Here is what I would do.

I would look at my analytics to see if any of the posts in these blogs is getting any traffic from search engines or from links on other websites.   If you have some pages that are getting that type of traffic, then I would spend some time to make those pages a lot better.

I would delete the posts that are getting no traffic to very little traffic and 301 redirect those URLs to the homepage of the remaining blog.

If one of these blogs has just a couple pages that seem to be valuable then I would improve the content, place it on the one remaining blog and 301 redirect the original post URL to the new post URL.   Then 301 redirect the rest of the posts on that blog to the homepage of the remaining blog.

If I simply wanted to throw the entire blog away I would 301 redirect everything to the homepage of my website.

I would ask them to explain HOW and WHY.  In detail.

I don't see this on their website and am skeptical about such a claim myself.  I think the details on their website are too skimpy to make a purchase - even at only $10/month.

I author articles for Adsense revenue and my metric is

income from the article / cost of article production

Cost of article production includes my time, webmaster, photography, graphics, etc.

This metric begins at zero and when it gets to 1 then you have broken even.  The metric will improve as long as the article is on the web and being viewed.

If you want a slightly different metric that is probably more valuable then ....

cost of article production / average monthly income from the article over past 12 months

... because it gives you an estimate of how many months it will take at current income rate to recover your cost.

I think that it is more valuable to measure your performance article-by-article because then you know what types of content are performing the best - and that can inform future content development.

This type of metric is based upon the assumption that you are creating evergreen content that will be on the web for years rather than creating newsy content that will be consumed and outdated in a week - but similar shorter term metric could be used there.

I also have retail sites and write lots of product-related content.  This content is written to drive traffic to sales pages and to display adsense.   I keep an eye on how many sales each of these articles are producing and that also informs the development of future content.

Google knows that Tenerife is a geographic location in the Canary Islands.  This website has the word Tenerife on it many times.  It has pages with Tenerife in the title, in the URL.

Even though you did not give them a link you gave them a mention... and in the same sentence you associated it with the keyword that you are searching for.  All of that helps them.

Google thinks beyond the page.

If you think this website is hard to beat, wait until they get an SEO who knows what to do.

SEO?   That is very ambitious.

Consider beginning here in Moz Q&A.   Give generous answers to as many questions as you  can.   Set it as a goal to check here daily and answer any questions to which you can give confident and accurate and praiseworthy advice.  This should earn you thumbs-up from appreciative people, maybe they will rate your response as a "good answer", maybe Moz staff will endorse your answer.

Your ability to earn these feedbacks will be a measure of your ability to write useful and appreciated information about SEO.   It is much easier to write answers here than it is to write articles.  But this will be practice and a way to accumulate a bank of content that can serve as the basis of articles.  It will be a way to develop a strong voice.  After you have answered the same question ten times here you will be much better qualified to write an article about it.  You will see what gets challenged, and what earns positive feedback.

Furthermore, keeping your eye on forums will alert you to new problems and opportunities in SEO.  It is a way to discover what is important to webmasters and the people who consult for them.  Forums like Moz Q&A is where people go when they see a problem.  When questions appear here frequently and repeatedly they are important, and your participation here will give you a gauge of those topics.

That will guide you to the content that people want to hear more about.  This will keep you focus your writing time on important topics that will increase your value as an author.

When you don't know the answer to a question, subscribe to get email updates for that question. You will then be able to see good responses from other people who know about that topic.  This will increase your knowledge and help you discover who has expertise in areas where you do not.  These are the people who can help you.  They will see your good work and when you ask a question you will receive generously given gold.

Try it for a month and see how it goes.

One question.....

What industry are you targeting?   SEO?    Banking?     Shoe Shining?    Cosmetic Surgery?

Advice will vary depending upon target audience.

Ask LOTS of questions here.

Pay close attention to who gives good and generous answers.

You will see that different people have different answers and different styles.   Different answers does not mean that one is wrong but a lot of the answers that you receive will not be "best answers" in general or not be the  "best answer" for you.  Still, different answers are informative.

Seeing a diversity is important.

After you have asked LOTS of questions you might realize that someone has a style that you like and gives answers that you believe are valuable - and get lots of thumbs-up from members.  That is when I would select a person for paid consultations.

