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I am doing some house cleaning on the site and made some minor updates to product titles and a rule was written in and it auto updated the URL to what the product title was with a redirect put in place from the old URL. If this a bad thing and should i leave the URL alone and just update the product title?

Then for the ones i did change the Product title and the URL was updated is this a bad thing and should i have just left the URL alone? These are all high ranking popular products so dont want to mess with any rankings going into busy season?

I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice.

This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer.

That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above:

“The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there?

If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages?

Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to  http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages?

Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work."

Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.

I started the site 10 years ago as www.islesurfboards.com selling mainly surfboards and ranking mainly for surfboards, paddle boards came along and now paddle boards make up for 95% of all the business and we are missing alot of ranking in the paddle board related keywords so what is the best course of action?

my plans:

keep www.islesurfboards.com and keep it surfboards focused, create a new domain www.islepaddleboards.com and move all paddle board related content products etc over to this domain with redirects to transfer the link juice.

Doing this will still keep my surfboard site and all its long term domain credibility and i can offer a link over the the www.islepaddleboards.com site for people looking to buy paddle boards and vice versa on the new paddle board site for people looking to shop surfboards.

Would this be the best course of action or does can anyone offer any better suggestions. I know google supposodly has taken off much ranking emphasis of the domain but as i pick apart the competition who rank welll in the paddle board space they all have "paddleboards" in the domains and a paddle board specific site to keep it tightly themed which pays off across the board in content, ppc campaigns, and overall ease of use as surfboards and paddle boards are two seperate products and paddle boards is very hot right now so i dont want to stay commited to www.islesurfboards.com domain if its going to create confusion or not help me rank well for paddle boards leading into the future.

Any ideas? Thoughts on the best route to take?

First question is in regard to the relevance of the main keyword in the company name when used in anchor texts for linkbuilding and also on the website on page seo title tags etc..

We used to call our selves "Isle Surfboards" but now call ourselves "Isle Surf & SUP" , sup is an acronym for "stand up paddle boards" as our core biz in now paddleboards

If we are trying to target the main keyword of "paddle boards" should we reconsider and call ourselves on the web " Isle Surfboards & Paddle Boards" or "Isle Surf & Paddle" or does it even matter?

Then when we link build should we be building links with our new name "Isle Surf & SUP" or just as "Isle Paddle Boards" or does it even matter?

Any help out there? bottom line is we want to rank better for the phrase "paddle boards" & "stand up paddle boards" as those are the top keywords.

And in closing since both above are the 2 most popular keywords and are very similar "stand up paddle boards" has "paddle boards" in the phrase should all my on page related seo target "stand up paddle boards" phrase since that would have both phrases or "paddle boards" or a combo of both?

Some content pages act as buyers guides for certain products for example

Used Paddle Boards for Sale - http://www.islesurfboards.com/used-paddle-boards-for-sale.aspx this is a content page that gets huge amount of traffic and is pure content with no products on the page,

but we also have a ecommerce section of the site that is

Used Paddle Boards for Sale -http://www.islesurfboards.com/buy-used-paddle-boards-for-sale.aspx however this page just has a small paragraph and all the ecommerce product related to this section on the page.

The content only page above gets all the traffic and rank and then they click over to the actual ecomm section wiht the products from a link on that page.

Should i merge these two together so its just one page and put the content on the ecom page? If i do all the content with push the ecommerce products down which is not good so what does anyone recommend as a best practice? Also will this mess up the content pages rank is i merge them assuming i redirect?

or Keep them seperate like i have with a content page regarding "used paddle boards for sale" and an ecommerce page that sells acutal "used paddle boards for sale"

wait, im confused, i thought an external link is a link from an outside website to yours and this is what you do want?

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/external-link

Why would having alot of external links be bad?

ok, so since my cart doesnt allow me to create a blog on the domain and i have started a new one on www.islesurfboardsblog.com then what should i do? move to a new ecomm cart that allows a blog on the domain and migrate over all the content? Am i just wasting my time with the new blog i started in terms of getting any SEO from it to my site since its at www.islesurfboardsblog.com

ok, sounds good. for the external followed links you mentioned we have alot we need to no follow external links? what does this mean?

We have our website / ecomm cart with network solutions and they do not allow you to have a internal blog like www.islesurfboards.com/blog . So the only solution is to have the blog on a external domain www.islesurfboardsblog.com which we set up. Is this ok for seo purposes or are we gonna miss out on alot by doing this. Any help?

We have been running our site about 10 years under the domain www.islesurfboards.com and we are referred as "Isle Surfboards" when linked to in the anchor text. Our core product line and keyword focus has always been on "surfboards" and its related long tail keywords.

However in the last several years we have began to sell "paddle boards" and now they have become our best selling product accouting for 80% of our business. We really want to rank well for "paddleboards" and related words but noticed we always seem to fall below people who have websites with "paddleboard" or "sup" in the domain and company name.

will they always rank better unless we also inlcude it in ours?

Should we move to a New Domain that focuses on the new target keyword "paddleboard" or a combo of both "surfboards" and "paddleboards"and would this make any difference or even hurt us since it would be a new domain.

Then in addition rebrand our company name to include surfboards and/or paddleboards in the company name or some combo of both so the anchor text when people who refer to us relate to both paddle boards and surfboards?

Many years ago we wrote about 60 content pages for our surfboard e-commerce website targeting all the top popular keywords. Many of them generic but very keyword focused.

We are now revamping our content our our site and want to move away from the generic side of things and actually rewrite all the pages to make them very useful and actually stuff our customers can really use and will find very helpful.

I noticed that many times we wrote small pages less than 500 words that target similar keywords around a general theme. In looking at the analytics all the pages are getting a good amount of traffic and ranking well but im wondering would it be ok to focus on a main topic and combine similar pages if they are related? So i can take the say 60 articles and combine it down to say 10 articles and make the articles cover alot more stuff instead of just being small 500 word articles.

As an example we have many surfboard models so we wrote an article for

-Longboard Surfboards

-Funboard Surfboards

-Mini Malibu Surfboards

-Retro Fish Surfboards

-Womens Surfboards

-Beginner Surfboards

My question is could i weave these all together and write one long guide on say "Choosing The Type of Surboard you need" and cover all the board models in that article and then redirect the old pages to point to that one article. Would i still rank well for all these words Or would this destroy all my current rankings for these words?

What is the best approach to rewriting and or combining old content pages that currently rank well but could be combined with others around the same theme to make it more user friendly?

I operate an ecommerce site for outdoor gear and was invited to guest post on a popular blog (not my site) for a trip i had been on. I wrote the aritcle for them and i also will post this same article on my website. Is this a dup content problem with google? and or the other site? Any Help. Also if i wanted to post this same article to 1 or 2 other blogs as long as they link back to me as the author of the article