Welcome to the Q&A Forum

**I am not sure why the car accident pages were de-indexed. **

New pages often perform fine until Google figures out that they are cookie-cutter duplicates.   Then they are filtered from search results.  The next time Panda runs the rankings across your entire site could be reduced.   What you see today could be just the start of your problems.

If you want unique content, make it entirely, completely, absolutely unique.   Shortcutting by plugging in different place names and synonyms has not worked with Google for several years.

For a simple installation you might be able to do this yourself.   We just paid the $100 for a low end account, went into the the "Edit Search Engine" link and completed the "set up" questions.

Then we went into "Look and Feel", selected some options, pressed "save and get code".   Now you have the code to slap into the site.  Put that on an experimental page, upload and test.   In under 30 minutes we were finished.

If you are happy with how it works and start getting a lot of traffic you can upgrade the account to accommodate the higher traffic.

It is impossible for anyone to give meaningful feedback with the information provided.

We have no information about the quality of your blogging on your own site, the structure of your website, how your site update was done, where you are guest blogging, the quality of your guest blogging.... and all of that same information about your competitors.

Read Rand's blog post about Why Good Unique Content Needs To Die.

Has anyone experienced a decline in domain authority in the past few months and have you been able to turn it back around?

Domain authority for most sites goes up and down, up and down, down and up.  Stay focused on doing a better and better job of winning the ecstatic approval of your visitors.

Is there something that we should look at fixing or something we are missing that could help bring our numbers back up?

Your focus should be on quality.  Numbers are for entertainment.  Quality is what defeats your competitor - or what your competitor uses to defeat you.

We have over 7,000 articles -many of which are evergreen and can be repurposed when needed.

salivatin'

If these are unique, evergreen articles, I would be attacking that as fast as possible.  I would divert staff with appropriate talent away from other jobs.   They would clean these up, any that are evergreen and could be displayed as content unseen by current readers would be republished and displayed in my normal content stream.   All others would be built into the category and internal linkage format of the website.  The faster you get them up the faster then will be pulling in traffic.   I would do them slowly enough to do a great job but otherwise as quickly as possible.

Top 12 Kitty Litters We Carry - View the Best and the Rest!

I think that is an awesome idea. Definitely worth trying.  There are many similar ways to pitch it.

(If these were my category pages, I would probably have more than 12 items.  For me, pages with more content generally rank better and pull in more long tail traffic.)   You can still say top 12.

What positions do you hold in the organic SERPs?

Are you in the top three for what you perceive to be big money terms?

How many ads are stacked above the organic SERPs?

If you rank below #5 and there are a lot of ads, then I would keep hammering at it and work on title tags that elicit clicks.  If you are in the top three in the organic SERPs for keywords with a lot of traffic then it is time for assessment.

our competitors budgets from 3k - 300k per month.

How reliable is this?

I watch my traffic increases and decreases.   You can do that with google analytics.  I do it with clicky.  When I see an important page show traffic losses, I go looking.

One of my retail sites suddenly was not selling a certain product category very well.  I looked into it and hundreds of "made in China" blogs had scraped my content.

Then, I have images that are often grabbed.  I watch image search traffic and watch for them.

I have tens of thousands of pages on the web.  Its hard to monitor all of them, but it is easy to monitor when you can download a traffic spreadsheet that has % up and % down, sort it and then investigate.  So, I am being responsive instead of proactive.  And, really, I don't look at it as ROI, it is loss prevention.

I am in Pennsylvania and I see your site at #2 for "wedding magician".   That's quite an accomplishment.   I took a look at your site -  your magic work is awesome.

I don't know if you make much money from the USA, but it is possible to use Google's DFP ad server to display ads only to those visitors who are outside of your market area.  It would not change your site much, but if you placed a couple ads on the site  you might pull in a nice stream of revenue.   People have different thoughts about ads, I make a living from them.

I would optimize my homepage for the terms that the average potential client uses for my services.  When you receive a call or an email from a potential client, what service do they ask for?

If they ask for Wedding Magician, or Party Magician, then that should be your target terms for the homepage.

If they ask for Table Magician or Close up Magician then those should be the keywords that you optimize for.

Are they simply asking for a magic show instead?

When composing a title tag, it is best to keep the length below 60 characters, better yet 55.  It is also best to place high value keywords on the left and make the title tag contain a readable thought rather than a stuff of keywords.