All of the people who I have paid for consultations have first demonstrated to me in forums that they know their stuff and have respect of their peers.  After this type of screening of consultants I have not been disappointed.   However, if I would have hired people without this screening I would have been disappointed many times.  Why?  Much of the free advice given on forums is bad advice or not good advice for you.

Read the profile of anyone who you consider hiring.  Some are available for clients.  Some are not.  Go to their website if they list one and look at it critically.   You can get fantastic assistance from many of the members here, but be careful to be sure that you get the right person for you.

Good luck.

I get some of this type of traffic.

It is coming from spammer sites.  These sites often look like a "directory" or they look like "search results".  They are usually running in industries where the cost of an adwords click is moderate to expensive.  They are always running ads - usually Adsense.

I think that they operate in a few different ways...

a) Dynamic site: you go there today and can't find a link.   That is because they are changing the data continuously - perhaps daily or by visitor.  The might think that changing the data on the site continuously will help it survive in the SERPs.    Look at this site today, then go back in a day or two, you will likely see that it is completely different,  sometimes it will "look" identical, but the destination of the links have changed.

b) Referral log spammers:  there never was a link to you on their site.  They have a computer program sending a "visitor" to your site so that they appear in your referral log.  They are doing this in industries where people pay a lot of money for clicks and pay really close attention to their visitors.  They know that you will come looking.   They hope that you will click on their ads.

c) Malware trap:  another referral log scheme to get staff from a high value business, maybe a competitor, to visit their site.  That referral in your log was "bait" and you are stepping into a malware trap. A small business in a high value niche is the most lucrative and vulnerable malware target.  Staff who are chasing reefers have access to adwords accounts, adsense accounts, checking accounts, credit card with high limits, they got your name, address and zip code.

d) Adsense/Adword:  these sites display Adsense.  Yesterday a visitor, genuine or robotic, was on their site and "clicked" your ad.  That produced a visitor to your site and income for their site.

e) Combinations of the above:   Two or three of the methods above are all being used.

Be careful.

I have used rel=canonical on a few pages of content that were published on two of my websites.  T

I agree.   I would not mix diverse topics.   But, if they are related, I would combine them as long as the content is meaningful to someone.  I would monetize the traffic with adsense or other ads.

How closely related are the topics of these websites?

Are you mixing fishing, knitting and hydraulic jacks?

W3C Validation: How Important is This to Ranking?

It depends who you ask.

If you ask one of the W3C evangelists they will tell you that you will never get good rankings without it and that google will penalize your website and not allow it to be seen in certain countries.

If you ask people who really know about this stuff they will tell you that if your site renders well in most browsers you will do fine in search.

Right now you have a problem with your best clients typing in NYCOfficeSpaceLeader.com or NYC-Office-Space-Leader.com or NYC_Office_Space_Leader.com (and a host of typos).

If you go to the proposed domain your best clients will be typing... MetroManhatten.nyc and MetroManhatten.com and Metro-Manhatten.com.

Those domains, to me, are like throwing traffic away.

Phone conversations go like this...

Guy: What's your website?

You: Metro hypen Manhattan.NYC

Guy:  Huh?  MetroHikingManhattan.com?

You:  No.     M-E-T-R-O hyphen-like-a-minus-sign M-A-N-H-A-T-T-A-N dot com

Guy:  huh?  can you repeat that ?

You:  OMG!

Guy:  OMG!

I would make the name of my biz really simple.  Get a good .com domain without hypens.  I'd be willing to spend good money to get an appropriate domain that anybody will clearly understand on a telephone.      If you don't get a .com then whoever owns the .com is going to get lots of your type-in traffic.

I get some of this type of traffic.

It is coming from spammer sites.  These sites often look like a "directory" or they look like "search results".  They are usually running in industries where the cost of an adwords click is moderate to expensive.  They are always running ads - usually Adsense.

