I would assume you are referring to site architecture. If this is the case then there are several good tools in market that are used by dev / designers to map out the site artchitecture or sitemaps.

Microsoft visio http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/

Power mapper http://www.powermapper.com/

Smart draw http://www.smartdraw.com/

I have used smart draw for flow charts and found it lot easier to use.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

Directory submissions are a total waste of time. Personally, I would not use any software solutions that offer mass directory / article / comment submissions because these fall under grey area and search engines don't value these anymore like they use to years ago.

Local directory submission to websites like angielist, superpages, citysearch, yelp is certainly useful for local rankings.

We recently went through domain consolidation of two high authority corporate websites. Based on my experience, combining all the media sites into one would be a wise decision for brand positioning, usability and seo. Domain authority continues to be one of the top search ranking factors and building the authority of one domain is lot easier than building authorities of multiple domains.

There could be instances where you may want to keep content / software on separate domains i.e. a startup investment, brand new software or an acquisition.

Having separate domains may have advantages in short term but having a one domain in longer time is highly suggested. (think Google)

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

Hello Spencer,

I recommend two tools

1. Xenu link sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download)

2. Gsitecrawler ( http://gsitecrawler.com/en/download/)

Both will report all the linked pages throwing a 404 error and other status codes including "forbidden request", "no connection", "no such host" and more.

Hope this helps.

Sameer

As long as you launch the site on a domain with proper local TLD (.de in your case) and add locally targeted content you should be ok. If possible try to host the website in the same country you are targeting.

Google has become much smarter in terms of detecting the geo local elements and it should serve the appropriate site on the SERP.

As far the mixing languages goes, it would not be a wise thing to do because it could impact usability. Is there a specific reason on why you are translating only a few pages in German? I could relate to an example where one of my customers mixed English with a local language on the local TLD website. The bounce rate went to the roof and users did not like it. They complained about this on the support chats and web forms. The issue was fixed and the bounce rate went down.

On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?

Best practice is to add new content and create new title and meta for these pages instead of changing title for the same page constantly.

Changing title too many times in short span can confuse the search spider as title is the first piece of content crawled by spiders. By changing the title too many times you may cause the search spider to think that there is something unnatural about the website.

Font size impacts user experience and may impact SEO in certain cases. Providing users multiple font size options to choose from i.e small, medium, large helps user experience. Search spiders do look for usage of bold, italics and H1 tags on a web page. Better user experience generally lead to better SEO.

Hello Neil,

Since advertising banners hoardings are paid ads as a general rule even if Google is able to somehow read the urls we can right away disqualify the SEO benefits. Plus, there is no flow of link juice from these image ad links.

Google book is definitely interesting one. Google books are a scanned image of the actual book so the links are not an actual link that could pass the link juice. Google also provides an ebook version of some books and the links on the ebooks are highlighted like a regular link but these are not clickable. It could be possible that Google will soon enable these links and link page rank juice will flow from these links the to the destination site. The only issue I see here is since these are hosted on Google is could very well be a nofollow so it could be given similar weight like a brand or social mention if Google decides to use the links for SEO ranking.

Ryan answered this question pretty well and I would like to add few points to it

1. As long as your site architecture is organic and designed for the user you should not be too concerned about page -keyword targeting.

2. Avoid have too many links on the page. Typically, there should not be more than 150 links on a page.

3. Make sure to have equal balance of content and images on the site.

4. Backlinks with good distribution of anchor text.