Roger Lapin: Wedding Magician - Close up Magician - Table Magician ??

That is far too long and stuffed with keywords.

Magic Shows for Weddings and Parties - Roger Lapin

This is a readable thought.  60 characters.  Hits magic, shows, weddings, parties

Magician for Weddings and Parties - Roger Lapin

This is a readable thought.  57 characters.  Hits magician, weddings, parties

Should your name be first or last?  Depends upon your level of fame, how much you want to be optimized for keywords and your sense of ego.

Over the years, tons of original content from my website (written by me) has been scraped by 200-300 external sites.

I have the same problem on multiple sites.  Most of the time the scraping is not harmful.  But, on several occasions it has cost me thousands of dollars and forced me to abandon product lines and donate thousands of dollars worth of inventory to Goodwill.  Infringers have included websites of many law firms, a state supreme court. a presidential candidate, an Ivy League law school and many others.  Infringers can be using images, video or text.

It is EXTREMELY time consuming to identify the site owners, prepare an email with supporting evidence (screen shots), and following up 2, 3, 15 times until they remove the scraped content.  Filing DMCA takedowns are a final option for sites hosted in the US,....

I am not an expert in intellectual property law, so what I do or say is not advice.  Filing a DMCA can get you sued even if you are in the right. If you file a DMCA all of the details including your name and why you filed will be easily available to the person or company that you complained about.  They can retaliate against you, call begging you to retract the DMCA, they can do anything they want against you.

If I contact someone two or three times without results I go straight to DMCA.    One thing that I can say about Google is that they generally respond promptly about removing infringing content from their web SERPs and image SERPs.  They also generally respond promptly to infringing content on Blogspot and YouTube.   Ebay will shut down auctions en masse in response to a DMCA if a seller or group of sellers are using your images or other property.

When infringing content is on a university, government agency, or prominent company's website they usually respond immediately to notification.  I usually contact a provost, legal department, or internal manager instead of writing to "webmaster" - who probably was involved in the problem and simply does not understand intellectual property.   I usually don't prepare a big document.  An email pointing out the infringing work and offering a resolution of "take it down right away" will usually get fast results.

quite a few of the offenders are in China, India, Nigeria, and other places not subject to DMCA.

If you can't identify the owner of the website or if they are outside of the USA, you can still file a DMCA to have the content removed from search engines or websites like YouTube or Blogspot who have an international user community but are owned by a US company.  Some of them will insist that you deal with their infringing member, having an attorney contact them might yield quick results.

A lot of the professional spam is done from outside of the USA but there are a few spammers and simply arrogant cowboys in the USA.  DMCA is the route to take, but you do risk retaliation with some of them.

Sometimes, when a site owner takes down scraped content, it reappears a few months or years later. It's exasperating.

Yep.

I spend a good amount of time protecting my content.   The problem is so big that I can usually only afford to do it in situations where the scraping, infringing or whatever is costing me or my content is appearing on the website of an established business or organization who should have people in leadership positions who would not want that happening.

I watch my analytics watching for traffic drops, etc. Occasionally I go out looking for infringement.  The cost of policing can be astronomical.  I could have a full time employee working on this if I was going after everyone - and its not cost effective.  Most of the people who are grabbing your stuff are putting it on domains that can't damage your rankings.

A greater problem than verbatim theft, in my opinion, is the people who grab your articles and simply rewrite them.  You spent tons of time doing the research and preparing the presentation.  They simply do a paragraph-by-paragraph rewrite into something that is not detectable or recognizable beyond structure.

Good luck.

Wow!   I was going to give my opinion on this topic, but I am going to shut up and just say.   Read Marie's article.  You will not find more comprehensive information from a person who is more qualified on the topic of link assessment.

Dirk,  what a great and generous reply.  I learned a coule thing that I will need shortly.

Thanks!

Perhaps the easiest way to lower the reading level of a document is to look at single sentences.  Most of then labeled "difficult to read" or "very difficult to read" will have one of these....

A) sentences with two separate ideas

B) sentences with two difficult words

Break those into two simpler sentences and the reading level will go down.

If you lower the reading level of your document then a greater percentage of the people who enter that webpage will "get it".  The power of this is that you can double the intellectual conversion rate of your document for all of the traffic that enters it for years.   Having done that it will be shared more, linked more, bounced less, scrolled farther... and that can double or triple the intellectual conversion rate yet again.

does Google take into account readability like this?

Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how they use readability.

Here is what I do and believe.  This is opinion.

I write a lot of content about subjects that could be read by people with a wide range of reading levels and expertise.

Let's say the topic is diamond jewelry.  Documents could be written that fit into any of these categories....

** containing words like "sparkling".... "glittering"....  "pretty"... "fire"..  are probably written by and written for the average consumer - someone who does not know the language of the subject - someone who uses common and easy words (fourth grade)

** containing words like "clarity"... "facets"...  "setting".... "18 karat"... are probably written by and for an educated consumer who definitely knows the basic language of the retail marketplace  (10th grade)

** containing words like "dispersion"... "loupe"... "grading"... are probably written by someone with basic knowledge of diamond gemology, maybe a retail sales person with experience  (13th grade)

** containing words like "fluorescence"... "refractive index"... are not consumer words but those of a specialist or researcher  (16th grade)

Each one of these documents has higher grade level words.  Google can probably tell by the words used in the query, the searchers previous reading, what level of information they can't handle.  They could give the inexperienced consumer easy information and filter much of that information from the researcher.

Not all subjects have this wide of a grade level stratification but some subjects do.

When I write an article that might be read by people with a broad range of expertise on a topic.  I make sure that the first couple of paragraphs are extremely readable. These lead paragraphs should contain "the first info that anyone searching for the topic should read".    I will spend a lot of time making those first few paragraphs basic and easy.   Then present a bit higher level content next, and the most difficult towards the end of the article.

This keeps the basic reader from bouncing and the more advanced reader, who probably has been on my site before, knows that the advanced info is probably there, just scroll down and look at the topic headings.

Your Gainesville Florida Acupuncture solution

I would put a little bit of time into studying the website that you are working on and possibly talking with the person there who answers the telephone.

If you do that you will probably learn that a word like "treatment" is greatly superior to the world "solution" both in qualifying the page for more specific searchers and sounding more in tune with the practice.

And, if you want a higher click through rate, using words like "gentle" will ease the mind of the searcher.

Honestly, read the website.  Talk to somebody.   This is really important to deliver the best service.

I just found out that they have a desktop version that can export your document as html.

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/desktop.html

I have been a writer for a long time.  I have done a lot of writing.  Many excellent teachers, professors, bosses, colleagues, and editors have helped me.  I've responded to a lot of red ink - a lot of red ink.

A few days ago, I found a tool that has been extremely helpful.  It has significantly improved the clarity of my writing.  Using it on a piece of work makes me more confident about it at publication time.  It requires a lot of work to use (at least it does for me) but the results are well worth the time.

People who are serious about writing well will understand this tool immediately.

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

I don't own this website (I wish I did) and have no affiliation with it.   Today they released a desktop version that they are almost giving away.  I have not tried it yet but plan to instal it today.

My response to "domain opportunities" is usually, let the domain expire and spend the registration savings on beer.

In this situation, I would do as you suggest and simply redirect.   That domain is relevant enough that I would give up the beer.

I would not take one moment away from my focus on my main project just to use a domain.  I would only use it if I had a new project and that domain was the perfect fit.

rel=canonical is a good alternative to noindex.  Both will prevent the article on your site from going into the index of Google or other search engines who honor rel=canonical.  From what I have seen, noindex works quicker.

The advantage of rel=canonical is that much of the link value of the article with the rel=canonical will be transferred to the specified source article.   I have used it on content that I own and have published on two domains.  The copy that receives the benefit of rel=canonical ranks better than expected.

If the article is public domain then there is no legal problem with republishing it verbatim with attribution.

If you have written a unique summary of substantive length of a public domain article then there is no need to noindex, worry about duplicate content, or a potential Panda problem.  That is best practice for reuse of public domain.

is there a standard practise/best practise for SEO to do this and ensure Google doesn't think i am plagerizing content etc

The best practice is to contact the author of the content and obtain permission.  That is the legal way to do it.  Otherwise you are committing copyright infringement which can land you in court.   If the owner files a DMCA with google (millions of pages get a DMCA each month) your page will be removed from the SERPs.  If you get a few DMCAs filed against you, it is possible that your whole site will be removed from the SERPs.

If you start republishing a lot of articles, even with permission, without setting them to noindex, then google will see your site as a duplicate content site and will either filter your site from the SERPs or hit you with a Panda problem.