I think that they operate in a few different ways...

a) Dynamic site: you go there today and can't find a link.   That is because they are changing the data continuously - perhaps daily or by visitor.  The might think that changing the data on the site continuously will help it survive in the SERPs.    Look at this site today, then go back in a day or two, you will likely see that it is completely different,  sometimes it will "look" identical, but the destination of the links have changed.

b) Referral log spammers:  there never was a link to you on their site.  They have a computer program sending a "visitor" to your site so that they appear in your referral log.  They are doing this in industries where people pay a lot of money for clicks and pay really close attention to their visitors.  They know that you will come looking.   They hope that you will click on their ads.

c) Malware trap:  another referral log scheme to get staff from a high value business, maybe a competitor, to visit their site.  That referral in your log was "bait" and you are stepping into a malware trap. A small business in a high value niche is the most lucrative and vulnerable malware target.  Staff who are chasing reefers have access to adwords accounts, adsense accounts, checking accounts, credit card with high limits, they got your name, address and zip code.

d) Adsense/Adword:  these sites display Adsense.  Yesterday a visitor, genuine or robotic, was on their site and "clicked" your ad.  That produced a visitor to your site and income for their site.

e) Combinations of the above:   Two or three of the methods above are all being used.

Be careful.

I got a request from a potential client as he do not understand why his website cannot be found on Google.

Honestly....  I think most of the people who say this know what they did but they ain't sayin'.

Yes, Trello is nice.  Someone who knows about me being a scatterbrain recommended it.  I tried it and liked it, but found it cumbersome to use.  So, I figured out a similar way to do it with Google documents  and that is what I described above.  Lots of people use Trello.  It will help you understand the potential of organization.

When somebody lands on one of my pages, I make sure that - in a single view they have.....

1. a great image that is relevant to the topic (we can spend hours creating these, spend $$$ on specimens or props, spend $$$ on licensing professional images)

2. a good introductory paragraph

3) attractive image links to highly relevant content

4. relevant ads

I am usually working on a dozen to two dozen articles at the same time.  This is because I am easily diverted from one project to another.   But have found that I do the best work when I go with whatever energy is hot in my mind.   I need project management software for the scatterbrain. 

Articles can hang for months without being touched because I hit something difficult, need props for photos,  need to travel for photos, graphics are being made, license/permissions,  these things eventually get done and these delays almost always result in a better product.

So, I have a master spreadsheet in a google document that tracks each step of the content preparation job.  Each row in the spreadsheet is a page of content, and the columns are the various jobs that must be done for each of them.   I can tell at a glance what is missing or needed for any article.

Column headings include:  research, mind map, writing, photography, graphics, posting to html, online review, spell check, editing, tag checking, publish to the homepage, announce to subscribers, incorporate into category pages, locate places to link internally, monitor analytics (change thumbnails or graphics of not performing).

Some of those jobs are done by me, some are done by an employee who is here daily, some is done by a part time employee who works irregularly, some are outsourced.    The spreadsheet puts all of this in order and makes sure that important jobs are not skipped.

I also create a google document for each page of content and share with an employee who does photos, graphics and creates the html pages.   That is where I compose <title><description> and author the article.   The employee prepares the images and adds them to this document.  I write captions for each image.  When everything is finished a pdf of this page goes to an offsite editor, when it comes back I do final adjustments, the employees post the article to the website, a tag checker proofs everything, then we look at the spreadsheet to be sure that all jobs to promote the content have been done.</p></title>

Is having copy above the fold still beneficial for SEO

Yes!   You want to slap the visitors' face with the best thing that you got.

If I didn't want to collect contact information, then I would put all of my efforts into creating a fantastic free content resource that clearly establishes my site and company as the ultimate authoritative source of information on this niche.

I would not hide any of my work by only sharing it with those who subscribe to a newsletter or whitepaper, etc.  This type of content is too costly to create for it to be withheld from being visible on the site and attracting traffic from search and building my credibility to people who want the information.

What I might do to acquire a following of subscribers is to publish new valuable and substantive content regularly and allow people to sign up for email notification of when new information is published.  Subscribers might be offered a special discount, free upgrade or some other item of value when a purchase is actually made.  That would lure them into a subscription as they approach the trigger point in the buying decision.

I would also use retargeting ads to keep my brand in front of the visitor after they leave my site.

I have a glossary on one of my websites.  It has been there about ten years and receives between 200 and 1000 visitors per day.  It ranks #1 for "[industry name] glossary", "[industry name] dictionary" and many similar terms and has held those rankings for many years.   It has about 1000 definitions, some that are very close or repeats as you describe.

