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Hi there,

Great question! The hardest thing I've had to learn with SEO...and therefore had to teach clients is the value of patience. Doing SEO right is a balance between showing short-term gains (say fixing website errors or correctly doing on page optimisation/content writing), but long-term sustainability (earning links the hard way). As an agency, SEO clients often want quick results - and most quick results in SEO either go against The Guidelines, or simply aren't sustainable.

Patience is also needed when you can see competitors using 'quick fix' methods but know they will get their comeuppance at some point. Just because a competitor is using a tactic that doesn't mean you or your client should. And that's hard for clients to swallow as they see their competitor benefitting from it, at least in the short-term.

This can mean great results taking months to show themselves. If you're doing all the right things and investing the right amount of time and effort, then good results will come to pass - but Google being Google, you can't always know when those results will surface.

Hope this helps!

Martin

Fab, thanks for taking the time to reply that really helps going forward. Much appreciated.

Well that was going to be my first reaction, but I didn't know whether that would dilute the link value currently being directed to summitweb.net and inadvertently harm its rankings, just to replace it with one incoming link from moxby.org.uk? Do you think building the site on the first domain is the best of both worlds or risky for the ranking of summitweb.net?

Thanks!

Hi Guys & Gals,

I have a question I'd appreciate your input on.

Quick History
When I first started in web design it was just me and a couple of clients. I had a website based on my name on the domain moxby.org.uk. The only 'SEO' work done on it was a bit of on-site work, various links based on forum and blog activity I was involved in (genuine involvement not crappy link building) and of course, building websites with a credit in the footer.

When we got serious about the business we considered and finally put in place a new website, new branding and 301'd old URLs to their shiny new location on the new domain: _summitweb.net _(put in place about 12 months ago)

Ranks were pretty much maintained and until recently we ranked well locally (still figuring the fallout from the last week or so's changes).

The Question I would like to build a personal website, well I'm going to anyway. But as it's a personal/showcase website I need a personal URL for it and my natural choice would be my old url moxby.org.uk. However it is not that simple because summitweb.net is benefitting from redirected links and I don't want to harm our business' rankings just to reclaim a personal URL.

So... is there benefit or would it be to my detriment to undo the 301 and build a website on moxby.org.uk or would it, in fact, just make more sense to buy a new domain and have a clean slate?

It sounds to me as though most of the content from old site is staying but that 3 enigmatic 'tools' are being moved to a new domain.

In which case I would want to be sure that the functionality being moved wasn't the cause of the previously lifted penalty, especially from a Panda perspective (given that the tools on the new domain presumably won't have any links pointing to it, Penguin shouldn't be an issue) - as a penalty would be re-applied if the tools are not Panda-friendly.

So:

• if you want to have the tools on both sites, I'm with Pete - noindex the tools on the old site.
• if you are permanently moving the tools, review them for Panda-friendliness and then noindex the old site's URLs, probably worth blocking the old URL in robots.txt as well.
• If your previous penalty was nothing to do with the tools at all, and the link profile of those pages is good (or if there aren't any links) then 301 the old URLs to the new.

That's if between Pete and myself we've understood correctly what you're trying to achieve.

Good Luck!

Glad to help. If you're happy with the response could you mark it as answered?

Unless you have other questions?

I'm not sure about the 'testing tool' thing, but Google says that Googlebot's IP Address changes from 'time to time' but that same explanation says you can look in your website's logs and do a reverse DNS lookup.

In terms of a 'default' page... in my opinion you should ensure you have a standard (unmodified/non-redirected) home page. So if your primary market is the USA then that's the default and then only redirect non-US based folk. That way you determine the default home page and aren't reliant on Googlebot's IP (or any other crawler's for that matter).

Hope this helps.

Have you checked if your listings are still live, or if they have just dropped out of the 'top 7' listings?

Check in your Google Local management tool and see if your listings have been suspended. If they have then you may need to review the listings for a well-written description, non-keyword-based business name, non-spammed categories, accurate business location and whether other useful media (photos/videos) have been added.

If you've just fallen out of the top 7 then you may need to look at

• New entrants/competitors coming into the results
• Have you got third-party reviews on your listing
• Are you active as a business on Google+?
• Are you represented on any other local resources?
• Have you got geolocation tags and address snippet markup on your website.

These are just some pointers, so hope you found something useful.

Hi Stephane,

All the below assumes you feel there is some value in keeping the original website live at all.

My first reaction would be to do a full review of all your old content and carefully consider which ones may have been hit by Panda - is there keyword stuffing, content duplicated from other sites, thin content...etc? Then either fix or completely rewrite those.

After that you should avoid publishing duplicated content so my view would be
1. Remove the rewritten/fixed articles completely from the old site
2. Don't implement the 301 so you don't get any redirected bad Penguin vibe
3. Put a block on those URLs using robots.txt
4. Remove the URLs from Google's index in Webmaster Tools

Then you are free to publish your new, Panda-friendly content to your new website.

Not sure what other mozzers would say, but that's my view. This is not about 'spinning content' but removing poor content and republishing great content. Hope it makes sense.

You are most welcome Glad to have helped!

My actual conclusion then would be to maybe do a guest post for your friend's site talking about how surf school could benefit from considering their marketing and get a valid in-context link rather than just a link in  a footer, which Lee above quite rightly points out could be seen as spammy.

That way you're contributing positively to the development of your friends site and the in-context link appears just on one page (not site-wide) and actually means the page is a relevant, but highly targeted/specialist page which validly links to your site.

