Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I do that too.  When I do a redesign, I always hire someone who knows more about SEO than I to do a site assessment and look for opportunities.  It is well worth the cost.  In fact it can bring payback of many times what you pay.

I do have some fear in this process too, but getting the good advice and doing things very carefully reduces that to a low level.

In my opinion... "How can I preserve my rankings during a site redesign?" is the wrong question.

It is the question asked by fearful people instead of by the person who is motivated to win.

If you are going to put the work of a redesign into your website, you should do the job right, do a careful evaluation and determine how the optimization, structure, SEO performance and conversion rate can be improved.

Use this as a time to study, get qualified assistance and make some clear gains.

When will you have time and the money to do these things properly again?

If you go into this and the SEO is fixated on avoiding loss, says nothing of opportunities and how you are going to kick things up a notch then you are wasting your time and have hired the wrong person.

I'd say that the number of unique keywords that a website can go after is limited only by how much unique, substantive and valuable-to-the-visitor content that you can produce.

Now, once you bring ROI into the equation, you are limited by the number that can either pull in a few conversions per year or make a meaningful contribution to the popularity of the website.

When I write an article the images always have file names that match the content of the image and an important keyword of the article.  The alt attributes are more detailed because they  provide information to screen readers.

I believe that the names of your image files and the alt attributes are small optimization elements that will help rank a page.  It might be enough to move you up a position or two if you are deep in the SERPs, but if you are in a battle for the top three for a competitive term then authority is going to be far more important than the sum of the small optimization elements.

If I use those queries with quotes or without quotes I get very different results pages.  (That's from the USA).

I agree with Hutch.

You (the owner of the website) need to ask the right questions.  The analyst can collect data to answer those questions.  Then you need a webmaster who can implement the changes that will improve performance.

The important work is on the people who run the website.  The analyst just fetches the data.

If you have a blog post that has been historically popular, the best practice would be to do some research and significantly improve the old blog post or completely rewrite it if that is what needs to be done.

Quality usually has a bigger impact than freshness.

That's a good idea.   Then you will have some evidence that you were correct in advising not to go down this path.   I would get screenshots to document.

There are lots of interesting comments on that google announcement, and lots of articles about it, as it was only released yesterday.

If you want something to toss back at the people who are advocating this approach.... yesterday, google announced going after doorway page spam (which they have been successfully killing for at least ten years but must be mounting a more dedicated effort).

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html

People can subscribe to the RSS feed of a WordPress category.

Also, you can write a program in Perl or php or other language to scrape your feeds and republish them into server-side includes by blog category.  Then these server-side includes can be displayed on any page of your website.  (there are simpler ways to do this but that is how mine has been done)

Lots of sites have multiple installs of wordpress in different folders.

In your application, you might not need to do that.  Instead just categorize the posts and then promote the category pages.   Will have the same effect.   You can insert custom content on the category pages using functions.

**I've heard that fresh content helps boost your position in the serps.  **

There might be a little value to "fresh" content, but quality is enormously more important.

If i wrote all new unique content on some of my pages that havent been changed in several years, would i see a boost in the rank? If so, how many positions?

Rankings are more a battle of "who has the best" rather than "who has the freshest".

Make "the best on the web" for your keyword, then I might say your rankings will go up.  If you are 10th best, you might make the third page, because the nine better pages will be above you, a bunch of big brands will be above you, and a few unanticipated pages will be above you.

Just improving the content will not produce immediate results.  It can take months to years for it to move up to where quality alone will rank it.  Sometimes you will never make it, just because Google can be strange or new competitors arrive with great content, your site has tons of crap that weigh it down, other people improve their pages.  So there is no guarantee.

Ryan has great ideas for answering your question.

This "industry" is one that has heavily and historically depended upon outbound marketing.  So, site-targeting, remarketing, and behavioral-based ads will be other methods to consider.  You gotta take the message to the donor.

Because domain authority is capped at 100, it has to be a comparison of how the assets of your website compare to the assets of every other website out there.

To increase your domain authority, you must increase the assets of your site faster in comparison to all of the other sites on the web.   So, a person could be working to improve their website and actually make progress, but domain authority could drop because other websites are doing more.

