Welcome to the Q&A Forum

CLARIFICATION on my initial request...
I need to know how to a) change our domain name and b) retain our history in MOZ.
Thanks!

Hey David

The site is growthtrac.com

For marketing -- and potentially SEO -- reasons. Specifically, the current domain has been around 10 years, but the name has nothing to do with our organization. We've owned a similar named domain, which includes the word that describes us.  I'd like to change to that domain.

We're pleased with our SERPS-- but when we see crappy sites out-ranking us, I think that may be due to having that 'word' in their domain name.  I think we can do better.

Late 2013 we performed a platform (new urls) and host change -- we survived. Much of those practices (i.e. 301 redirects) apply to a domain change. Technically, we can handle it.

Yes, I'm aware of the risk and the 'unknown' value... but it makes sense to us.

Do you have direct experience with specific domain changes?

We are planning a domain change -- same site, new domain --
Similar to Google Analytics, can we make that change here in Moz so our stats continue to be tracked?

If so...

Will the new domain stats simply 'add' to our present stats? (preferred)

Thanks.

Thanks.

Just to be sure I understand: Analytics without the ability to define dates?

I need to define a specific period for our Weekly Keyword Performance report. How?
There's a pull-down with the last 2 weeks pre-defined -- but how do I specify my own dates?

http://analytics.moz.com/reports/95735.95522/select/12033

Thanks.

No -- competitive -- as in "competitive sites".  I want to see my competitor's keywords.  I found the answer, but thanks. (The answer is SEM Rush)

I'm looking at our data -- we've been in PRO for about 18-months now -- and I don't see how to compare periods. Seems that the gains and losses are data compared in the same week (which is meaningless).
Anyone? Thanks.

Gentlemen, thank you.

So, we are a long time user of GA and we're planning a domain change.
Does anyone know if I can 'change the domain' in GA so we don't lose our past data?
Thanks!

We're strongly considering a domain name change; this is purely for marketing reasons. We think in the long term, this will be a good thing. I believe we can mitigate the page redirection, branding changes, etc.

My concern are the inbound links: from 200+ domains, 3,000+ links.

So, I guess we can contact each of the top sites linking to us and hope they update our links.  I'm not hopeful.  I believe we'll loose must of the links.

Has anyone been down this road and have experience to share?
What should I expect, worst case? Is there a way to mitigate?

Thanks much.
Jim

Does Moz provide a way to see what search terms are generating traffic on competitive sites?

Thanks!

bump, anyone?

Does Moz provide a way to see what search terms are generating traffic on competitive sites?

Thanks!

Cody, thank you.

And... there is no 'Google contact' for these kinds of issues, correct? (dumb question).

Seems that Google has not been crawling due to an access issue with our robots.txt
Late 2013 we migrated to a new host, WPEngine, so things might have changed, however this issue appears to be recent.

A quick test shows I can access the file.

This is the Google Webmaster Tool message: http://www.growth trac dot com/: Googlebot can't access your site January 17, 2014 Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 62 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 8.8%

Note the above message says 'over the last 24 hours', however the date is Jan-17

This is the response from our host:
Thanks for contacting WP Engine support! I looked into the suggestions listed below and it doesn't appear that these scenarios are the cause of the errors. I looked into the server logs and I was only able to find 200 server responses on the /robots.txt. Secondly I made sure that the server wasn't over loaded. The last suggestion doesn't apply to your setup on WP Engine. We do not have any leads as to why the errors occurred. If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us.

Google is crawling the site-- should I be concerned? If so, is there a way to remedy this? By the way, our robots file is very lean, only a few lines, not a big deal.

Thanks!

We recently moved our Wordpress site to a new host (WPEngine).

We had forums on the old web host, which we need to migrate to a new forum platform (Xenforo) and integrate into the WP site.

Since WPEngine only allows Wordpress on their servers, we need to install the forums at another web host, on one of our other domains.  We might point to the forums through a subdomain, like this:

forums.our-primary-domain.com

The main reason we're re-installing the forums is for SEO value. HOWEVER, since our forum content will be on another domain, will we have an issue?  If so, is there a workaround that would give us 'credit' for that content?

Thanks much.

Guys, thanks.

A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice.

We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination.

On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text.

Here's my question:

1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles?

Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
-- This is an Article, Page 1
-- This is an Article, Page 2
-- This is an Article, Page 3

Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context.

What about url's ?  Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01,  /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
Does it matter?

2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page.  So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter?  I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles.

3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page?

Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
Thanks much!

Jim