When I made this glossary I decided to place it on 26 pages - one for each letter of the alphabet.  During the first few years it was up, I was tempted to convert it to one page per definition as you propose but decided against that.  I was tempted because I thought that the glossary would rank for lots of different keywords and pull traffic for all of them.

In the past two years, I have been really glad that I didn't create all of those pages.  Why?   Panda.   The Panda algo would probably not be kind to those pages.  They would contain an average of about 50 words.  That is too skimpy and I think that my site would be demoted for thin content.

What I have done is write substantive article pages for many of the definitions.  These are 500 to 2000 words with photos, graphs, data, etc.  Each of these article pages receives a link from the glossary definition and these page rank really well for very difficult terms.  I only have a couple hundred of these articles but finish one or two more every month - so its growing - slowly.

I have ignored the glossary for the past several years but this week I have been adding new words and adding images to many of the definitions where they would be helpful.   I am also adding links within the definitions to pages where I have articles about those topics.  The goal is go move glossary visitors into the rest of the site.

Two of my friends have glossaries.  One made his on 26 pages like mine and is getting lots of traffic.  The other made separate pages for every definition, was doing great in the early years, but recently had Panda problems.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

Do I really need to do anything about those pages?

**In my opinion, YES, absolutely.  ** Allowing lots of parameters to persist on your site increases crawling require, dilutes the power to your pages, I believe that your site's rankings will decline over time if these parameters are not killed.

There are three methods to handle it.... redirect, settings in webmaster tools and canonical.  These three methods are not equivalent and each works in a very different way.

1. The parameters control in Google Webmaster Tools is unreliable.  It did not work for me.  And, it does not work for any other search engine.  Find a different solution, is what I recommend.

2. Using rel=canonical relies on Google to obey it.  From my experience it works well at present time.  But we know that Google says how they are going to do things and then changes their mind without tellin' anybody.   I would not rely on this.

3. If you really want to control these parameters, use htaccess to strip them off at the server level.  That is doing it where you totally control it and not relying on what anybody says that they are going to do.  Take control.

The only reservation about #3 is that you might need parameters for on-site search or category page sorting on your own site.  These can be excluded from being stripped in your htaccess file.

Don't allow search engines to do anything for you that you can do for yourself.  They can screw it up or quit doing it at any time and not say anything about it.

Where I compete, the short tail is becoming enormously competitive.  Almost all of my revenue comes in from extensive long tail content. Extensive.  More than all of my retail competitors and manufacturers combined.

Most of my traffic comes in from long tail queries that are informational rather than transactional.  So, although it looks like my conversion rate is bad, the number of conversions is higher because a few of the informational content visitor will purchase.

I do the following...

Feature your popular and most recent blog posts prominently on every page of your site.  Show them to all of your visitors.

Set up Feedburner so people can subscribe by email or RSS feed.  Get AddThis sharing buttons.

If you have great content then your visitors will promote it for you.

I would make one blog on the main domain and put all of my efforts into that.   If you already have a blog on the main domain I would keep that running but put twice as much work into every post and post a little more often.  Quality over quantity wins.  Content that is twice as good gets ten times the attention.

If you split your efforts into three outhouse blogs you will not have much and all of that effort could have been used to increase the authority and impressiveness of your main site.

Overall, you are doing great.  Fantastic.   How many people can say....

....my two websites produce the majority of my income....

You are doing better than most professional SEOs would do on your site.

So, I don't think that you need or want someone to "take it over".   You want a brief amount of SEO consulting.  That is what I get.  I have paid people for their opinion on what should be done with my site and I have paid people for technical work such as responsive design, moving sites into wordpress and coding a custom content manager.   These are generally one-time costs.

If I owned your site, I would probably pay for an opinion of its Panda and Penguin vulnerability.  And I would pay to have someone recode the site and incorporate responsive design.  That might be all that I would do.  This might cost a few to several thousand dollars.   I have paid for both of these services several times over the past few years.  It does not cost as much as you think.

Then, after that work is done and I gave it some time, I might get advice on how to kick-up its competitiveness safely.  Here, I am paying for ideas, not someone to do the work.

There are plenty of people who provide "SEO consulting" services.

When people are discussing what affects their search engine rankings on this particular forum,  which has got to be one of the most read on the Internet just how much guesswork is really going on?

I believe that most people are giving you their honest best answer.

