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.

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.

I agree with Hansjörg. 32% is unheard of. Although it is not impossible because Schwan's with 40% conversion is a living example (if you trust third party data). If you are getting good leads at this astonishing rate then this might be an exception but I would still double check the traffic metrics and look at the goal funnel conversion steps.

You mentioend that you are seeing this change for a whole week. Does that mean the conversion was much lower than what it is now? If this is the case then you may want to identify the exact day that this happend and reverse engineer your way to the cause.

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

Great.Thanks

Sure. Your welcome.

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

Work hard play hard and stay away from grey or black areas

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

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?