Should get you a bit more targeted referrals, rather than you 100% bouncing ones too

Hi there,

Great question! The hardest thing I've had to learn with SEO...and therefore had to teach clients is the value of patience. Doing SEO right is a balance between showing short-term gains (say fixing website errors or correctly doing on page optimisation/content writing), but long-term sustainability (earning links the hard way). As an agency, SEO clients often want quick results - and most quick results in SEO either go against The Guidelines, or simply aren't sustainable.

Patience is also needed when you can see competitors using 'quick fix' methods but know they will get their comeuppance at some point. Just because a competitor is using a tactic that doesn't mean you or your client should. And that's hard for clients to swallow as they see their competitor benefitting from it, at least in the short-term.

This can mean great results taking months to show themselves. If you're doing all the right things and investing the right amount of time and effort, then good results will come to pass - but Google being Google, you can't always know when those results will surface.

Hope this helps!

Martin

The value of a link is a complex thing, to be honest. Your 2m 'no follow' links can have a variety of value depending on

• The number of domains those are placed on
• The position of those links on the linking site
• The value of the page the link is placed on
• The actual anchor text in that link.

Also try not to think of links purely in terms of ranking. At the end of the day, ranking is great, but what you really want is traffic. A 'natural' link profile will have some nofollow links in it (in most cases) and you may find some nofollows are great at driving traffic.

On the flip side you also want a good proportion of followed links as these represent a 'full value vote' for your site, rather than somewhat of a disassociation, which a nofollow can imply.

So get a variety of links from a variety of sources in  a variety of ways but don't ignore a potential linking opportunity just because it may be nofollow as there may be other advantages to be gained that purely ranking.

In short, both are important. I focus firstly on the Page Domains because at the end of the day it is that Page that is ranking.

But you must also ensure that you are raising your overall domain authority so getting links and publishing content and social sharing (etc) for other pages of your site as well.

If you raise the overall domain authority, the pages tend to get a lift too, but start with the page metrics first.

Hope this helps.

For a start you shouldn't be doing any 'link wheels' as you risk damaging all 7 sites. If the brands are within the same company and are related you could probably 'cross-sell' but that can just look spammy from a customer's perspective.

You'd be better focussing on each brand individually and building up its authority and getting quality links than linking 7 sites on the same IP/C-Block.

Just. Don't. Do. The. Wheel.

The only instances I've come across of Google ignoring a META DESCRIPTION is when it decides that something from the website's content is more relevant than what has been written in the META DESCRIPTION.

I don't know if this is others' experience though?

Review the meta tags and ensure they're not spammy, they are unique across all pages and are a valid summary of the page's content and then wait for re-crawling to see if it makes a difference.

Heya,

Seems like on the whole you've at least thought through the redesign etc, so well done on that score. Here's my opinion on your questions though:

1. Leaving the XML file on-site for a short while won't do any harm - but make sure you have a new XML files containing the correct website structure going forward. Make sure your new structure has strong canonical tags so that the 301s are also recognised by their new URLs. As far as I know, the XML file doesn't help 'pass the juice', the 301's will.

The other consideration is to ensure you systematically look at external links to old pages and get them changed to point to new pages as the juice value of 301's diminishes over time.

2. You should only see a drop in your rankings if your new page content and titles become less relevant. So ensure your on-page optimisation is done well for your target keywords as soon after that page 'going live' as possible. If you drop in rankings, it may be temporary, or as you say with fresh content it may give it a boost. The issue is not your rankings, but ensuring relevance for your page. If you drop, compare your on-page optimisation to those of your competitors and see what they are doing differently.

If you do everything systematically/methodically and do it well then you should be fine.

I think you need to look beyond Page Rank. Make sure you set you FB page to show info rather than timeline/news feed by default for non-fans.

Look to other stats such as visitors from your FB page and then use your FB wall well to influence your SEO in a natural way

This is looking okay to me - with the only issue being that the +44 and (0) are outside of your Telephone Itemprop. You want to include one or both inside this.

What you're trying to achieve is a good rich snippet and consistency with other places your details are shown - e.g. Google Maps, local directories etc. And the area code is part of your local identity, so in the very least, put the zero inside the telephone itemprop.

Hi Doug,

And I did not presume you could or couldn't do those things, but I didn't word my post in a way that was condescending...explaining things step by step is not always appropriate because I would rather presume knowledge on a forum like SEOmoz than presume ignorance.

So, I hope you were not too offended by my presumption of knowledge.

That being said would you like me to explain what to do to achieve the above points? I am more than happy to do so, by the way.

• On the volume of links - if it is a large-scale issue then another solution would be to have a non-SSL version home page, but on login they are taken to a different SSL 'member welcome' or 'dashboard' sort of page. That way you can retain the link value to the non-SSL version while providing the necessary security over the logged-in functionality.
• On the question of non-SSL links to SSL page ... any extra 'diversion' required between a link and its target has, in my experience, the propensity to reduce that link's effectiveness. even the effects of 301's diminish over time because the presumption is that the page you are 301-ing to is the correct 'new' one and is therefore more relevant, which is why I initially suggested getting links 'fixed'. As your initial post did not suggest the scale of links I could not have replied in a more precise way.

So I do suggest you consider implementing the first bullet point above as a good compromise and will retain the value of your links but permits the SSL implementation as well.

Let me know if I can help further or if you need more things explaining so that you know how to go about doing some of the things suggested. Thanks.