Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your input.

Together with subfolders, we will take your advice and work on getting local links.I guess since we are using subfolders, the local links will benefits the entire domain.

Thanks for sharing the link to the whiteboard friday.

Thanks James, appreciate your advice.

I think we will go with the subfolder option, even though it might create a rather odd looking url because of the existing country specific domain name. So will end up with something like domain.com.au/sg.

I am working on a project, where we have one website, with a country specific domain, which is currently ranking well in local search.

The client now wants to expand his business into two new countries (all english speaking) and would like to rank for the same keywords in these two new countries. The customer do not want to create new websites for the new countries.

Because its a local domain and the website is setup for local search in GWT with locally hosted server, i expect challenges in optimizing for new countries without impacting the current local ranking.

Question 1: What would be the recommended approach for maintaining their existing ranking on local search, while optimizing for the new countries.

When you enrich a page with articles and video, do you include this in the same page or do you link to it?

In our case, we are trying to promote a product page. The page gives an overall product description and it has sub pages that each describe individual features. Plus we have a couple of resource links, that link to related datasheet and video.

In your experience, would we benefit from including more of the linked content directly on the product page, instead of linking to it on separate pages?

Does the search engines have a preference for pages with long or short copy? (Assuming our short copy fulfill the basic keyword requirements)

While a long copy, enable us to include more long tail keywords, i find that most people prefer to read a short copy. We currently try to keep each page short and give the reader an option to explorer further with links to more detailed pages.

Regarding link building, what counts the most in terms of PR and relevance(topic). Is it whether, the link comes from a domain/page with high domain/page rank or that the link come from a domain with similar/relevant content?

I know, we should always aim to get links from domains with both relevance and good page rank. But which is most important?

For example:

If we have a web site about swiss made watches. Should i focus on getting links from other domains with information about swiss made watches. Or can i achieve just as good link juice, by getting links from un-related web sites with high PR?

We will of course get more qualified traffic from related domains. But from a pure search ranking, what plays the biggest factor?

Hi,

Our web site is designed using a template, which means the header and footer is consistent across all pages. Only the body content is unique on each page.

Is the google bot able to see that the header and footer content is defined by the common template?

Will this have any impact in terms of duplicate content? For example, we have a two line text in the footer that summarize the services we provide. Because the same text is in the footer of all pages, i am concerned about creating duplicate content.

Finally, does it make sense to include keywords in header and footer of the template? Will it have any positive or negative SEO impact?

We have an old web site which currently has good traffic and search ranking. However, the old design is not helping us convert traffic into customers and we have decided to re-design the web site.

Due to challenges resolving 4XX issues in the current setup, we will be moving the site to a new CMS and hosting provider. The domain will remain the same.

The plan is to create exactly the same pages in the new CMS, as what we have today. And to use the same URLs for each page. Content will remain the same in step one. We will only apply a new layout and design.

Besides keeping the URLs the same as in the old system. What else should we be aware of when doing a web site migration, that might impact our search ranking?