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John,

That wouldn't quite work in this situation.

The OLD website is still very much an active functioning site.... its is just one service which has been split into another company.  So for example... we only want to redirect;

www.oldwebsite.com/servicename

to the NEW website.

I could of course just edit the old page and say ...."click here to go to the new site"..... but it does wind me up somewhat that the ideal solution, and proper way to do it is a 301.... but if we do it they get put under penalty.

The official Google line about doing what we want to do is a 301 redirect..

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html

To quote them "It’s important to redirect all users and bots that visit your old content location to the new content location using 301 redirects."

I wonder if a cross-domain canonical would be worth doing?

A special thanks to John for his advice on this issue.

To update you.... I submitted a site-map of the OLD website to Google via WMT.  Hoping this would encourage a re-crawl and that Google would see the 301 was no longer in place.  I then put in another recon request.

Thankfully the penalty has now been removed and I just had email confirmation this morning.

My quandary now is how we redirect from the old site to the new one.

To my mind a 301 redirect is the right way to do it.... but obviously we can't do this again.  A 302 would serve the purpose of redirecting users to the new site (which is what we want to do), but obviously a 302 is not the right way to do it.

Any advice or ideas on how we should take people from the old site to the new one?

Thanks John, I have just emailed.

Yes their traffic dropped by around 90%.  Its a brand new website and it ranked very quickly after launch when we put the 301 in place.

After peanty they went from position 4/5 for the main keyword to currently position 99.  It is site-wide so affecting everything.  The brand name they rank outside the top 50.

To update this thread again;

After removing the 301 redirect, we put in a reconsideration request.  To my amazement it was declined as they felt the site still had too many un-natural links.

Within webmaster tools the site is showing just 57 links.

The domain is only a few months old, and I'm not sure what else I can do as we haven't actually built any links and the 301 redirect is gone.

Just to update this thread.  I have removed the 301, and I am going to leave it a week before putting a recon in.

I have a customer who has a website, 8 years old.  The business has changed, and he has launched a new website (and sub-business_ to handle a particular service.  As such the main website will no longer be handling the new service.  For purpose of example;

The service in question had it's own are set aside on his website, so what we have done is to 301 that part of the site (a single URL) to the homepage of his new website.

Old Business Site
    Service 1
    Services 2 (301 to new site)
    Service 3

New Business Site

This worked well, and within a week his new site was gaining traffic for the service keyword.

However, we have now had a un-natural link wartning in webmaster tools.

The old page on the old site had minimal links to it (around 400).  It had a page authority of 42, and 142 linking domains.

The new website has been live a few weeks now, and has had 3 links to it, all genuine.

He was on page one for the new business name, and is now page 6.

Has anyone else ever seen this happen, and how should we deal with it.  We could of course remove the 301 redirect and put in a recon-request, but the 301 seems like thje right thing to have done, and is genuine.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

5 keywords on 1 page is quite high, and in my opinion will limit your success rate. I would reduce this to a maximum of 2 or 3 phrases per page, and as you identify new keyphrases build new pages on your site.  This way your site will grow organically, and you will start to build the number of keywords in your portfolio.

I honestly don't think you are going to be able to do anything about the links created, unless you manually contact the owner of the sites involved.

Out of interest, did you LinkBuilder provide you with a spreadsheet of work completed? If so they may have included URLs, IDs and Passwords so that you can be back in and remove the bad links....which I assume are profile links.

Just keep building good links, and these bad ones will fall into insignificance.

Keyword research is the most important part of any SEO campaign, as it represents your foundation.  All subsequnt work is going to be based on your initial keyword research.  Get it wrong, and you may found yourself spending many wasted hours on keywords which are simply not worth it.

If you are new to SEO, my advice would be to get some help with your keyword research, or at least get a second opinion.

The Google keyword tool is going to be one of the most important long-term tools you will use, and it will help you to effectively choose and find keywords. However, you must consider how strong the competition is for any keyword to give yourself the best chance.

Best of luck.

5 keywords on 1 page is quite high, and in my opinion will limit your success rate. I would reduce this to a maximum of 2 or 3 phrases per page, and as you identify new keyphrases build new pages on your site.  This way your site will grow organically, and you will start to build the number of keywords in your portfolio.

Just use the official Facebook fanbox widget creator.  It gives you two options for code, one of which is an iframe;

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/

Hope that helps?

Keyword research is the most important part of any SEO campaign, as it represents your foundation.  All subsequnt work is going to be based on your initial keyword research.  Get it wrong, and you may found yourself spending many wasted hours on keywords which are simply not worth it.

If you are new to SEO, my advice would be to get some help with your keyword research, or at least get a second opinion.

The Google keyword tool is going to be one of the most important long-term tools you will use, and it will help you to effectively choose and find keywords. However, you must consider how strong the competition is for any keyword to give yourself the best chance.

Best of luck.

A special thanks to John for his advice on this issue.

To update you.... I submitted a site-map of the OLD website to Google via WMT.  Hoping this would encourage a re-crawl and that Google would see the 301 was no longer in place.  I then put in another recon request.

Thankfully the penalty has now been removed and I just had email confirmation this morning.

My quandary now is how we redirect from the old site to the new one.

To my mind a 301 redirect is the right way to do it.... but obviously we can't do this again.  A 302 would serve the purpose of redirecting users to the new site (which is what we want to do), but obviously a 302 is not the right way to do it.

Any advice or ideas on how we should take people from the old site to the new one?