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They did come back after a couple days, I sure wish they would make up their minds. Thanks again for the responses.

For over the past month my site has received sitelinks from Google and they have been really helping out. All of a sudden this morning they are gone. We 301'ed and redirected (WBT) another one of our other sites to this one on monday. Could it be Google is just trying to figure out what we are doing? Has anyone else seen sitelinks come and go on their site without any other redirects?

I am assuming it is because of my sites combining but wanted to hear if anyone else saw sitelinks come and go on their own.

Thanks

I am moving content from one site to another and redirecting the DNS from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com/old-site. I have put the 301 in place but I wanted to make sure I have to also tell Webmaster Tools to change the old site to the new domain? We still want the old domain name to answer and redirect to www.newsite.com/old-site.

Thanks

Thanks, that is exactly what I thought. It had been a 302 for a while and I just came across it. Nobody knew exactly why they had it as a 302.

We have one of our sites that we got rid of and incorporated into our "main" site. We left a 302 redirect from the old sites URL to a landing page on the new site. It act as a branded stub page before registration.

We are currently using a 302 to redirect from www.oldsite.com -> www.newbigsite.com/old-site

Should I change this to a 301? I loose my google SERP ranking for www.oldsite.com if I do the 301 and it will be replaced by www.newbigsite.com/old-site correct?

Thanks

Just checked with our web team and they are using HTML5 Web Storage http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html

We have some list pages on our site that we would like to use a paywall for to get users to do a free registration. The first 2 times they view a "list" page (from anywhere) they see the content fine. If the user registers or logs in they can see all content.

My question is if a user hits our site and they look at 2 list pages. They leave the site and then via a google search result they find another one of our list pages. When they click on that they get to our site but the paywall pops up. Is this a problem? First Click Free documentation says that they must be able to get there on the first try.

Since we let people look at 2 lists free are we ok? Does googlebot have an issue crawling our site if we do that?

Without the paywall our conversion rate was about 1-2%.

Thanks

Well, to help the situation. I tried to use WBT to redirect and got this error message.

We couldn't verify oldsite.com. To submit a change of address, oldsite.com must be verified using the same method as www.oldsite.com. Add oldsite.com to your account and verify ownership, then try again.

I had www.oldsite.com in WBT and used it fine all the time. Is it because my DNS has already taken over and it cant find the verification file on the oldsite?

Update, I was able to add a site in WBT for oldsite.com and verify it. Then I was able to move www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com (oldsite.com is also moved to www.newsite.com)

To move a site you need both www.site.com and site.com in WBT and verified? I did not know that.

We are absorbing one of our sites into another and I want to make sure I am not missing anything. The site that is being absorbed will no longer exist as all the content has been replicated/duplicated on the main site.

About a month ago we added canonicals to all the duplicate content to point to the new site it will be a part of. That went very well and organic traffic continued to flow to those pages on the new site.

We recently (yesterday) used 301s on all the pages using mod_rewrites and redirected the domain name from the old site name to the new one.  Using mod_rewrites we redirect any other page linking to that domain to www.newsite.com?ref=oldsite.com. So far I dont see anything coming in on an unexpected link.

I still need to tell Google via Webmaster Tools that the oldsite is now on newsite.com correct?

Is there anything else I might bump into that we havent thought of?

Thanks

Thanks Andrew,  we do have a scholarship description unique for each but some are very short.  It might not be enough of a difference in text for the robot.

We have a lot of detail pages on our site that reference specific scholarships.  Each page has a different Title and Description.  They also have unique information all regarding the same data points.  The pages are displayed in a similar structure to the user so the data is easy to read.

My problem is a lot of these pages are being reported as duplicate content when they certainly are not.

Most of them are reported as duplicates when they have the same sponsor.  They may have the same contact information listed.  These two are being reported as duplicate of each other.  They share some data but they are definitely different scholarships.

http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/adelaide-mcclelland-garden-club-scholarship/9254/

http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/mary-wannamaker-witt-and-lee-hampton-witt-memorial-scholarship/10785/

Would it help to add a Canonical for each page to themselves?  Any other suggestions would be great.

Thanks

Do I have to worry about putting a rel canonical between two pages that are not that similar?  Our members home page has a lot more links to content and the "Home" page basically has the CTA for registration.

I see it now,  collegexpress.com is 301ed to http://www.collegexpress.com/?ref=collegexpress.com.  I will have to change that to get red of the ?ref=collegexpress.com.

Good call on the brand name as well.  Since it is semi unique it shouldnt take much.

Thanks for the input Peter,  we have some very old links out there that we are in the process of reaching out to.  We are trying to get everyone to change the links to point at the correct site.

Can you explain a little more about the 301 to ref=collegexpress.com?  I dont see that or think that I have that setup anywhere.  I am still pretty new to SEO as this was dumped on me in January.

The weakening of CollegeXpress and the existing strength of careersandcolleges really does look like what is happening here.

All of your answers really make sense and I appreciate the time you took to answer.  Thank you very much.

George

Thanks Phillip.

For #3 we recently added the URL parameter ref in Webmaster Tools to crawl the representative URL and ref= should have no effect.  I also noticed that we didnt have www.collegexpress.com in our sitemap at the same time.  I added it and resubmitted it to be crawled.  It has not yet been indexed.

For #2 /home is really a Member's landing page.  It isnt what we want to display since there arent any CTA for registration.  How else can I tell Google that www.collegexpress.com is the place we want to use as our home page.

I have a couple brand sites that our company uses and a couple of weeks ago one started to suddenly show up in the #1 position while searching for the other site via its brand.

If I search for "collegexpress" our other site careersandcolleges.com is in the #1 possition.  If I search for "collegexpress.com" it shows carrersandcolleges.com's title and description but links to www.collegexpress.com

Could I have something messed up or is google confused with our two sites?  In the past I am told that CollegeXpress referred to the careersandcolleges.com page but that has been there for many many years and this SERP change only started to show the first week in march of this year.  I looked and there are a handfull of anchor text links from external sites using some form of the "CollegeXpress" brand linking to www.careersandcolleges.com but not that many,  and they are not new.

If I do a search the other way for "careersandcolleges" I see it correctly return is own site #1 but www.collegexpress.com is shown to me as #3.

I checked and we dont have any redirects or mod rewrites between the two sites.  They are on two different IPs

Any help that can point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.