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What impact (if any) does IP or DNS changes, have on paid search campaigns? We recently performed an upgrade to our sites that required a datacenter change (but within the same region East US)  and DNS change.  We believe there may have been an impact to our ad campaigns in the form of suppression of our ads following the change, specifically - Google Adwords. Is there any information regarding this issue or has anyone experienced this before? Thanks

On our website, www.BusinessBroker.net, we have 3 different versions of essentially the same page for each of our State Business for Sale Pages.   Back in August, we did a test and did 301 redirects using 5 States.   For a long while after doing the redirects, the pages fell out of Google search results - we used to get page 1 rankings.   Just recently they started popping back up on Page 1.   However, I noticed that the new page meta data is not what is being picked up -- here is the example. Keyword Searched for in Google -- "Maine Business for Sale" Our listing shows up on Page 1 -- # 8 Result URL returned is correct preferred version: - http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx However, the Page Title on this returned page is still the OLD page title - OLD TITLE -- maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker Not the title that is designated for this page - New Title - Maine Businesses for Sale - Buy or Sell a Business in ME | BusinessBroker.net Ditto for Meta Description. Why is this happening? Also have a problem with lower case showing up rather than upper case -- what's causing this? http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx versus -- http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, MM

This one has us stumped and frustrated, hopefully someone out there in SEOMoz land can give us some thoughts and/or suggestions on what's going on and how to remedy. This is a follow-up to a post I made awhile back.   Here is an excerpt from the original post -- We currently have 3 different versions of our State Business-for-Sale listings pages - the versions are: Version 1 -- Preferred Version (Links on Homepage www.businessbroker.net) http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Vermont-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx Title = Vermont Business for Sale Ads - Vermont Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker (I realize the title needs work) Version 2:  (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/blistings.ihtml) URL Prior to 301 change --- http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-Vermont.aspx Title = Vermont Business for Sale | 120 Vermont Businesses for Sale | BusinessBroker.net Version 3: (Links on this page: http://www.businessbroker.net/businessesforsale.ihtml) URL Prior to 301 change ---   http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_vermont.ihtml Title = Vermont Businesses for Sale at BusinessBroker.net - Vermont Business for Sale While the page titles and meta data are a bit different, the bulk of the page content (which is the listings rendered) are identical. OK, so we decided to test this on 5 of our State pages - I will use VERMONT in this discussion.  We did 301 ReDirects on Version 2 and Version 3 -- they now redirect to Version 1 - we did the redirects and also changed the URL's on the pages.   Prior to the change, we were ranking for keywords like "Vermont Business for Sale" and some other similar keywords -- on 1st page of Google --- now, we have lost our rankings big time. Did we do something wrong?  I thought when you did 301's the majority of link juice was supposed to be preserved (losing 10% or so) -- this didn't happen in our case. Any help on what we can do would be appreciated.  We only did 5 States as a test and also noticed big drops for Maine as well.   These were both states where VERSION 2 was the page that was showing up in SERPs. Thanks in advance for wading through this long post and any help you can provide!! Matt

We are getting ready to switch to a new hosting company.  When we make the switchover, our sites will be offline for a couple of hours and in some cases perhaps as long as 12 hours while DNS is configured -- should we be worried about Google trying to index pages and finding them unavailable?  Any fear of Google de-indexing pages.  Our guess was that Google would not de-index anything after just a short period of not being able to find pages -- it would have to be over an extended period of time before GOOGLE or BING would de-index pages -- CORRECT? Just want to gut check this before pulling the trigger on switch over to new hosting company.     We appreciate input on this and/or any other thoughts regarding the switch over to new hosting company that we may not have thought of. Thanks, Matt

We have recently updated a key page on our website.  It is a template page that is used many times to display search results.   The words "price", "revenue", and "cash flow", "not disclosed"  are used for each listing on the page -- to minimize their impact on keyword density on the page we used images for these words.   Here you can see some examples: http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Florida-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx http://www.businessbroker.net/City/Los Angeles-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx http://www.businessbroker.net/Industry/Auto_Car_Wash-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx You will note these words on this page are images and not regular text. We are certainly not doing this to "dupe" the visitors or Google -- we just want to ensure that each page has keywords pertinent to what the page is about. Bottom line question -- is this an OK practice?  Are we running any risk with Google by doing this?   I'm particularly nervous these days with all of the Google changes. Your thoughts and guidance on this issue would be much appreciated. Thanks. MWM

We are thinking about turning on the IIS-6 HTTP Compression to help with page load times.   Has anyone had any issues with doing this, particularly from an SEO or site functionality standpoint?     We just want to double check before we take this step and see if there are any potential pitfalls we may not be aware of.  Everything we've read seems to indicate it can only yield positive results. Any thoughts, advice, comments would be appreciated. Thank-you, Matt & Keith

Our site currently is focused in the USA and the entire site is in the English language.   We have considered broadening our scope to include content from foreign countries - i.e. Brazil. What is the best way to approach this -- can we use our existing domain and just have a specific section of the site that is dedicated to a particular Country with content translated into that Country's predominant language?    OR could this create SEO issues -- having a domain with both English and some other language? Would it be better to have this on a totally different domain with Country extension? This is totally foreign territory for me - bad pun intended. Any advice, help would be appreciated. Thanks. Matt

We have entered into a partnership with one of our sister companies that owns many different small newspapers and their associated websites -- they have agreed to show some of our content on their site along with providing links back to our website.  There are 50+ of these websites that we will be getting links from.    Does it matter to Google how quickly we add these links to these sites?    They are all very legitimate links with unique content provided.   We just didn’t know if Google would view it negatively if we added a bunch at one time.  Any guidance on the timing of how links are added would be most valuable.   Thank-you.

Any thoughts on using companies like Text Link Ads (www.textlinkads.com) to do link building?   Seems a bit dangerous to me, but if the articles are decent and relevant -- can it hurt you? Any thoughts would be appreciated.   Thanks. MM

We currently have 3 different versions of our State Business-for-Sale listings pages - the versions are: **Version 1 -- Preferred Version: ** http://www.businessbroker.net/State/California-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx Title = California Business for Sale Ads - California Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker Version 2: http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-California.aspx Title = California Business for Sale | 3124 California Businesses for Sale | BusinessBroker.net Version 3: http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_california.ihtml Title = California Businesses for Sale at BusinessBroker.net - California Business for Sale While the page titles and meta data are a bit different, the bulk of the page content (which is the listings rendered) are identical.    We were wondering if it would make good sense to either (A) 301 redirect Versions 2 and 3 to the preferred Version 1 page or (B) put Canonical Tags on Versions 2 and 3 labeling Version 1 as the preferred version.    We have this issue for all 50 U.S. States -- I've mentioned California here but the same applies for Alabama through Wyoming - same issue. Given that there are 3 different flavors and all are showing up in the Search Results -- some on the same 1st page of results -- which probably is a good thing for now -- should we do a 301 redirect or a Canonical Tag on Versions 2 and 3?     Seems like with Google cracking down on duplicate content, it might be wise to be proactive. Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!    Thanks. Matt M