Rankings operate the same way.  If you improve your website, but your competitor improves his more, then you will not advance to a position above him, even though you might have done a ton of work.

This is a very simplified explanation.

I can understand why they think two sites would be a good idea.

Let's say you get two powerful sites up and ranking and someone searches for "Dewey Cheatem & Howe" and clicks into the wrong site.  They don't find what they are looking for and leave.  The result is that 50% of their brand name searches bounce.

Would BigAssLaw.com who has a very broad practice be a better website?   Let's say in the future they decide to do DUI or IP law... would they want four sites and have 75% of their visitors bouncing or still be using BigAssLaw.com that is a large firm with broad expertise?

Many of my documents and articles are on those sites.  I didn't submit them and I have never hired an SEO.  It is done by weasels who simply steal your stuff and upload it under their name.

I use anchor text like "green widgets" in persistent navigation and in paragraph text on all of my sites and have no problems.

Now, if you are using chest-thumping anchor text like... "best green widgets in California"... then you might be asking for it.

There are a lot of these "little things" that must be put in line to make a domain successful.

Because this is such an important domain, with the success of a group of professionals at stake, I would hire an experienced SEO to give it a top to bottom review and get it into fighting shape.  This person should be able to help you get the site move straight, optimize it for organic search, get you better set-up for local search.      I would do this sooner than later.

All of the pages have the same title tag and a lot of code that is not needed.   A good SEO could expand the keyword reach of the domain and make it more competitive.

Getting the 301 working correctly will eventually pass the DA/PA to your new domain, but there are more important things that need to be done.

(I am not posting this because I am looking for work.  I only work on my own sites.)

A really well-known person with lots of twitter followers, that include a lot of people who have purchased his/her items in the past, might be able to sell a little bit of art via twitter.  If you don't have that follower base already, it will be really hard to build it.

Selling stuff on websites requires an enormous amount of work to position the website in the search engines where people who are interested in your products are going to find it.  I have a website that sells craft items and two people work on that website for a few hours each day.  That is just to hold our positions, we worked really hard for a couple of years straight to gain the positions.

The place where I would go if I had art to sell would be Etsy.  It is an art marketplace and the buyers come to you.   Still no guarantee that you are going to sell anything because making a sale depends upon many things beyond getting your items in front of visitors.

Have you tried Etsy?  I would go there first.

** I just don't know if I should tailor individual pages to our 4 target audiences, or tailor pages to the specifics of our services. Or both...**

Here's how I solve this dilemma.... I get up in the morning and write about what motivates me.  When I do that, I make the most progress, do the best work, and make the most money.  If I do anything else I am like a racehorse behind a plow.

I don't think this will work well for a client.      But it sure works well for me.

I would target great ideas for the people who use or enjoy their services.

What they want to know... What they should know but don't... Good stuff that they have not heard of...

all of this is Thanks!   Really?  Cool!   Wow!

So don't spend your time writing for industry fatcats or thumping your chest about your service.  Write about stuff that people want, enjoy and share.

We won't have time to get new category pages up probably for at least a few months

I try to avoid stopgap work.  If I was in your situation, I would plan this well and execute once.  I would wait until the site move is over and then do a great job.

As for optimizing the case study pages.  I would look at the traffic coming into them now and what keywords might be sending it.  I don't think that the optimization of these pages is extremely critical.  I would simply give them obvious and relevant names.

In my opinion, you seem to have an awesome library of content on this subject.

So, what I would do is prepare a special page that will serve as a category page for this topic.  I would, at the top of that page, describe the general topic, the background of what employers should know, then explain how you have prepared detailed summaries of many different cases.   A summary of your service to this type of client would be included on this page.

Then, I would give a name to each case, a one or two sentence description, and link to the page where the full details of that case can be found. This page will be a gateway to your library and because it links out to lots of resource material on your site it should become your master page on this topic to rank at the top of the SERPs.

I would title this page with a very short title tag, not much more than your keywords and the name of your firm.  Then, across the website in persistent navigation I would link to this page.

One problem with blogs is they often don't weave into the topic structure of your website with breadcrumbs or persistent navigation.  So if you don't have that, you might want to develop it or at least give links back to the main category page within each blog post with keyword anchor text.  I might create a colored box that directs any visitor to each blog post  to your full category page.

