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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?

Hi there, Sorry I've been a bit quiet of late, we're going through a huge rebranding exercise as well as staying on top of client work. Anyway. I've got an issue with keyword research phase of a client remarketing. Trying to decide which keywords to target (aren't we all?) The client has 3 months of back data in Google Webmaster Tools, which helps us to see Impressions, CTR and actual click-throughs etc. Now, they rank #1 on Google.com for a certain keyword (logged out, of course). According to Google Keyword tool (Logged in) there are 2.7million searches per month for this keyword. With the average CTR being 18% for a #1 keyword that should be bringing in 400k visits. However, take the same keyword in Google Webmaster Tools and the impressions are actually around 1,600 per month with a CTR of 9%. Different CTR's for different sectors I can accept. What I don't get is the vast difference between the impressions in GWT compared to the alleged search volume coming from the Keyword tool. Really need to understand this so we can better select keywords and judge approximate traffic expected if ranking #1 for a keyword. Any help would be really useful. Thank you!

Hi there, Quick overview of a client who came to us after having the vast majority of their link value slashed by Penguin. Client only has a limited 'recovery budget' Client had been outsourcing SEO to a foreign company The website was 'keyword stuffed' when we arrived Links were of poor quality, the company clearly majoring on quantity rather than quality. Client was ranking #4 or  #3 for a keyword which was bringing in sales. Post penguin, dropped to page 5 and then out of the top 100 for that keyword, losing 70% of sales. The client, under our supervision has Rewritten spammy content so they work for human beings (so it now reads well) Gone through the website and is removing old/duplicate and low-quality content De-emphasised other pages for the target keyword so that only one page majors on it. After doing the above has submitted a reconsideration request (about 2 weeks ago, so I know there's time). We are focussing on ensuring her content is written well and on building decent links to the site (i.e. to put some good-uns where the bad ones were). We're into month 2 of the 'clean-up exercise' and the site is still only ranking #90 for the keyword. Given the client's budgetary limitation, could it be more beneficial to consider a new brand identity and domain name to start afresh (without a 301 redirect) or should we just continue along the track we are doing with this client? Thanks!

Hi there, To help get news out about our business and increase brand awareness, I am considering doing the occasional press release. However doing research on new SEO client backlinks there seem to be a lot of poor quality, spammy press release sites. So I would appreciate some opinions on decent sites please. Obviously we wouldn't be 'article marketing' so only new unique posts would be put out there and not in duplicates either - so one press release to one site etc. Also just curious as to whether this still works for SEO? But this is a secondary concern, because the activity would be for brand awareness - so avoiding rubbish sites will save us time, effort and potential damage. Thanks in advance!

Hi there, The last couple of months we have had quite a few link request e-mails apparently not being received. Our e-mails are sent out through Mozilla Thunderbird, so not an e-mail platform. However we use a HTML template to ensure our business logo and footers are consistent and to help raise awareness of the brand. Is there any chance that some e-mails may well be blocked (e.g. by filters) because we're using HTML e-mails rather than a standard e-mail format and does anyone have any advice for ensuring e-mails get through (other than getting the right contact name if possible). Thanks in advance, Martin

Hi All, I asked about a client last month and have had to do some other digging to try to find out what's going on with its Google rankings. According to our link-building spreadsheet, we have got up to 50 links (from 50 domains) in process of being actioned and a large proportion of these are actually in existence. There are two questions:- 1. Open Site Explorer only recognises 3 domains - as I know that other domains exist and are pointing (mostly 'followed'), what can be the reason OSE doesn't recognise this? 2. What can be done to encourage these external links to be more easily accessible by OSE and, presumably other bots? Other Points:- 1. I initially thought it might be  crawl blocking issue causing the rankings, but Bing/Yahoo rankings are slowly dragging themselves upwards. 2. Robots.txt is not blocking any of the site 3. Pro on-site analysis for the target keyword is 'A' 4. The website's stats per OSE are better than some competitors in the top 20 except on the root domain issue, which is why the above point is important. Link building for other clients has worked really well without hiccups and with general gradual recognition, so any tips from more experienced folks out there would be gratefully appreciated. Many thanks, Martin

Hi there, Please can someone point me to some current and reasonably accurate articles or guidance on optimising for Bing, as my optimisation work on one client is reaping rewards in Google, but being partially ignored by Bing and I really want to be able to better understand their ranking factors. Many thanks, Martin