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So I'm not entirely sure abot how these co-op programs work, from what I have been able to discern I believe that the companies doing so have built netowrks of both spam accounts they have created and 'co-op' accounts where they pay soma small amount, say $0.02/follow to users to motivate them to fulfill their requests to follow there customers.

What I have noticed talking to some people who have purchased twitter followers is that they tend to see a 20-30% un-follow within 5-7 days of the delivery. So this is not only a poor solution for gaining interested and targeted followers, but it is not a sustainable way to keep your count up either.

If you are considering purchasing one of the sites and the corresponding service I would caution you to do a lot of due diligence on the fulfillment process and find out exactly how the provider is recruiting, retaining, and compensating it's partners.

Hey Bill,

I actually have direct and very relevant experience with designing a URL architecture to penetrate local search in both Google's 10 -pack as well as full organic listings.

A while back I was designing a site for a client in the medical services industry and needed to target a large variety of cities across the U.S. (500+) and conducted a number of experiements to find out which directory structure would have the greatest impact in ranking for the various geographies where he had satellite offices.

What we found was that creating a master 'locations' page, i.e. .com/locations that then drilled into a deeper geography structure by state, .com/locations/pa ans then finally ending up at the city .com/locations/pa/philadelphia

Ultimately we found that the term 'locations' was able to signal local search results and more so allow for immediate relevancy to be established at the individual city level which made it easier to build authority directly at the individual geography.

I would be happy to provide you with examples of how this strategy is still driving #1 positions for head keyword term + city in over 300 locations, if you're interested shoot me a message.

Best of Luck.

Thank you EGOL. This is actually for a friends site who I helped advise on the purchase. Currently the new blog, operating exactly as it had for many years, sending targeted visitors to his site through mentions in the posts.

While this is great as an independent source of qualified traffic, he would really prefer to have the product listings currently indexed with the new blog be located under his TLD instead (for obvious brand and eCommerce reasons)

The new blog's link profile is not nearly as diverse as the main website, but it does consistently generate its own traffic and does a decent job of starting conversations with visitors through comments. The existing blog's brand is NOT that important, to anyone.

Any additional thoughts? (thank you for your time and consideration)

About $136 each, RE: http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-fans-worth-2011-06

Hey here is an example of a Magento site where all pages (even statics like About-us) have been moved to the flat .html extension (example: http://www.topdjgear.com/about-topdjgear.html/)

In my opinion it is best to present a uniform URL structure sitewide and generally flat HTML files are a good thing although I also have worked on very successful eCommerce sites that used no file extension.

It is relatively easy in Magento to mod you static page to include the file extension, so in terms of lowest barrier, this is the route I would go.

I recently purchased a blog within my product category - it has many first page rankings for difficult keywords within my niche. I am wondering if it makes more sense for for me to continue to operate this blog and build links to my site and blog (blog is in wordpress) or to export the XML feed and upload the content to my blog (new site also in wordpress), at which point I would do a 301 at the Top-Level domain.

Any thoughts, ideas, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

There are a lot of great responses here.

I personally am a huge proponent of architecture (IA), between both URL's and content. If you construct your site the right way you should be able (to EGOL's point) to rank highly for your individual product terms and then have additional results listed underneath such as your homepage and potentially a news or archive page.

For example lets say you sell brass, silver, and gold widgets. You would want to set the site up so you have a trickle down hierarchy with implied relevance, i.e. homepage/product-category/product-name. This will allow you to build authority at all three directory levels and rank your category landing or product detail pages for your product queries as well as your homepage further down the results.

Hey Bob,

I ran into a similar issue a while back where one of the sites I was working on was ranking well (top 3 positions) for the top selling product, but it was the homepage. We were happy but at the same time knew based on the competition hat we would most certainly only be able to achieve limited results with ths page as it was truly not the best result for the query.