Even better practice is to write unique content for your website.  Then nobody is going to take you to court, nobody will file DMCA, google will not filter you, and google will not Panda you.  If you can do that repeatedly with excellent content that visitors love then you will be in a position to make buckets of money.

lol...  I understand.

Still, I would toss something like that out at the next meeting and tell them that it could be a Rocket Fuel.   :0

We don't even think about singular or plural any more when writing title tags.

Here is a suggestion.  When you visit a news site and see the content promotion ads from Taboola, Outbrain and others, read their captions.  Those captions are designed to elicit clicks often to the point of being spammy, suggestive, explicit or vulgar.   The people who write those title tags are experts. They know how to get the clicks and getting the clicks, I believe, is a huge ranking factor in the organic SERPs.

I have learned a lot from them and although I really dislike a lot of their ads they can give you an education.  So, if I was selling foam rollers, I might consider title tags like...

Foam Rollers - Get yo' bones straight 

Foam Rollers for when you back is out of whack !

Those are just very quick efforts and you can certainly do better because you know the product and how people use it.    If there was a lot of money to be made selling foam rollers I would be spending a LOT of time to get a great title tag that makes people want to click into your webpage.

is it reasonable to think the page would return to a similar position next time it is indexed?

I can't give you a confident answer.  I know of situations where people made a lot of title tag changes in a short amount of time and the pages went deep into the SERPs and did not recover to any reasonable rankings for a long time.

At our office we rarely tweak title tags, when we do, we enter the details into our SEO log and wait a month or more before trying something new.  Also, when we write title tags today we focus on a very readable message that is enticing instead of gunning keywords as was common a few years back.

You made a number of changes in a very short time.   Keep in mind that google has lots of different servers, delivering SERPs pulled out of different data bases, with experimental algos running all of the time, new data going in, old data going out, and normal daily flux overprinting all of that.

To determine what is really happening, make one change and wait at least a couple of weeks before you make any judgement.

Also, for a query like "foam roller" there is going to be some competition, enough that a small tweak to a title tag is unlikely to make a huge difference.

If you change "Foam Rollers | OPTP" to "Foam Roller | Shop Premium Foam Rollers | OPTP".... that is a really small tweak that does nothing but make it a little repetitive.   I would, instead go for something that.....

*** adds a value proposition like "free shipping"

*** elicits clicks such as...  "over 100 varieties"

*** or broadens your keyword reach such as.... "for therapy and massage"..... "for painting and texture finishing"... depending upon what type of rollers you sell.

The long title of my post | My Brand n... (just for example)

I believe that this is what google will show.

is it okay? or for 100% optimization I have to keep it 60 Characters and no more.

In my opinion, 100% optimization for ranking is to have some keywords in the title and words that elicit clicks.  Words beyond about 55 characters might not be displayed.  If your title tag is really long the keywords in it might lose effectiveness.

The brand name does not optimize for keywords in my opinion.  Does your brand name elicit clicks, repel them, or do nothing.  That, in my opinion, defines its value in the title tag.  Keep in mind your domain name will be immediately under your title tag, is that enough branding?

Should you use your brand name in the title?   You have a choice of adding more keywords, words that elicit clicks, words that communicate value (free shipping for example) or ad your brand name.   How can you best spend those characters?

I still think that there is value in reading the older posts on this topic.  Lots of smart people have given opinions.   Lots of people think differently than me.  

This question has been asked here many times.  A google search will help you find and read many opinions from moz members.

Are they bad for SEO?    It will be hard to get a reliable answer unless it comes straight from Google.

I can say that a lot fewer sites are using them today as compared to a few years ago - at least the sites that I encounter.

I had some pages on one of my sites launching pop-unders a couple years ago and that site had a Panda problem, but I can't say that the pop-unders are what caused it because the site also had a lot of articles that were republished in cooperation with university news offices.   As part of cleaning up the site, I removed the pop-unders and the site is now ranking better than ever.

I think pop-unders are a bit risky and if you are not making buckets of money from them I would remove them.

The articles look fine to me.

I don't know much about the hosting industry or how many people are searching for this type of news.

I have a site that has been covering the news of an industry for about 10 years.  When I started covering the news, I wrote articles like you are writing.  They were a lot of work and the content was not evergreen.

