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Hi Cyrus,

thanks for spending so much time looking through my site and comparing my new design with the old one - I really appreciate it.  The feedback you've provided is great - I'm really happy that you like the new look and feel, and the points you've raised have certainly got me thinking.

1. I do agree, it is a little top heavy, and on the venue page the hotels are hidden beneath the fold, so you might be right that I notice a drop in conversion.  I'll launch the site to a small number of visitors and collect some stats.  It might not be a major issue, since the vast majority of users to the website actually land on the hotel listings page (as opposed to the general venue information page) - but I guess we'll find out

2. Mmmm, good point - I guess the only page I'm removing that Google might have thought contained high quality ranking signals would be my old venue reviews pages - they contain a lot of unique, customer reviews of the concert venue.  So there is potential for weird things to happen - I'll monitor it closely.

I hadn't thought of how the website would look, or work, if Javascript/cookies were disabled, so thank you for highlighting this - I'll certainly look into this.

3. You definitely raise a worrying point here - I hadn't thought of it from a duplicate content view - I simply thought that it would be nice to show the user a sample of hotels from the general venue page, before prompting them to view the entire list.  I don't know how I can change this - I guess reducing the number of hotels might help?  That way, I'd be reducing the amount of duplicate content.

4. Good point, I'll read the article and put the changes in place.

5. Ah, I hadn't thought of that - I was just going to put a sitemap of the new URLs up - how long would I need to include the "old" URLs in the sitemap for?

Thanks again for all your advice!

Best wishes

Mike

Hi Mat,

thanks for your reply.  I'll definitely change the link, but I agree that it would be harsh if it was the sole reason for the 30% drop in organic traffic.

There are definitely some directories linking to ConcertHotels.com - at one stage I used the SEOmoz list of directories and got my website listed on some of the recommendations from the list.  But my strategy for the last two years has been to approach venue's own websites and ask if they'd be interested in linking to our nearby hotels page, as a useful resource for their visitors.  This strategy has worked quite well for me, and to me it sounds like a very natural, sensible link building strategy.  I'll certainly work through my list of backlinks, but I would hope that the majority of them are from very relevant websites (due to the strategy I adopted).  I guess there could be a percentage that I have not had any control over however, and I guess I should disavow these?

As for the directories, should I now be disavowing directory links?  I didn't think that the percentage of directory links to my site would be that high -I used the directory link strategy in the past to simply enhance the number of links to my homepage - the strategy I described above is one which achieve links to specific pages throughout my website, not my homepage, so I felt the need to grow the number of homepage links.

Thanks again for your help and advice

Mike