As the person who might use the information provided you have to consider these things...

1)  The exact question that you asked and what information that you provided about your site that would enable the person answering to give you a well-considered response.   Some of your recent questions have "unknowable" answers.  Why?  Because any person who would try to give an answer would need to spend many hours in study to give a good answer.  They would need to consider your site, your competitors site and everything that they know about google which google only partly reveals.

2. Who is answering your question.   Some people are answering your questions without looking at your site, some are answering after looking at multiple pages on your site, looking at your competitors site and looking at data from all of these sites using tools.  So you are getting shoot from the hip answers given by noobs and carefully-considered answers given by experienced people.  Sometimes the noobs are right and sometimes the experienced people are wrong but you are asking where people of many different abilities and perspectives are doing this for free and are not inclined to spend a lot of time.  In short, it is best to listen to people who you think are successful and who in their answer reveal that they have carefully considered a lot of information about your website, competitors and google's foggy revelations.

**3) Are you REALLY reading the answer carefully with a mind that is willing to do the work? ** Very often, the answer that is the most difficult to implement is the best answer.  In recent weeks you have asked the same question here multiple times in different ways.  Go back and read all of the answers again.  The first time or two you ask people might give you reasonable time, but after they see the same question again and again (which has been asked here months or years ago) their willingness to respond starts dropping.  Either you don't like the answers that you received, don't believe them, or you are allowing "shoot from the hip" answers that are easy to implement seduce you away from carefully considered answers that are hard to implement.

** 4) Your site might have a Panda or a Penguin or another type of problem** and that is important to determine and get under control before you make a big investment in other things - because when you have a penalty you only get back a fraction of any further investment.

You seem to be considering a major investment in your website.  When I do that I spend a lot of time studying the situation myself.  Then I get paid advice from people who are smarter than me and who have looked at similar problems on LOTS of websites.  What I don't do is try to weight the advice of a hundred different people given in a forum where people give your question ten seconds of consideration and type the first thing that comes to their head.  _That is the high cost of free advice. _

When I was young I trained as electrician which dealt in facts, it seems like this is not possible with the world of business and search engine rankings?

You are right.  There is a big difference.  Diagnosing the problems of a website on a forum is similar to diagnosing mental illness.  The only information that you get are what the person shares about the website and then what you can divine from looking at it, its competitors and the data from a few tools.

If you  suffer from mental illness who do you want advising you?   I would want my advice from experienced people, who have treated many others and who have spent good time trying to understand my situation completely.  So when you are trying to decide who to listen to in a forum keep these things in mind.  And keep in mind that there are different approaches to building winning websites.  Some require an intelligent investment in the website and some use offsite methods that might have different values to Google over time.

Glad you are testing... I have been waiting for the Penguin stampede.

Marie Haynes thinks that there was an update.   https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

She sent an email out to subscribers...

Hi! I woke up this morning to an inbox full of people asking whether Penguin had updated.  Twitter is ablaze with people talking about Penguin as well.  While we haven't had an official announcement from Google yet, it really does appear that Penguin is in the process of updating.

If you haven't seen any changes in your rankings, don't despair.  It looks like the update has only affected some people. I have seen people in the UK, Australia and the US who have seen changes, but other people in those same regions have not. Some of my clients have seen nice jumps back to page one, but I have other clients who have not budged.  Also, several people on Twitter who do a lot of Penguin work are not yet seeing any changes either.

I have also heard several reports of sites dropping several pages in rankings today. Most were sites owned by people who admittedly built unnatural links.

High DA, PA and A grade at page level not ranking in SERP - why?

The most common reason is a Panda, Penguin or some other problem.. or you are looking at local search where these metrics don't work well.

First, I will say that Google has thousands of computers that respond to search results.  Some of these computers have the freshest data, some of them have stale data.  They also have lots of experimental versions of the search results running at any given time.  In addition, search results can change depending upon your location, if you are logged into a Google service, previous searches that you have done, cookies on your browser, and many many other factors.

So, the positions of your pages in Google can move up and down depending upon all of the factors listed above and how your rankings change in any one of them.

Some of my rankings are rock solid.   The rest of them jump up and down constantly.  I have a few keywords where I have jumped back and forth almost randomly from any position between #15 and #4 for the past few years.