After doing that for a year or so I decided that my time would be better spent by:   1) writing more evergreen articles covering basic information about the industry, and, 2) making brief posts (two sentences and an image) of news items and linking to the original source.   That used my time for more profitable purposes (evergreen articles can pull traffic for years) and still satisfied my visitors' interest in news.  In fact, the number of people subscribing to the news blog rose rapidly because I linked to six to ten stories per day instead of writing one or two.  Lots of people began arriving at my site and clicking the news link.  The number of people subscribing to my email and RSS feed quickly rose into five digit numbers.

A couple years ago the site slipped rankings in one of the Panda updates, even though I was purging old news posts once or twice per year.  I assume that Google didn't like lots of two sentence blog posts so I noindexed them and got out of Panda within a few weeks.

More recently, I decided to make one post per day that would simply contain a list of about eight links to news items on other sites.  This saved more of my time and reduced the amount of skimpy pages on the site.  Lots of people still arrive at the homepage and click into the news.  People are still subscribing and writing to me with thanks for offering this news as a free service.

I don't know if your audience wants this.  I don't know how many competitors you have offering similar news for this industry.   I don't know if you are getting lots of traffic from search into your news posts.  Those are all items that I would consider.  But, I would weigh the opportunity of writing evergreen content instead of ephemeral.

what might be the SEO pitfalls

I don't know what they expect to accomplish here, so using only the information provided, my opinion is that the pitfall is a waste of good money.  Also, adding all of these pages to a site is going to suck power from other parts of the site.

If I saw my company featured on this site, my impression will be that they are doing this as a form of spam.  Why would they want a page on their site to rank for my name.  It would make me mad if they were in my business niche.

My bet is that some SEO told them that building a mass of pages on their site will help with their rankings and they are doing the donkey walk.

We use Shopper Approved and they provide a couple types of code that will do this for you.

*** They provide code for several badges and widgets that allow us to display recent reviews and summary reviews on our website.

*** They provide code that grabs our ratings from a Shopper Approved server and displays them on our website in search engine readable format.

*** They also provide schema code that causes our ratings to appear as stars beside our listings in the organic SERPs.

For SEO purposes here are my opinions....

**  I do not believe that Google reads the content of the customer reviews in the widget.

**  I do not believe that linking to Shopper Approved through the widget or through the badge is helpful.

**  I believe that having mentions and links on the Shopper Approved site is helpful, however, they generate enormous numbers of review pages that I can see in my webmaster tools account.  Generally, I would say that getting this many links on thin content cookie-cutter pages is dangerous, as it looks like manufactured links, but I am assuming that Google realizes that these are reviews and will not count them as negative as they are nofollowed.

**  Links to your sites in the Shopper Approved directory might be slightly helpful.

**  I believe that having lots of good rating, such as four or five stars, confirmed by a review site, might be helpful.

**  I believe that having four or five stars, out of a possible five, appearing  in the organic SERPs will help your clickthrough rate, which could help your rankings.

Our sales seem to be up a tiny amount since starting to use Shopper Approved.  Our rankings have always been good, so I can't say that we have received any measurable SEO benefit.

Our motivation for getting a review service was:  1) an easy method for collecting reviews,  2) an easy method for getting customer feedback on purchases,  3) an easy way to display reviews from TODAY's customers on our website, 4) use of the badge as a 'trust mark', and, 5) a way to use schema to get stars in the organic SERPs.

These are opinions only, nothing scientific.

Patrick gave a great answer above.

Now that you mention they are at the bottom of the page, I would definitely remove the h2 or hwhatever and simply style them with css.

You got a comprehensive answer from Patrick.

Adding to his comments on "writing content"....   new websites are often promoted before the content is full and impressive.  Your goal should be to welcome visitors with enough  content and high enough quality content that they say WOW!.

Promotion is a lot of work.  You want to get full value out of that, otherwise visitors land, see a small amount of content, and even if it is great stuff, their motivation to share or return is diminished.

If they are not saying WOW! then keep on the content task until you will get your full mileage.

It's great to see appreciative people getting good advice.

Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?

It is a good bet that Google uses multiple metrics that confirm one another to be sure that their rankings are not manipulated.  That traffic would also need to explore deep into the site, talk about it in social media,  write about it on blogs, return many times over a long course of time by typing the domain name into search boxes or the address window of the chrome browser.

So, instead of trying to fool google, just improve your website so that these things happen on their own.

