Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Happy to help, good luck!

Hey Alaniz,

I would run the subfolder route for two reasons.

1. Branding. You can leverage all of you brand equity under one domain but still let people know that you specialize in marketing for the listed industries. Your case studies and blog will show you know your stuff. People will probably think each site is a separate business. You will want your customers to know you service other industries so they can (hopefully) refer others. So maybe you do a killer job marketing for the legal side and the client has a buddy in medical and they can easily refer the friend to the one website.

2. SEO time and effort. Starting from scratch on six sites in competitive markets will take some serious time and resources to get them to generate traffic. Focusing on one domain will pass the link equity on to the other pages. I would rather manage one site versus six.

I love seeing strategy questions on here, those are always the tough ones.

No, the two systems operate separately. I would let this ride out a bit longer before you jump to too many conclusions. There are many variables that could have influenced this situation such as new competitors entering the PLA's, a slight algo update wasn't in favor of your site, or seasonality depending on what you are selling. A mix of good organic rankings and PLA's/PPC usually has a 1+1=3 effect because you have more "real estate" on the web, hopefully on the first page.

You will need to find out if you need to block a single or range of IP addresses, then here is the guide-

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034840?hl=en

Most category pages are pretty content shallow. They usually just have basic product info that links to the product pages. Make sure you have category pages built out with plenty unique content that would be valuable to your customers and the bots. It seems that people like to link directly to the product page so do your best to acquire links to the category level.

Each site seems to have their own niche, and usually offers a service for that.

Conversion Rate Experts- for methodology and what questions must be asked before setting up a test.

Unbounce- for landing page optimization. (and they have a pretty cool 30 day landing page course http://do.thelandingpagecourse.com/)

Crazy Egg- for engagement and heatmaps.

Visual Website Optimizer- for a/b testing, reaching statistical significance on tests.

Here is a great post from Niel Patel- http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/10/08/what-spending-252000-on-conversion-rate-optimization-taught-me/

Hope this helps! Just a few places I go to for info.

Hey Bob,

To make sure you are starting with a clean slate, you might have to clean the slate. I would first Google the

1. Name

2. Address

3. Phone Number

Then claim and adjust anything that isn't consistent with your current nap. This includes variations of suite so "suite" "ste" "ste." "#" this will make sure that all the authority is passed to your site, and not a non-existent business. You can also check an accuracy report on Yext or GetListed.org.

Then make sure moving forward you use the same info without the slightest variation. I would begin building citations first with the big data aggregators: Google, Infogroup, Localeze, Axciom, etc.

Here are a few more resources:

Great NAP guide by David Mihm- http://moz.com/blog/local-search-moving-locations

How to Remove Duplicate Listings from Different Business Directories- http://www.ngsmarketing.com/how-to-remove-duplicate-listings-from-different-business-directories/

How long websites take to update- https://getlisted.org/static/resources/listing_time_to_live.pdf

When you set up the campaign did you select the first radio button that said "Subdomain" because that tracks only one subdomain such as getpromoted.in. If you select the second radio that says "Root Domain" then that will track multiple subdomains within the domain such as blog.getpromoted.in or forum.getpromoted.in. Hope that gives you somewhere to start.

This is definitely the best practice for a forum. This will take away the incentive for people/bots to comment spam in the forum for a followed link. It still might happen, but at least you have taken away the reward.

Thanks for the tip! We have a pretty decent review campaign set up for initial and post site launch, so that isn't much of a worry. Thanks again!

When you set up the campaign did you select the first radio button that said "Subdomain" because that tracks only one subdomain such as getpromoted.in. If you select the second radio that says "Root Domain" then that will track multiple subdomains within the domain such as blog.getpromoted.in or forum.getpromoted.in. Hope that gives you somewhere to start.

This is definitely the best practice for a forum. This will take away the incentive for people/bots to comment spam in the forum for a followed link. It still might happen, but at least you have taken away the reward.

Most category pages are pretty content shallow. They usually just have basic product info that links to the product pages. Make sure you have category pages built out with plenty unique content that would be valuable to your customers and the bots. It seems that people like to link directly to the product page so do your best to acquire links to the category level.

use the canonical tag, or do a 301 redirect. Canonical is the best option.

Hey Alaniz,

I would run the subfolder route for two reasons.

1. Branding. You can leverage all of you brand equity under one domain but still let people know that you specialize in marketing for the listed industries. Your case studies and blog will show you know your stuff. People will probably think each site is a separate business. You will want your customers to know you service other industries so they can (hopefully) refer others. So maybe you do a killer job marketing for the legal side and the client has a buddy in medical and they can easily refer the friend to the one website.

2. SEO time and effort. Starting from scratch on six sites in competitive markets will take some serious time and resources to get them to generate traffic. Focusing on one domain will pass the link equity on to the other pages. I would rather manage one site versus six.

I love seeing strategy questions on here, those are always the tough ones.

You will need to find out if you need to block a single or range of IP addresses, then here is the guide-

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034840?hl=en