This will be a hand-built category page targeted at your main keyword.  This is what I use when I am mounting a massive content attack on a difficult keyword.

If you are publishing "fresh news" about subjects that appear on other websites, it can be extremely difficult to rank because of the immediate volume of content being published, much of it on powerful sites.

I can have established articles on my site, that have been there for years, this is a site with a DA of 76.  These articles can be swamped in the SERPs by content being published on the New York Times, CNN, LA Times, and many other very powerful and very popular sites.  My rankings will come back eventually, when the content is either deleted from the news sites or it is buried deep in their site as fresher news is added.

Just reporting observations.....

I add a new article a few times per month on a domain that is strong and long-established.

The articles that I write usually target keywords that can be moderately to quite difficult.  The articles are usually substantive with about 1000 to 3000 words and several images.  In my opinion they are some of the better content on the web for their topics.

When these articles are launched they often rank ten to twenty pages deep in the SERPs.   They stay there for months.  I do nothing to promote them other than add them to category pages on my site, list them for a short time on the homepage and news page.   After a few months the ones that target easy keywords might be in the first page of google.  The ones that target moderate to difficult terms slowly climb the SERPs and may take a year, sometimes two years to reach the first page.

This is how I have published for years.  Things have worked this way for years.  I believe that google promotes these pages based upon how visitors respond to them.  Slowly google figures out that visitors engage these pages and slowly promotes them up the SERPs.  I zero time promoting them beyond my website.  I would rather spend that time on the next article.

Thanks for the query suggestion.

I was surprised that I didn't recognize lots of big brands with .tv domains.  So, in my mind, .tv domains are frivolous.

These are just my own answers, don't accept them as "best practice" or anything like that because lots of people will disagree with me.

We have a client that wants to place their video content on a .tv tld instead of a subfolder/subdomain in their .com website.

In this situation, I would explain to the client that most SEO professionals will recommend keeping all of their assets on a single domain.  This is generally agreed to produce the highest rankings.   I would make certain that they understand this completely.

They believe that the .tv domain will better represent the media experience of their business.

They seem to feel so strongly enough about this .tv domain that they are willing to sacrifice their potential rankings.   So,  I would tell them that they should move ALL of their assets to this .tv domain instead of dumping them into a caboose.

They must feel that their video assets are special.  They must think that the .tv domains are special.  So, I would toss this at them and see how they react.

If their video assets are so wonderful then it is possible that the .tv domain will become a powerhouse site, then they will have all of the rest of their assets in a caboose on a .com.

I personally don't have experience in the .tv space.  Are lots of major players moving onto them for good reason?   Do they think enough of them to move all of their assets to them?  Or is the use of .tv domains frivolous?

So, going full circle on this, I still think that it is a bad idea to move videos to a .tv domain instead of putting them into a folder on this company's established .com.  The only reason that I would change my mind about this is if major companies are moving to this in a big way.  I would register the .tv domain and sit on it until this is the clear and widely accepted path.

This is one of the best questions ever.   I hope you get great responses and one of those responses thinks that the topic is worthy of a post on the Moz Blog.

Just telling a story here....

I once used a host that offered "unlimited file transfer" and lots of other unlimited stuff.  Not sayin' any names here.  Really, no host can offer you "unlimited" amounts of certain resources for $4/month or $10/month or $40/month or more  and make a profit.

So, when my traffic got up to about 1500 visits per day they were throttling my usage.  They were not capping the bandwidth, instead they were capping database connections, or some other metric to keep me from running costs that were higher than I was paying them.   Yep, I had unlimited bandwidth but I didn't have unlimited amounts of other resources needed to run a successful site.

At that host my sites were down a lot, timed out a lot. They didn't notify me that I was being throttled.  They just did it.  Instead my visitors noticed and I noticed and Googlebot probably noticed when he came to crawl my pages.

When I switched hosts, wow the traffic went up.

So, now I use hosts that charge me for every bit of resource that I use.   They want me to be extremely successful and fuel my hosting with all of the resources needed, because the more successful they help me to be the more money they will make.  And, I pay them a lot of money.