What's the tool that works for you all the time and is 100% reliable?

Nothing is going to be 100% reliable because of what I described above....

The rankings that I pay attention to are what I see in Moz Pro Rank Tracker.  I think that is a good choice because location, browser, search history, cookies, personalization and most other factors are not influencing the results.  But, still my rankings jump up and down there - and I can usually confirm them by searching on a machine/browser that I think is pretty clean.

If you want to track your progress, I think using a a tool that taps the Google API - like Moz Pro Rank Tracker - is as good as you are going to get.  Plus Moz Pro Rank Tracker will record your rankings history in a nice chart.

The best way to understand it is to go here and experiment.

http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php

When I thought that pagerank was really important I went to this tool everyday and almost wore it out.  I learned valuable things and benefited from them.

Today, I think that pagerank flow is a very tiny part of ranking on the web.  I think that visitor response to your site is a lot more important and focus my attention on building a great site.  Knowing a little about pagerank is good, but I would not invest a lot there.

So the big question is how important are these errors scores when it appears that most of the top competition also are in the same situation?

My response to this is a question.   Are you looking for the competitive advantage?

Nobody knows exactly how Google or any other search engine assesses the code on a page.

I personally hold the belief that my use of

,

and

are valuable for informing search engines about the main, second, and tertiary topics of importance on my webpage.   That is what I believe and I make a planned effort to present the hierarchy of my document's topics in a way that is marked with <h>designations.  So, on that basis alone I would be doing major work on your website because there are hundreds of <h>tags in the code of every page on your website.  <h>has been used as formatting instead of marking the important elements of each page.

You agree that you want a responsive site and that involves working in the code.  That makes a good time to improve other parts of the code and the design as well.

Finally, you want a site that is quick to deliver and easy for browsers to render properly.  For that reason you want code that is as light and as simple as possible.  All the more reason to have the site recoded.

I am not a code evangelist.  My site isn't perfect.  But, I am just saying that if I was the owner of your site, I would want the site recoded from scrach to be as light and as simple as possible.    At this moment, I am paying someone to completely redo my main site to improve elements that are less motivating to me that what I see in your code.  So, I have put my money where my mouth is on this.

One risk that you have in getting the site recoded is that you could hire someone who will not do the job properly or well.  So, it is really important to get the right person to do the job or learn all that is needed to do it right and well yourself.</h></h></h>

I think that Robert makes a good point that the code underlying your site is very inefficient and having it recoded from scratch would be a great improvement.   I would do that if I owned your website.

Robert also points out that you have a lot of deep content on your site that most people never find.  I see about 180 pages doing at site:endeavourcottage.co.uk query from the USA.  A lot of that content is "historical" and "local guide" information that might bring in traffic and might be useful - it could also be dead weight cause some Panda risk.   So I would assess that content to see if it is:  1) substantive, and, 2) unique.   Then I would look at if that content is pulling in any traffic or if it is dead pages on the site.  Based upon that I would prune or improve and organize it into a small library.

I also believe that the persistent navigation could be significantly simplified so that it does not compete so strongly with the content of the page.

As for your homepage and site structure...  It looks like you have about a dozen properties and I do not believe that is too many to display on your homepage with a representative photo and essential information.  When a person lands on your homepage, my impression is...

"Hey... they have a nice selection of cottages.  Let's take a look at them"

The visitor can also click into the main page for each property to see several nice photos, full details and a map of where it is located.  That's my opinion, and how I would run this site if it belonged to me.  Others might disagree.  It is just how I would want to present my business, and I would have a way to rotate or prioritize the sites in the presentation.  This could be on availability, profit, popularity, or the advertising fee that you are paid, or simply a straight rotation.

If you had 120 cottages I would not list each of them on the homepage, instead, I would group them in some way by location, size, price or characteristics and allow the visitor to explore.

As you see there is a lot of personal opinion on how to play the homepage, but I think that most SEOs will agree on the need for:   1) improved code, 2) improved navigation, 3) an assessment of the content collection for substantiveness and uniqueness.

Good luck.

The homepages on my sites have been influenced by what my visitors do when they land.

When each of my sites started, I didn't have much content on the site so my homepage had very few options.  Then as the sites grew I added more content options to the homepage and the persistent navigation across the top of the site and down the side became filled with links to category pages.