We have products that are sold on multiple sites.  The best solution is to write unique product descriptions and title tags for each of them.  That will prevent your sites from competing with one another in the SERPs because you optimize your title tags and descriptions for different keywords.  We did this by creating separate items for each product/site.

That allows you to turn this "problem" into the opportunity to increase your keyword reach and sell to a more diverse audience.

Once you start doing this and paying attention to the SERPs and the traffic you might be surprised at how many sales you were missin'.

If you are ranking well for these you probably don't have a problem - at the moment.

But, if you have lots of these kinds of pages beyond what you mentioned them it might be to your advantage to consolidate multiple similar products onto one single page.

Many of the items that we sell are on pages with several similar items.   I believe that this gives you a more compact site, with more substantive pages that ranks better.

We're a radio station posting original content each day.

Nice work!  You are making a big investment to make this happen.   I hope that you are getting a lot of traffic from search out of this and that people visit your site daily to read your new content.

It's been proposed that we all contribute content to this group so any radio station can grab this content and post it on their own websites.

Those weasels who proposed this want to ride your train.   I bet the ones who propose this run the laziest stations on the planet.   Tell them to get off of their lazy duffs and write their own content.

As the site with the most content and web traffic, could this potentially harm us?

In reality it has a greater chance of tanking your competitors because they could be viewed as the republisher - because your site is probably stronger and may be credited by google as the original publishing source.  BUT, that can not be guaranteed.

If you think that there is little overlap of direct traffic, meaning people who visit your site are unlikely to visit their site, you could consider this....

For a monthly fee, you would allow them to publish a certain number of your articles on their site but the requirement is that they have rel=canonical properly installed on every one of your articles.  That would generate income for you and the article would be attributed to your site, thus protecting you and them from Panda problems and duplicate content filtering.

Or, with rel=canonical installed on every page, you could allow them to use a limited number of articles and you get the ad revenue.  I think that there are some ways to do this that will be to your advantage, but I would not do it without contracts and regular inspections of how things are implemented.

Whoops!    I thought they were gone and came back.

Thanks for letting me know.

I see that thumbs down are back.

Nice.

Although they can be hard to interpret, I think that it is good to have them.

---  It allows you to give thumbs down to stuff that you think is rubbish

---  It allows you to receive thumbs down and be proud about your contrarian opinion

---  and... it allow you to ponder behavior that you find to be totally irrational   

Care to comment on the reversal ?

I am concerned that this 80% of my traffic that does not often convert and leaves the site quickly, is costing me in rankings on the pages that do perform well.

I would not worry about this.  That blog is pulling in the traffic and Google knows that some types of pages satisfy a visitor and result in a short visit.  So, if visitors are staying long enough to read, then you are doing great.

I am therefore considering taking the blog OFF our site and moving it elsewhere, linking back to the e-commerce site and allowing it to stand on its own two feet. Is this a bad idea?

I would do the opposite.  I would move it into a folder on your main domain.   Like maindomain.com/blog/  (I would not name it blog because that makes it a target of hackers, give it a more relevant name)

If that blog is attracting traffic, earning likes, links, mentions, etc. having it on your own domain will be better than having it in a subdomain or an outhouse.  If it is on your domain then your domain gets credit for the popularity.  The only reason that I would not put it on my main domain is if it was susceptible to Panda or Penguin problems.

Thoughts?

I would be showing Adsense to those 2 million visitors.   Will probably earn a five digit number annually and the first digit will not be a "1"..

If this was my site, I would stop linking to tag pages and search results pages.  I would also block them from being indexed.

It is very possible that the search results pages are causing issues.  Google said back in 2007...

"Typically, web search results don’t add value to users, and since our
core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally
exclude search results from our web search index. "

Matt Cutts comments about it here and on a similar subject here.

Are you trying to rank in local search?

The best way to get good, actionable recommendations is to post your URLs.

I would post a nice, but very obvious banner at the top of the site that says something like this...

Mr Egol has joined the law practice of Dewey, Cheatem and Howe.  WIth smaller font below giving your new address, phone and email.

Clicking the banner could go to your profile page at the new firm with a nofollowed link.

If you "redirect the site" then every page of your personal site will drop out of google, your rankings will be gone and the webpages not be visible to anyone anywhere.

Your profile page on the new site will get your old traffic for a short time of a couple weeks and then the pages and topics that supported your current traffic will not be on the web anymore.

lol

Thank you, Patrick.