Most people on these "unlimited" plans never have a problem because they don't get much traffic... dozens of visitors per day or hundreds.  But, if you have a site that is starting to become quite successful you might run into a situation where they need throttle your usage or change the agreement with you.

If you read BlueHost's "usage policies" you will see that they will throttle your service to protect their interests.

we do occasionally have to constrain certain accounts that use resources beyond what would be expected in the normal operation of a personal or small business website.

Read the full policy.   I can't link to it, it opens in a window.

I really like my host because they look forward to me being successful because they want to charge me for all of the resources that I consume at published rates.

I like that analysis, Ryan.

Nice work.

Lots of people dislike shortened URLs because they can't determine the destination.  They do not trust them.  I don't click them.

In your example you say....

.... think of a toy industry site that hosts content from it's brands covering stuffed animals, electronics and board games.

If that is your website, do you think that a shopper will be pleased that she can do gift shopping there and add a stuffed animal and a board game to the shopping cart.   If you split these sites all of that cross shopping will be gone.  How many of your current shopping carts mix items from the different parts of your website.  All of that is gone.  And, if people are like me, they don't like go buy one item here, another item there, another item at still another site and then wait for all of these packages to arrive and be interrupted or stay home because you have a package scheduled to arrive.

I have retail sites.  How many of my customers add products to their shopping cart from multiple product categories?   I'll tell you how many.... enough that if that was taken away that my business might not make a profit.   You don't make much money selling one item at a time.  You make the real money when people fill the cart.

If you publish magazines, don't you think that a visitor will see that you publish Magazine A and Magazine B and Magazine C.... they will think... Wow!  This company publishes all of these magazines, they must know what they are doing.  And if someone likes Magazine A  a lot, don't you think they might be on your site and see that you also publish Magazine C and decide to take a look at it.  Lots of people subscribe to many magazines.

The people who want to break up this site are not thinkin'.

I am willing to bet good money that breaking up this site will result in an enormous traffic loss.

Why?  You are going to take a large authoritative domain that is probably a nice brand and break it up into a bunch of hotdog stands.

Google likes big brands.  Google likes authority.   Visitors like to be impressed.   I would not do this.

When I am in your situation, I ask myself... "What strong content can I produce?"

My ability to produce great content drives all attacks.  If I don't have great content for a keyword, I pick another keyword where I can produce the content.

You will win more by attacking with your strengths.

If I was creating a genuine "buyers guide" for an entire category of products, that should be something substantive, requiring a lot of work, and as such would be a valuable stand-alone addition to a website.  So, I would give that type of content a special page on my website, feature it prominently, and not make it a caboose on a category page.

Thank you Ryan, I am glad that you liked that post.

What would be the best practice for ranking a new site .. lets say a business site that does not have a blog to produce regular content in it....  And specially, when you are competing against big competitors.

At my office we are a small business up against big competitors and spend zero money on PPC.   All of our sales come from organic rankings.  We have 3 full time and one part time people working with occasional help from consultants.  Two people spend almost 100 percent of their time on content.  The other person does fulfillment and inventory work.  The part time person does administrative work.   I hope that shows the importance that I place on content.

Start using the DFP ad server and target the ads geographically.

When someone in your service area lands on the page, do not show the ads or show a house ad.

When someone outside of your service area arrives, then show them the ads.  Adsense will target by contextual relevance, geographic area, behavior, remarketing, etc to give those people valuable ads.

Sell that ad space by geographic area to people in your industry who serve other areas.

How sound is this theory?

I'll just say what I do and why, because I don't know how google handles this.

I have lots of pages on most of my sites that are "reference materials" that a visitor might look at, get the needed info, and leave in a short time.  I would not put these pages into another domain or hide them in any way.  I believe that google knows "the nature of this traffic".

What I believe is important is to do all that you can to entice the visitor to view another page.  Do this by creating closely related content and offering that to the visitor in very attractive links that every visitor to that page will see.   I frequently use nice size image links similar to what is used by the Taboola, Outbrain and other content marketing platforms.  This works well on content pages.

On retail pages, I do not fear offering links to content that tells the visitor "how to use" the product, "how to select", "ideas to have fun with" etc.  All of these are good for the visitor and if they see that you have lots of good content they will buy from you.