What we did was to make sure the text on the homepage covered all of the top level product categories and reworked the URL architecture to be more friendly. We create category landing pages for each or our products, i.e. http://brand.com/product-category and then linked to individual listing pages for each product from those category pages (pretty typical eCommerce architecture)

This in combination with some focused anchor text link building to the category pages achieved the result we were looking for. We now rank #1 for the product term with the product category page - which also happens to be an exact match at the sub-directory level for our target search term. Best of all, our homepage now ranks in position 3 for the same term (it didnt move, but was surpassed by our product category page)

This change in the architecture (both URL and content) brought about a number of beneficial trickle-down results and we are now actually ranking very highly for almost all of our product keywords at the category level. These results also reinforce that strong target anchor text on inbound links is still your friend.

I hope that helps?

Cheers,
Nick

Hey Sam,

I believe this can adversely effect your overall site rankings, not due to penalties from the 404's themselves, but due to the assumed high bounce rate on those pages - which is going to increase your site's overall average bounce rate - which Google will attribute to the value of your website's content.

Just as Manischa said, I would 301 these pages to functioning content pages if you do not plan on resurrecting them, and if you do I would use a 302 (temporary redirect) until you have the content back up on those pages at which point you remove the temporary redirect status.

Hope this helps.

-Nick

I'm extremely interested! Not directly through age, but it's in there - IMO it is more so a relative measure of the ability of pages on that domain to rank for a keyword versus a stand alone metric for measuring rankability.

A couple questions if you don't mind sharing:

1. Has the domain been previously registered or ever had an indexed URL on it in the past?
2. What is your daily crawl rate according to webmaster tools?
3. What is you new URL to indexed URL ratio?
4. What is your website's SEOmoz measure of p-links and d-links, and how do these stack up to the the averages of the top 10 URL's currently ranked for your primary anchor text keyword phrase?

More data makes for more interesting conversation. Thanks in advance.

There are a lot of great responses here.

I personally am a huge proponent of architecture (IA), between both URL's and content. If you construct your site the right way you should be able (to EGOL's point) to rank highly for your individual product terms and then have additional results listed underneath such as your homepage and potentially a news or archive page.

For example lets say you sell brass, silver, and gold widgets. You would want to set the site up so you have a trickle down hierarchy with implied relevance, i.e. homepage/product-category/product-name. This will allow you to build authority at all three directory levels and rank your category landing or product detail pages for your product queries as well as your homepage further down the results.

Hey Sam,

I believe this can adversely effect your overall site rankings, not due to penalties from the 404's themselves, but due to the assumed high bounce rate on those pages - which is going to increase your site's overall average bounce rate - which Google will attribute to the value of your website's content.

Just as Manischa said, I would 301 these pages to functioning content pages if you do not plan on resurrecting them, and if you do I would use a 302 (temporary redirect) until you have the content back up on those pages at which point you remove the temporary redirect status.

Hope this helps.

-Nick

Hey here is an example of a Magento site where all pages (even statics like About-us) have been moved to the flat .html extension (example: http://www.topdjgear.com/about-topdjgear.html/)

In my opinion it is best to present a uniform URL structure sitewide and generally flat HTML files are a good thing although I also have worked on very successful eCommerce sites that used no file extension.

It is relatively easy in Magento to mod you static page to include the file extension, so in terms of lowest barrier, this is the route I would go.

So I'm not entirely sure abot how these co-op programs work, from what I have been able to discern I believe that the companies doing so have built netowrks of both spam accounts they have created and 'co-op' accounts where they pay soma small amount, say $0.02/follow to users to motivate them to fulfill their requests to follow there customers.

What I have noticed talking to some people who have purchased twitter followers is that they tend to see a 20-30% un-follow within 5-7 days of the delivery. So this is not only a poor solution for gaining interested and targeted followers, but it is not a sustainable way to keep your count up either.

If you are considering purchasing one of the sites and the corresponding service I would caution you to do a lot of due diligence on the fulfillment process and find out exactly how the provider is recruiting, retaining, and compensating it's partners.