Are you using IIS? If so you might be able to do something with the Re-write Module.

Personally, I'd avoid it though. It'll just confuse things.

If you can't get the perma-link structure of wordpress to match as many of the old pages as possible then, yes, I would personally 301 the old pages to the new ones.

You'll lose a certain amount of "link juice" by doing this, but it's better than losing it all!

Keri - It is pretty high up there though isn't it?

Ha, I like your honesty there!

You are keeping yourself busy in the forums aren't you!?

Thanks for the resource

Other than technorati and alltop what are the best RSS directories to use and submit feeds to?

Thomas,

Just had a gander, and I like the look of it. Just the sort of thing I was after!

Thanks for the tip!

OK, before anyone says anything, I know this isn't the right way to do things properly and that if I want to build a genuine and interested following base, I need to create some great content, tweet great things of interest and build a genuine and engaged follower base....

BUT

....Has anyone got any actual experience of using paid for twitter followers and if so would you recommend it or recommend any particular company who does it in the UK?

I know there's companies who do it by getting reciprocal followers and others who just use bots to give you lots of 'useless' followers.

I essentially want to know if it can work at all on any level and get you some degree of useful followers (i.e. people who may actually read your tweets as opposed to fake accounts).

It took 2 weeks for us a few months ago, but we were simply told that the site did not have a penalty.

We made some changes both internally and created some better links and we were back up the rankings,

The brand/site in question is a very straight forward loan site and at the moment there's not much reason for people to want to go on the site for content purposes. It's more they need a loan and that's all they care about.

The content part is something we're working on for this site, but at the moment, it's hard to get twitter followers via this route.

I was more looking to get twitter followers first who could then be driven to the new content to generate traffic and then re-tweets... reverse logic

If you can't get the perma-link structure of wordpress to match as many of the old pages as possible then, yes, I would personally 301 the old pages to the new ones.

You'll lose a certain amount of "link juice" by doing this, but it's better than losing it all!

What does the forum think the best strategy for social bookmarking is?

Obviously white hat, user generated would be preferable but looking slightly darker; you can obviously get services that create social bookmarks over a period of several weeks, but are they worth the investment?

Google uses WHOIS to determine the age of the domain under a current ownership, however if the WHOIS data changes and at the same time the content of the site changes dramatically, Google may reset the domain age of the site in their opinion.

I'm not sure but I would imagine Google have their own records on domain age outside of WHOIS registration.

Vjay - good question

I think it really depends on the quality of the directory. I think that relevant (industry specific) directories are generally ok as long as they are high quality and not rife with spam.

There are also some credible directories still such as yahoo directory, best of the web, etc. So if you can find a decent one with decent inbound links and a solid auditing process, then why not.

One method would be to use the logs on your server. If you're using IIS for example, every time a pdf was downloaded or viewed, this would be stored in the IIS Logs. It would normally show the time, date and IP address that viewed the pdf file.

You can get software to analyse these logs here;

http://www.iis.net/community/default.aspx?tabid=34&i=1864&g=6

Otherwise instead of linking directly to your pdf in your website, you could point the link to anther html page, which then in turn opens/downloads the pdf. You could then put the Google Analytics tracking code in this html page and then you would be able to track how many time that page was viewed in analytics (and therefore how many times the pdf was viewed).

The html page would just need to contain a simple redirect to the pdf, eg.

<title>Your Page Title</title>

Optional page text here.

You would also need to insert your analytics tracking code in the section.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Anthony - Not what I was hoping for, but guess white hat is the only way!