Massimiliano,  you have earned the position of "niche authority" and multiple positions on the first page of Google can sometimes go with that.

Nice work.

I have a site in a retail niche where the only content that exists (other than my own) is product pages.   With all of that content being so visible my site is now the "go to place" when people want information in this niche.   I have an index page for my content library and most of the visitors to that page are "returning visitors".

The problem with this position is that amazon, walmart and other large retailer customers can not get answers to their questions from where they purchased their items.  So a lot of those questions come to me.  We have become customer service by default for people who purchased where help is not available.  This is a bit of a curse but if you sell  products  that require consumable supplies, you can attract a steady flow of customers because of your published expertise.  And your replies to the email questions that you receive can be improved into your next page of content.

I agree with getting some experience with a couple of less important sites.

I would also keep an "SEO log" that documents the things that you try, when you tried them, and how they worked.

Paying close attention to analytics and rankings are really good things to do and you can track this stuff with moz tools.   This work is essential to understanding what works and what doesn't.

This often happens in those industries where staff at the major players feel that their industry is "boring" and use that as an excuse to get out of writing content and the best SEOs that they can find are unable to produce or find anyone who can do the job.

These topics are not boring.   There is a lot of content to write.  All you have to do is ask the person who takes incoming telephone calls at  the office and she can give you a very very long list of the questions that people are calling to ask.  Every day people call in with questions about selecting the product, how to fix the product, accessories for the product, how to maintain the product, how the company brand compares with competitors, which parts should be purchased, information about no-longer manufactured items.

This person might not know the answers to all of these questions, but she is extremely underutilized by this company.

Instead of answering these calls and transferring them to Joe in parts, Sam in repairs, Willie in sales, etc., she should be promoted to the much higher paying position of "director of content marketing" and supervisor of all of the people who receive these transferred calls.  She should be able to identify the articles that need to be written and assign them to a person on the staff who has the content area expertise to write them.  If Willie is a horrible writer she can team him with a person who can interview him and maybe a photographer/graphics person and get that part of the the job done.

Let's use "hydraulic jacks" as an example.  Go look at the top ten in google and you will find almost nothing but skimpy product pages and category pages and maybe a doorway page or two.  Nobody has written anything worthy beyond the folks at wikipedia.

A few people are searching for "hydraulic jacks" but the people who spend the money are looking for deeper information about parts, maintenance, safety, how to use, repairs, new models, etc.  Right?  The people who ask about this stuff are consumers and buyers and folks who get grease on their hands.  The lady who has been answering their phone calls probably knows them by the sound of their voice.  They spend a lot of money at this company.  A really lot of money.

Now, after our director of content marketing makes assignments and gets all of the needed articles back she should have dozens of articles  on how to maintain, dozens on repairs, dozens about how to use, etc. etc.  She then takes these to the web development team and the SEO team, who she is also the boss of, and tells them to get these articles on the site and optimized for the words that people say when they call her on the phone.  She knows the keywords of the industry better than an SEO in NYC who never got grease on his hands.   He doesn't know jack about hydraulics.

She gives them a logical structure of this library of content... a folder about parts, one about repairs, all segregated by makes and models.  When this stuff is launched, that hydraulic jack company has totally carpet bombed the SERPs and after these articles start ranking a search for "hydraulic jack repair" will yield several results from this company on the first page of the SERPs.  That search will display their repair service page, the index to their library of repair content and a couple of their most important repair articles will be on Page 1 of Google.  They might get four positions out of the top ten.

Here's a secret to making this happen.  When somebody starts talking about content cannibalization put your fingers in your ears.  Making lots of articles associated with the more highly searched queries in your industries is how you make this happen.  You can't get four positions on the first page of google if you listen to the guys who tell you that content cannibalization is a sin.  Its where you find the meat.

Other companies could have done this.  They just listened to guys complaining about nothing to write about in their boring industry.

Just get the right person directing this important marketing effort.  The person who understands the queries that people use to get information from your company.  She has been taking your calls for the past ten years.  Now she has enough knowledge that she is underutilized.

"how to create stuff something"   (some people would pick this because they think that the absence of "in" makes for better keyword optimization)

"how to create stuff in something"   (I pick this because in addition to sounding better to the user it might be clicked more, and being clicked more, in my opinion, is more valuable today than keyword optimization.  Why?  Because google is pretty good at getting the keywords from your article into the title tag but getting people to do what you want them to do takes much more finesse. )