Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This may help you:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1093493?hl=en

Get a UPS box for one of the businesses with a VOIP # for one of them, or even a Google Voice # (although be careful there because if you get huge, you may not always be able to keep that #).  Unless you get tons of snail mail...

Then you can legitimately list 2 separate companies in the local listings.

Why not just keep their site up and rebrand everything with your company.  You do own it, so don't just burn the site.  You may be able to craft different content/topics which would be better suited for each site and thus capture a larger portion of your target audience.

It takes so much time to build up a site, it would be a shame to just switch it.

I would advise against using the sites for links to or from one another, that will hurt you in the long run.

This has proven very helpful to us: http://backlinko.com/the-definitive-guide-to-keyword-research

Sometimes they do not choose to utilize the meta description and titles I believe because they may think something is more relevant to return based on the specific user query.

As far as I know, you cannot do anything about what gets displayed by the engine.  So long as you have checked that each page has it's own unique meta, then there is not much else that you can do.

Your meta may appear as intended for some searches and not for others is what I am really saying.  It is the engine's prerogative as to what is displayed based on the user's query and I am seeing more and more that the engine's are ignoring your page/post specific meta tags when it comes to the display.

Sometimes they do not choose to utilize the meta description and titles I believe because they may think something is more relevant to return based on the specific user query.

As far as I know, you cannot do anything about what gets displayed by the engine.

Your changes may appear as intended for some searches and not for others is what I am really saying.  It is the engine's prerogative as to what is displayed based on the user's query.

You are correct, the majority of users do not know what a TLD is or probably even care.

I suppose that it depends on what kind of customers that you have, but my experience with my customer base is that they would probably not click on something that looked out of the norm to them because they might think it is a scam or something that they have heard about on the news.

Also, I am thinking of it in terms of your customer remembering your site address into the future.  Let's say they click on your site because you rank high, look at the info and then bounce.  How many of them are going to remember the TLD if they want to come back to the site via direct entry into the navi bar?  There will be a certain % (I think it would be high) who would type in yourdomain.com instead of yourdomain.company

I have seen this many times with close matches to domain names - people come to the site, look at it, then bounce.  They come back 2 weeks later via a direct entry into the navi bar, except they enter a slight variation of the actual domain name because (I suspect) they remember that they visited a site they liked, but cannot totally remember the exact address so they do their best.  That is why generally if possible, we grab close variant domain names and forward them to the main domain with GA parameters for tracking.  It always amazes me at how much traffic we get monthly from people entering in the close, but not exact, domain name in the navi bar.

www is considered a subdomain of the main domain.

Generally speaking, Google will give the main domain credit for what is on the subdomain.  I don't think this is always the case though if you have really specific content on a subdomain and it is targeted for a certain topic because people would start linking to the subdomain as opposed to the main domain.  So I think the correct answer is that it depends on your site and situation.  If you can, everything should go on 1 domain unless it makes sense for some other reason to split things on multiple domains/subdomains.

If you have a ton of advertising out there for www...., why change it?  Most people don't know that www is a subdomain (or care).  You are not going to pick up a significant advantage SEO wise by switching to the main domain vs using the www version, so just don't mess with it.

Unless for some reason you have a good reason to create a bunch of subdomains, like if you had a real estate site nationwide and you wanted them to be organized by city like houston.mysite.com, atlanta.mysite.com, etc.

I think you have to also think about how many people know about a .company TLD.

Most people outside of the IT world only know or are comfortable with a .com, .net and .org

Personally I would wait to see the market's acceptance of a certain domain before going too far down the road into it.

http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2011/03/07/how-to-properly-use-ssl-redirects-without-getting-certificate-error-messages/

It doesn't totally answer it I don't think, but it may shed light onto the issue.  It could be a server specific/site specific kind of need as to why they are doing this.

So what you're really saying is that your click percentage is double what it was before...

