option if you want Google to rank your site.

For smaller sites or ones with limited technologies, I sometimes recommend using a crawl-delay directive in robots.txt

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48620

But I agree with both Shane and Zachary, this doesn't seem like the long term answer to your problems. Your crawl stats don't seem out of line for a site of your size, and perhaps a better hardware configuration could help things out.

With 70 new articles each day, I'd want Google crawling my site as much as they pleased.

Sounds like you're trying to outsmart Google.

Here's my advice: If you have a legitimate reason for creating independent blogs, then by all means do so, but do it out in the open where everyone, including Google can see it, because Google will see it anyway. They have tools of detecting "administratively related" sites that we can't even comprehend. It goes way beyond ip addresses, class c subnets, Google analytics profiles or whois registration data. if you have a relationship with a group of sites, chances are they will figure it out algorithmically.

As an example, the Theme Forrest folks do a great job of this with their collection of websites (try the drop-down navigation in the header to see the relationships) But aside from navigation, there is not a lot of inter-linking between these sites to my knowledge.

It's actually pretty common to run a number of sites under the same company. Danny Sullivan runs Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, and has a number of other sites. These all link to each other naturally.

But be careful. If you're doing this solely for SEO benefits, the temptation to optimize your links and overdo it may be too great, and you may end up in a place you didn't intend. If, on the other hand, the different sites can all stand alone on their own merit, this may be a great idea.

Best of luck!

HI Dariusz,

Hopefully I understand your question correctly. Let me answer each in turn.

1. If I understand correctly, you're asking if text contained within elements like tabs is viewed the same as text clearly visible on the page.

For the most part, Google will easily crawl and index this text, but keep in mind that Google tends to place more weight on body text above the fold than text place in other areas of the page. That means that content within sidebars, pushed to the bottom of the page, or hidden in navigation, while important, probably doesn't count as much in most circumstances.

If putting the text there makes sense to your visitors, by all means go ahead and do it. On the other hand, if you're doing it for SEO reasons, you might be asking for trouble.

2. Depends on the context. If it is a footer link with off-topic anchor text, then Google will possibly devalue the link. On the other hand, if the medical company writes a glowing blog post about their great printing company, then the link will likely carry lots of value and Google will consider it highly relevant.

Most likely, your link will fall somewhere in-between. The best links are

• unique (not-sitewide)
• Surrounded by relevant text (not just a bunch of other links)
• in the body of the text (not the footer, bottom of the page or sidebar)
• on a relevant page
• with anchor text varied from other similar links to your URL

My favorite blog post of all time: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Rhys,

Taking a look at your site, your links all seemed natural and within reason. ( I did think the homepage was a little light on content - mostly just navigation and quick links to products. But that's another conversation.

"Best practice" is to consolidate your non-important links into a format that makes sense and is human friendly. Rand wrote a post about footer links awhile ago that still works today:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience

I wrote about this in another Q&A thread a short time back.

Today, you don't hear much about PageRank sculpting. Most SEOs don't bother with it, partly because of it's decreased effectiveness, but also in part because there are more effective ways of controlling the influence of links.

...Link "equity" or PageRank, (or MozRank), is only one small factor in the overall value of a link. Anchor text, position on the page, and a host of other factors all influence how much influence any given link can wield. Here's a good introduction on the subject (again from Rand)

If you "no-follow" your important contact pages (about us, etc) Google may have trouble finding and crawling those pages. Because these are both valuable pieces of content and trust signals for your site, this probably isn't the outcome you want.

To summarize: Adding nofollow in your case doesn't make sense. It really only makes sense in a very few cases, and isn't as effective in controlling ranking signals as many people would like to believe.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Logan,

I've read through this entire thread, and both Alan and Jeremy have some good points, but after reading your last comment I'd strongly opt for directories instead of subdomains.

As far as the display URL goes, Google will allow up to 35 characters, so you could possibly use
EmergencyDental.com/Omaha

I think what you propose...

Take:

• omahaemergencydental.com
• desmoinesemergencydental.com
• seattleemergencydental.com
• etc...

And make it:

• omaha.emergencydental.com
• desmoines.emergencydental.com
• seattle.emergencydental.com
• etc..

...is diluting your domain authority amoung too many subdomains. As Alan said, you want to be careful about inter-linking all of these subdomain. Whereas if they are all on the same subdomain (but in different folders) than interlinking is less of a problem.

Aside from preserving Domain Authority, I think you have the opportunity to create a stronger brand voice using "Emergency Dental" than all the subdomains which emphasize the city first.

Ultimately, there are few instances where subdomains make sense, and I could be wrong based on the information presented, but the circumstances would have to be pretty convincing for me to create a subdomain structure like you propose.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Excellent. Glad to hear 1&1 is more manageable than I suspected.:)