As I added more options to the homepage user engagement increased, and as I added still more options user engagement increased again, and again, and again.  Pretty soon, other people who have websites and strong opinions about homepages tell me I have way too much stuff on my homepage.   I can listen to them or I can listen to my visitors.   I picked the visitors.

So, what are your visitors telling you about your homepage?  Are you doing anything to learn how they behave when they land?  Crazyegg gives you the ability to see what they click.  It is easy to find out what they are clicking, what they are ignoring, what returning visitors do, what new visitors do... you can even see what visitors on mobile do and what visitors on tablets or desktops do. If you don't know what the visitor is doing you are just shooting into the dark.

You can use visitor information to move heavily engaged items to prominent positions, you can see what isn't being engaged that you want to be engaged and give it different wording or a better photo to see if that improves.  It is all about giving the visitor what he/she wants and enticing them towards what you want them to accomplish.

What's all of this have to do with your rankings?  A lot, I believe.

If you are giving the visitor what he wants that visitor is more likely to engage your site instead of bouncing, share your site, bookmark it, return to it using your domain as a navigational query or typing it into the address bar of the Chrome browser, click on it preferentially in the SERPs.   So, I think that by pleasing the visitor your site will produce signals that google is watching and that will help it rise in the SERPs as long as you have the basic page optimization and a decent navigational structure.

As for what to show the visitor on your homepage, you can send the message that "we ain't got much" or "you gotta click to find out" or "we have an enormous variety of things".    I have bet ALL of my money on the enormous variety because that has been what generated the most visitor activity.    Maybe your visitors are different from mine, just saying what I believe works on the small number of sites that receive all of my attention.

This has been such a great thread, I decided to add a little more information on my problem redirect and a personal theory....

When I redirected domainA.com to keyworddomain.com, domainA.com had been on the web for nearly ten years with #1 rankings for its products for almost that entire time,  The domain had lots of mentions had, lots of domain queries and a great history with google.

When you do a 301 redirect, I believe that only redirects a fraction of your assets.  It is only a mechanical redirect of the file names on your server and search engines know how to follow it and attribute links.

However, I do not believe that a 301 transfers all of the mentions of your brand that appear on other sites or the domain queries that you have been receiving, any social value and other off-page assets that search engines might give you credit for.  (I don't know what they can do about local, since that is never a concern for me.)

So the more work you have put into your site related to branding the greater your loss will be when you walk away from the domain.  When I put my site up on keyworddomain.com Google's followed the 301s but had every right to ask.... "WHO IS THIS?"...

This new domain was a Nobody.

No one asks for it  by name through the google seach box, nobody is typing the domain in the address bar of the Chrome browser, the name is not mentioned in association with all of my products on many other websites, in blogs and in forums.  I lost all of those assets and that is why I personally believe the rankings dropped.

Robert gives great suggestions for an attempt to reclaim some of these "other offsite assets".  I think he has good ideas that I did not do.

People rarely if ever talk about these "other offsite assests" so we are ringing their bell here.

This is not advice.  Just a report.

About 12 years ago I built a website on a decent domain and it went to #1 rankings on a number of commercial keywords, beating a couple of well-known manufacturers, amazon, staples and others.  This website's rankings seemed great to me and it was getting over 1000 visitors per month who typed the old domain as a keyword into the google search.

Then about three years ago I acquired the perfect domain and confidently redirected the old domain to the new.  I changed nothing on the website except switching instances of domainA.com to keyworddomain.com.   Oh.. phooey...  I don't know what happened but rankings dropped from #1 to #3 for the good money queries.

Rankings stayed at #3 for several months, then, after over one year finally got back the #1 ranking, occasionally slipping and jumping back up, curiously the recover occurred when domain queries got back up to about 1000 per month on the new domain.  (This was immediately before google started blocking keyword information).  Now after two years, stable again, but I lost a lot of sales and my current ranking at #1 might be because the strong manufacturer might have a Panda problem in my opinion.

So, just saying that things don't always go as planned.  Best to tell the client that there is some risk involved.

This question resonates with me..... 

This is a matter of personal opinion... and the opinion of people associated with THE BRAND are often adamant about how their name is used.