I would only take the impression count with a grain of salt.  Also, take a look at all your analytics sources and look at ratios rather than just the raw #s; you will be able to get some more actionable data from ratio analysis.  Also, personally, and again this is a preference and some may like it or hate it, but I like statcounter.com for some analytics.  I have also used Kissmetrics which depending on what your business model is, can also be good (also shout out to CrazyEgg).  Worry much more about how many unique visitors are going to the site and your conversion rate (for whatever product it is).

If you focus on efficiency, you won't have to put as much input (unique visitors) in the top of the funnel.  Of course, this is easy for me to say because I have no practical advice on how to make your machine more efficient, but just that it is a good thing to focus on.

Did your traffic also drop at the same time, by a similar percentage?

Nice website.

I would spend much more time getting quality, pertinent backlinks for your site from creating good content pieces which people want to share/link to.

Do you use canonical urls throughout the site?

Yeah, hard it is hard to say without knowing what exactly is going on.

It is possible that at a small scale you may not see the potential issues rise up, but when you get over a certain traffic level the imperfections in the code may cause an issue.  You definitely don't want to have a slow server time as you increase the traffic, which generally speaking, could cause you an issue.

I hate to have the typical lawyer-esque type of response, but it all depends on your plan, traffic levels, etc, etc.

That's why I would identify what the issues are and then ask yourself, and other pros out there what potential issues it is going to cause, then quantify the potential cost impact (tangible and intangible - I think you must have a "pain in rear end" threshold) those issues may cause, then calculate how much time and cost it will take to correct the issues.  Then I would make the decision based on ROI when you consider all those factors.

If you have an issue in the coding that won't truly be an issue until you reach like 100,000 unique visitors per day, and you are only projecting having like 1,000 visitors a day, I would probably make a different decision than if the issue were going to show itself at 500 visitors per day and I am expecting 1,000.

Hope that helps!

Wow - that is tough.  I have been there when it comes to hiring coders, etc.

I am not 100% sure what they are saying is correct, so here is what I would do:

1. Get them to explicitly list what the issues are, one by one, line by line of code which they are claiming to be causing an issue

2. Shop it around to other developers, not the original ones (in my experience you will not get anywhere by doing this) and see if what they are claiming holds some validity.

Just saying that it isn't coded correctly isn't sufficient enough to make sweeping changes.  It needs to be quantified with a potential impact to the site also identified for each line item.

Your site loads pretty fast and as long as you have an XML sitemap submitted to Google, and a few other things going, I cannot imagine why it would be an issue.  It is already on the Wordpress platform which is quite a large percentage of the overall code base, but then again, you may have a number of plugins running, etc.

Is there any hard data to back that up?  Just curious if there has been a study done over a ton of pages, links, etc.

And bingo was his name o

You could probably write a macro to do this, although just because you could doesn't mean you should.  I don't think it is advisable because you do not want to violate any terms of use for anyone.  That is never a good thing.

Nice, thank you for pointing that one out!

I noticed this too, I think that the whole MOZ system is down for maintenance or something because OSE is also not up and working right now for me...

Just wait some time, I am sure it will come back online.

If you have users register for anything (like comments for example) then I would use https, or any kind of ecommerce.

Other than that, I don't think you pick up an advantage.

I cannot see why it would hurt to submit articles with fetch as google, but in general if you have a plugin controlling your XML sitemap, Google will get updated whenever something changes or something new is posted.  Fetch as Google will just make it happen faster than if you wait for the bot to come and crawl the site.

Check out Brian Dean at backlinko.com (I believe Brian is also here on MOZ) - he has some excellent ideas for getting links from quality sites with good content creation.  Actually, he has some of the best ideas I have seen in a while.

Hope that helps!

If you are searching for something more local, like say a real estate business for a certain town, you are probably going to get better results by searching yourself.

Clear out all of your cookies in your browser, as well as LSOs and all cached site data, then perform your search for each keyword in your browser.

I don't know for sure, but I believe there must be some kind of weighting that goes into where the geo-location of your IP address is so for something local, I have seen it have an impact in what gets displayed in the searches.

In my experience, I look at some statistics per page of the DA + PA because I believe that both matter in terms of how they rank.