Getting back to "the nature of the traffic".   All you need to do to outrank your competitor in my opinion is to provide better engagement for the visitor because every website that receives this "nature of traffic" has the same problem.  Just do better that the competitors and you will win.

I agree.

Google should make the tests very difficult and require a very high score for a person to say that they are "certified by google".

The test is easy and only 75% is needed to be "certified".

Do you want a person who does not know 25% of the facts running your $20,000 per month campaigns.   That means that they are blowing $5000 per month.

Google needs a kick in the pants.

I would write one authoritative article that is the best on the web for this topic.  It would have lots of high quality photos and be clearly divided into subheadings so that a person scanning can find what he is looking for.

An article that immediately impresses people with images, breadth and length has a better chance of being shared than a large number of articles that cover only snippets of the topic.

Long articles also pull in nice amounts of longtail traffic because they have a huge diversity of words on a page.

They are rubbish because the passing score is so low.

**If I copy description from my web and paste to Youtube description, this is duplicate content for Google **

I agree with Stelios and am very pleased to see that Christy endorsed his answer.   Please don't do this!

We have a few dozen youtube videos that demonstrate how some of our products are used.   We write a big article on our own site about each of these products with the video embeded.   On youtube we post a very short - no duplication description.

Now when you search for these products on Google, our "demonstration" article ranks at the top of the SERPs... and our youtube video is lower on the page.   I am betting if we duplicated our own content on youtube that the article on our website would not rank in the SERPs because the page on our site and the page on youtube would have identical content.

Google does read the content of pdf documents and will even rank them in the SERPs.

When you make a pdf document you can add links to other pages of your site... and if you are clever you can even give it a header or a sidebar that matches the look of your site.

Clever people can also include "add to cart" buttons in pdf documents or ads that click to sales pages on their website.

I have lots of pdf documents that I produced to control how information is printed.  I also have the same information on html pages.  In those cases the pdf documents are assigned rel=canonical using .htaccess to assign their authority to  the html page that contains the content.  This eliminates duplicate content concerns and ensures that my html pages are the ones that rank in the SERPs.

"a significant rankings boost"

Here is how I see it.....

If a page of mine moved from #5 to #4, I would call that a significant rankings boost.   If it moved from #50 to #40, I would call that trivial.   If I am on the first page and get any movement up I would call it awesome.

About domain authority...  I almost never look at it and can't tell you the DA of my websites.  It has just slightly more than "entertainment value" to me.   But, plenty of people worship those numbers.

we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage

First, I would look at analytics to see if these pages pull in any meaningful traffic.  If they do then you have learned something  -- that the keywords that these "types of pages" are optimized for might be valuable.  If they are bringing in good traffic, I might make massive improvements to them.  If you keep them or make new ones on the same URLs be sure that they are useful for the visitor.  If no traffic is coming in through these pages I would redirect them to a relevant page or simply to a related category page or my homepage.

How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs?

This depends on how much traffic enters the site through these pages and also the overall value of this website.  If no traffic enters you can simply delete them and allow them to 404.  If there is a little traffic or if other sites link to them then I would redirect.

What expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO?

If your site has taken a panda hit then removing these pages could result in a significant rankings boost when (if) recovery occurs.  If the site has not taken a panda hit then removing the pages should make your site "lighter" and any authority and power that it has will be increased in these pages.

I would be optimistic - especially if this site has a lot of value on the pages that will remain.

Stelios gives the technical details.   Now for the encouragement....

For all of the work that you can put into a website, you owe it to yourself to ditch a host, a CMS, an SEO, a developer, a technology or anything else that forces you to run a blog on a subdomain.

Make big improvements to a few unimportant pages.  See what happens.   I think that this is relatively safe.

I frequently rewrite short pages that were published many years ago with totally new, substantive content, with more and better images.  They usuelly move up the SERPs within a few weeks.

Before you redirect... it could be much more profitable to run these sites separately.

A proper analysis could take a few minutes to a few hours to decide that they are not worth much... or it could be worth a lot of money to have someone who knows what they are doing flip these sites and convert them into valuable assets that earn many times more than what their previous owner was doing with them.