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If I move forward with the acquisition: 1. Should I, if there is a way, just acquire the domain and then attempt to unlink existing links? 2. Can I just buy the domain, completely kill the site, and then build again from scratch? Even if I do that, the links to the domain will still be out there. 3. Should I even move forward with the purchase if I know these tactics have been used? Thanks!

I asked our developers to implement a WordPress blog on our site and they feel that the technology stack that is required to support WP will interfere with a number of different .NET production applications on that server. I can't justify another server just because of a blog either. They want me to find a .NET blog solution. The only thing that looks decent out there is dotnetblogengine.net. Has anyone had any experience with this tool or any others like it? Thanks, Alex

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I own a couple domains that are specific to a product and would like to know which one folks on here recommend. Primary Google Search Term Example: "Tax Bond" Example Domain 1: www.taxbonds.net Example Domain 2: www.tax-bond.net I've done research on here before and have come to the conclusion that hyphenated domains aren't bad (no more than 2 hyphens though). So, do I go for the EXACT search term with the hyphen or do I go for the pluralized search term without the hyphen, even though most people will not add the "s" in the Google search? Thanks, Alex

All of our pages have been indexed by Google and we are ranking very well thus far. Here is an example of a search where, based on my searches, we rank well. Search for "Indiana ERISA Bond". You can search for any state name followed by "ERISA Bond" and we rank really well (Top of page 1). The pages that should show up for you are here: 1.  https://www.suretegrity.com/surety-bonds/indiana/erisa-bond 2. https://www.suretegrity.com/surety-bonds/indiana/erisa My issue is with a different product we offer. Search for "Georgia Mortgage Lender Bond". The pages I would hope to come up, in order of priority, are: 1. https://www.suretegrity.com/surety-bonds/georgia/mortgage-lender 2. https://www.suretegrity.com/surety-bonds/georgia/mortgage-broker-banker-lender When I do my searches I show up at the bottom of page 2 and the URL that is being found is #2 above and not #1. I have spent a LOT of time thinking about this and am in need of some direction. What am I doing wrong? Thanks, Alex

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Hi, We've got some pretty strict anti-scraping logic in our website, and it seems we accidentally snared a Googlebot with it. About 100 URL requests were responded to with a 403 Forbidden error. The logic has since been updated, so this should not happen again. I was just wondering if/when Googlebot will come back and try those URLs again. They are linked from other pages on the site, and they are also in our sitemap. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?

I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?

SEOmoz Community, I am a business owner and have spent the past year studying SEO. I've been through countless hours of videos and reading. For those questions that go beyond anything i've watched or read i've referred to this community. Everyone here has been VERY helpful and I have based some major decisions on what i've learned from everyone here. We launched our site this morning and now i'd like to see how we did from your point of view. Is my overall site/URL structure up to par? I still need to build backlinks and things of that nature but getting the site live is a major milestone for us. Any comments (good and bad) are welcome. Site: www.Suretegrity.com Thanks, Alex

When there is a 500 Internal Server Error, is it better to return an HTTP 500 response and custom error page from the requested URL, or is it better to return a 302 redirect? The redirect would send the browser to the custom error page, which would return the HTTP 500 result. We tell Google not to index or follow our error pages, so if Google sees an error at a URL, we don't necessarily want Google to think that the URL should be ignored. That's why the alternative would be to redirect to a custom error page with it's own URL. Similarly, what's the best approach if the response is a 404? Return HTTP 404 and custom 404 page from the requested URL, or redirect? Thanks.

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If I have an h1 tag on the page that describes the purpose of the page, is it a bad idea to make all of the sub-headings h2 tags? A designer mentioned that it was frowned upon to make all of the secondary headings into h2 tags, or to use CSS to selectively style the heading tags.

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I have an existing site that is currently utilizing a structure that is like this: http://www.mysite.com/Ohio/City-of-Cleveland-PRODUCT-NAME Should I restructure it like: http://www.mysite.com/Ohio/City-of-Cleveland/Product-Name We are doing very well with very specific searches already but are sometimes coming in 2nd and 3rd place. For example: If I search for CLEVELAND PRODUCT NAME I always come up in the top three and about 60% of the time I am #1. I want to make it better. We have only launched in 4 states but plan on launching an additional 4 states over the next few weeks and I want to make sure we are building things properly. Any feedback would be wonderful. As usual, thanks everyone!! -Alex

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We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state. I have 2 questions: 1)      Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site? 3)      To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map? Thanks in advance everyone! -Alex

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