To me, making such a show about the brand is like chest thumping.  I often grin when I see it.   I would never put that stuff on my site.  I would rather have my brand recognized by the quality of my service and my product - and put my energy into that.  If I have quality services and products I don't need to make that kind of noise.

But I have experience with a couple of employers who are all about THEIR BIGASS BRAND and if you are on their team you better be SHOUTING about it and liking it (or pretending to like it).   Because if the boss gets a whiff that you ain't all about THE BRAND then you better be lookin' for another job.

So, I think its a good idea to see how deep their commitment is to THE BRAND.  If it is dyed-in-the-wool you better start likin' it or leave.  But, if they are open minded you might be able to help them evolve from chest thumping to a more professional communication style  - in some people's opinion. 

Justin, Daniel, Bryan.... Love the responses!

Got me smilin'   

*** My question is if people are going to be linking to my blog, will this help my website rank for product terms? The blog is part of the website, websitename.com/blog.**

The answer to that is "yes".   And, in many cases your content pages will rank higher in search than your product pages... and some people cuss about that... but if they again focus on the visitor they can answer the visitors questions and then get them to a product page where the purchase can be made.   You shift your focus to "advertising your own products" on your content pages in a way that is not chest thumping.  Content pages are not places to promote.  They are places to educate and earn trust.

My point is... When you focus on your visitors needs and interests you are in a better position to produce content that will be shared widely, convert visitors into buyers, rank high in search and get the links that you are looking for.

When you start building a great website, people will start typing your domain into google search and that is more valuable than links.  When google sees visitors asking for you buy name, that is when you have something.

It is possible to be so focused on "links" that what is really important is ignored.

Forget about links.

Instead focus on content that will be useful for your visitor.

An article that explains how to use a product with a nice video, illustrative photos  and clear text will inspire people to buy.  It will also be out there in search and pull in traffic, and some of those people will buy your product.  These types of articles, done well, can serve you in many ways.

Articles that compare products are also good.  Photo tours of product features, articles that calculate costs or savings, histories of product development....  think about all of the popular cooking, home repair, history, even reality programs that are on television.

If people are calling you  or emailing you with questions, your replies to those queries can be a great starting point for articles.

(Note that I am deliberately using the word "articles" instead of "blog posts" because I want to elevate this content to something that is much more substantive and will be fully integrated into your website.   Too many people think of a "blog"  as a caboose on the tail end of their website where they go to slurp coffee, type prattle, and make mindless pages of yada yada stuff without mental effort.  If you want content that works you gotta make something of substance and attitude that can be promoted on your homepage.)

If client was copying content from other websites and the owner of that content submitted a removal request to google then client's pages with the complained-about content will fall out of Google.  If lots of people are complaining the entire site could fall out of Google.

To see if this might have occurred, do a google search for a query where the client originally ranked on the first page of the SERPs, click into the SERPs, scroll to the bottom and you might see wording like this....

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

I submit lots of removal requests and Google yanks those pages out of the SERPs pretty quick.

Great story.

That reminds me of one...  I know of a small adsense site that went offline and the owner didn't realize.   A few months went by before they realized that the hosting was not responding.   The site was brought back online, popped back into the SERPs and resumed making money.

I don't know the answer to your original question.... but I would be jumping to redirect anything from April 2014.

Nobody really "knows" the answer to this... but I think there is a good chance that google will continue to crawl these connections.  Even if some of them are still good.

If Google was zapping people for matching title and h1 then my site would be toasted.

If Google was zapping people for matching title and h1 then huge numbers of people would be busting into this forum crying that they got whacked.

I think that the idea of Google punishing people for matching title and h1 is total rubbish.  Does anyone know and have a link to a serious person's website who is publishing this stuff?

It is very easy to get information about Multiview....

http://www.yelp.com/biz/multiview-inc-irving-2

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/directory/multiview

I discovered that many other people share my opinion.

I agree with your assessment.

This hosting service is being run by either noobs or stingy people or both.

I would get a new host right away.  ASAP.  Your rankings in search will die completely if you remain on this host.

In addition to what you have seen here they probably have other practices that are deadly.

I would install my site on new server, then change the DNS before informing the current host.  Then call to cuss 'em out. 

Wow... what a great reply.

I am glad that you gave detailed info on "local search".

Nice work Marcus