That is a good point!

On that though, what would the more preferable placements be for a multiple link situation? I would say it would be better to have multiple links in the content area as opposed to multiple links in the footer. Or, do you think a distribution of links would be better...for example, one link in the content and another in the footer?

I would say it depends on what the website is and the nature of the links.

Are the multiple links all on the same page or are they on several different pages of the site? Getting links on many different pages of a website would be more beneficial than getting multiple links on the same page.

What about the placement of the link to your website? Is it just a link in the directory or is the link part of a highly relevant blog post? Multiple links inside a relevant blog post can continue to add value if those links go to different pages of your website.

Also, it is worth considering if it is a high authority or low authority website. If it is a high authority site, then multiple links would be worth pursuing. If it is a low authority website, there wouldn't be much value to multiple links from that kind of website.

Like the other responses said, moving servers or hosting companies won't affect your rankings or search performance. That is assuming everything else stays the same during the move obviously.

EGOL's response is right though - it may not be the fault of the host. Have you talked to your host about the server? Many times there are configuration changes that can speed things up, especially if you are on a dedicated or VPS environment.

When it comes to your code, since you are in WordPress, have you tried the Super Cache plugin? I've had success with this to help speed up WP sites, even on slow, shared hosting environments. Here is a link to that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

The other tool I've had some luck with when it comes to load issues is Cloud Flare. You might want to check that out as well. Here is the link to that: http://www.cloudflare.com/

Hi,

My understanding of best practices (and what I've always done on sites I've worked on) is that you do want to return a 404 status code on any non-existent URL regardless of whether or not content existed there in the first place. This is your signal to Google/Bing/the world that this is a bad URL. It doesn't matter the reason that URL is broken really, you just want to make sure Google and Bing know that there is no /beach-towels/asdfas page on your site on the off chance they find it or see a link to it.

If you return the exact same content on /beach-towels/asdfas as you do on /beach-towels/ this does open you up to duplicate content issues because now you have two URLs with the same content. Even though there is a slim chance anybody could discover that an incorrect URL returns duplicate content, you don't want to open yourself to those problems if you can avoid it.

I do think your idea of common misspelling is a really good one and one not enough people take advantage of. I've implemented 301 redirects for common misspellings on other sites. I've found it is especially helpful on short URLs people are likely to type in by hand (for example, people will type in greatbeachtowels.com/beach so it would be worth making sure greatbeachtowels.com/baech or /beech have a 301 redirect over to that other page.

Hope some of my answer can help you out. Good luck!

Thanks,
Matthew

Hi,

A client of mine is selling his business to a brand new company. The brand new company will be using a brand new domain (no way to avoid that unfortunately) and the current domain (which has tons of authority, links, shares, tweets, etc.) will not be used. Added to that, the new company will be taking over all the current content with just a few minor changes. (I know, I wish we could use the old domain but we can't.)

Obviously, I am redirecting all pages on the current domain to the new domain via 301 redirects on a page by page basis. So, current.com/product-page-x.html redirects to new.com/product-page-x.html.

My client and the new company both are asking me how much link juice (and other factors) are passed along to the new domain from the old domain. All I can find is "not the full value" or variants thereof.My experience with 301 redirects in the past has been within a single domain and I've seen some of those pages have decent authority and decent rankings as a result of the 301 (no other optimization work was done or links were added).

Are there any studies out there that I'm missing that show how much authority/juice gets passed and/or lost via a 301 redirect? Anybody with a similar issue see any trends in page/domain authority and/or rankings?

Thanks for any insights and opinions you have.

I've not seen any change either. One of my clients has a news site that is pretty ad heavy. While the site does run some non-original content (wire stories for example) at least 60% is original content. Overall Google traffic for that site is up 4% in the last week - with 10% more keywords delivering traffic than the week before. That is right on average with our normal week over week increase.