Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Paul,

Bing is much less confused, and we'll sit tight - but many thanks for the change of address tool suggestion - we had missed that!

Best,

Richard

Hi Mike,

Ok, that's pretty much what we thought but thanks for confirming your thoughts.

Best,

Richard

Hi all,

We've just rebranded.  The 301 appears to have worked well and moved the results and rankings onto the new domain.  However a site:olddomain.com search in Google brings up about a hundred pages that have the new titles and descriptions but show the old urls - does anyone have any idea how to make the old domain disappear from the SERPS?

Many thanks,

Richard

Hi Richard and Marie,

Thanks for the replies so far. We did the first generic warning asking for a reconsideration request then the second message saying "..for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole".

In this instance did our drop in rankings result purely from some of inbound links being excluded from then? Are these links of no worry or consequence to us as Google have essentially disavowed them from being of any value? That's certainly the conclusion I'm getting.

We did stop link building in light of these messages and that has no doubt let other sites take over and improve their rankings while ours stagnated a bit.

Hi Mozzers,

A quick question regarding Google Penguin recovery. A domain I have was hit by Penguin and we got a message in Webmaster Tools. We went to work fixing links we thought were most harmful, documented the evidence and did a reconsideration request.

Google's reply was "No manual spam actions found".

If reconsideration requests aren't the way to go then of course I will continue to build good natural links. But if I remove more links which I consider to be harmful will I ever know if the penalty is removed? Is there a point at which the algorithm would remove the penalty and inform me?

Thanks!

Hi Mozzers,

I'm setting up Google's Site Search on a website. However this isn't for search terms, this will be for people filling in a form and using the POST action to land on a results page. This is similar to what is outlined at http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012264 ('<a class="zippy zippy-collapse">Setting Up Site Search for POST-Based Search Engines').</a>

However my approach is different as my results appear on a sub-domain of the top level domain. Eg..

1. user is on www.domain.com/page.php
2. user fills in form
3. submits
4. user gets taken to results.domain.com/results.php

The issue is with the suggested code provided by Google as copied below..

Firstly, I don't use query strings on my results page so I would have to create an artificial page which shouldn't be a problem. But what I don't know is how the tracking will work across a sub-domain without the _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.domain.com']); code. Can this be added in? Can I also add Custom Variables?

Does anyone have experience of using Site Search across a sub-domain perhaps to track quote form values?

Many thanks!

Hi magicrob,

Thanks for your reply.

In this instance would I want the sub-domain I use for payments only to be treated as a separate account than the top level domain it belongs to? From there I could track referring domains to that payment sub-domain and use your report to show where the sales came from.

Thanks!

Hi Mozzers,

I have a series of sites (~25) that are all regional e-commerce sites with the same URL structure eg. www.[region]-product.com as well as a 'master' site (eg www.product.com). I also have a single Adwords PPC account which point to all of the regional sites as well as the master site. As part of the payment/checkout process you only ever get taken to a sub domain of the master site (eg payment.product.com).

My question is: Is it wise to use the single PPC Adwords account to set up an Analytics account under which I list all of the regional sites and the master site? Once that's done I'm not entirely sure how I can track sales from a regional site to the payment process of the master site and have sales correctly assigned to the right domain. On the payment process I can only use one site ID tracking code so I'm not even sure I can correctly assign a transaction to a single site if multiple sites use the same payment pages.

Example:

Visit to region-product.com > Quote form submitted to payment.product.com > Payment completed on payment.product.com > Sale is assigned to which domain?

Can anyone who understands what I'm trying to achieve comment on the plausibility of this?

Many many thanks!

Hi Mozzers,

I'm using Advanced Web Rankings (AWR) to track my site and a number of competitors in Google - seeing how rankings and brand visibility change from week to week. I didn't set this up from scratch and I'm worrying with all of the recent algorithm changes that I might well be tracking the wrong competitors.

Is there a tool or methodology I can use to find the biggest players in the market? I'm in the travel market so there's lots of choice and I track the large sites but want to be sure I'm aware of smaller/mid-sized sites gaining visibility without me tracking them via a platform like AWR.

Many thanks!

Thanks for the help guys. I have been 301'ing to a seperate domain rather than somewhere else on the same site. I'll speed up the removal of the old content, thanks Ben!