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Our company was acquired and we are working toward an entire re-brand, including name change and new url.

We plan to appropriately 301 redirect the old site to the correct pages on the news site, etc. The question is, if users continue to search the old company name on search engines, will it appear in SERPs for the new site?

I'm guessing that our company name is associated to the old url and will that pass along the branded company name to the new url? My thoughts are to include the old company name in the sitemap.htm file and in the About Us section, particularly in the news release when the change occurs. Aside from that idea is to include social posts on G+, LinkedIn, our Blog, and Twitter as appropriate talking about the name change, all linking to the new website.

Any input would be most appreciated!

This might be a shot in the dark not knowing much about your site - can you check in Google Webmaster to see if you accidentally removed your website using the Remove URLs tool? I know of someone that accidentally did this when copying a pasting a URL, but accidentally only copied their main website address and not the full URL (oops!) and their site dropped out of Google SERPs rather quickly. Just a thought...

I've used dynamic keyword insertion variations in Google Adwords, but here's one that's a bit tricky and I'm starting to think the only way to do it is to create a unique campaign group for this keyword without DKI to pull it off.

Trying to dynamically insert the keyword actiNOS, but see no way to over-ride DKI in the campaign for this term.

Any ideas or suggestions, or do I need to create a separate adgroup without DKI for this term?

Having the keyword terms in urls in the native language is certainly a better user experience for both searchers and your website visitors. As part of Google's algorithm, keywords in the url do have some influence - this item even appears in the Moz Analytics On-Page Grader tool showing Keyword Usage in URL as Moderately Important.

If the IT team can only provide urls in English for now, then it's probably what you'll need to do until you can move to native language words in your urls. From a search engine perspective, as long as your site is setup correctly for international/multilingual, you should be fine. Google has a very helpful post here.

Then when your team can do urls in native language, you can appropriately redirect the English language-specific pages to the new urls.

Fantatic - thank you David & Frederico!

I found a study in 2005 titled "Men Are From Google, Women Are From Yahoo" showing that women at that time preferred Yahoo as their primary search engine.

I'm unable to track down updated statistical data to determine which search engine women primarily prefer.

Any links to studies or resources would be greatly appreciated!

Great question, and I'm mostly responding to be included in other replies. When approaching longer titles for articles, we have used an H1 tag for a succinct 1-line title, followed by an H2 for the rest of the title. Regarding your design aesthetic note, I agree on two levels: 1) short titles look better and 2) are better for the visitor because they are easier to read. Also, stuffing lots of words into a title might look spammy.

I ran out to HuffingtonPost to see how they do it - their articles run 3 lines probably because of large font size which seems to be the trend these days, and also a fairly narrow site design with limited horizontal space. I think it works, but does make titles a bit rough on the eyes.

I like Frederico's response and agree with it. If you are providing additional content and value (which is good for the site visitor), you are fine. We actually do a very similar thing with highly technical data and the only time we ran into duplicate content issues was when we accidentally had three pages about the same product because it applied to three different categories. To fix the issue, we created a new product page listing all three categories on the page itself, and applied canonical tags from the other three duplicate pages to the new page.

Or another way to look at it, have the main domain acme.com and update the meta info and on page content for the current year. That way you're building up your site strength in many ways: links, domain age, etc... Then categorize each year for future reference by acme.com/2011, acme.com/2012, etc. Then you have a repository for content from each year's event (white papers, videos, etc...). Added bonus - you don't have to maintain so many domains and websites which could eventually become problematic. Instead focus on branding the shortened URL in the minds of your audience.

Thanks Everyone for your input!

To further clarify, the 2 Chinese sites in question have essentially slurped our pages and in their automated process, have created non-existent links that have never existed on our website and that have no pattern similarities in URL structure.

Based on this, I am inclined to disavow the PR1 site, but work to 301 links from the PR5 site via .htaccess.

Thoughts?

Our Google Webmaster 'page not found' reports consistently show two Chinese websites that have approximately 50 broken links each to non-existent pages on our website. One site is a PR5, the other a PR1.

Two of our Chinese employees have contacted the site owners (even talking with them over the phone) to discuss the errors, where the broken links live on their sites, and how to fix them. They have contacted the site owners three times in the past three months, but still the broken links have not be fixed.

What do you recommend we do?

I agree with Jesse. Earlier this year we added a new data-driven section to our website that included (believe it or not) 83,000 pages, all unique in content since the information is highly technical in nature. No associated penalties have resulted from this.

Unfortunately I am unaware of stats, however your question is timely. Just last night my fiance and I were searching for a specific kind of wedding shoes for her. After no luck with web searches, we turned to image search, found the right pair, clicked on the image which linked to an ecommerce page, and voila - we bought the shoes, the site made the sale.

I think both image and video search will gather momentum - seems like people are less inclined to read when in browse/shopping mode, but rather peruse images or watch videos.

Perhaps someone can chime in to inform if there is a way in analytics to determine what traffic is generated from image searches on Google (or other engines)?

Today I noticed one of our sub-domains listed in our Google Webmaster Tools Account moved from the 6th position to the 2nd position.

Is there a reason for this (perhaps urls/sites listed at the top require the most attention)?

Thank you Carla - I too noticed moz.com appears in most seo-related topic searches, so thought it was odd that tools showed they have a PR2.

And thanks for the link - great info to know for the future if there is a project we have that involves domain changes

Thanks Mike - yes, I believe this only happens on results pages on their site.

Good point on the cloaking - good thing to think about as well.

Sounds like disallowing in robots.txt is the 1st thing they should do, then they can remove the pages resulting in 404s which they can then manage through GWM.

Thank you Mike. I was leaning towards your hypothesis and it's good to see you're thinking the same thing.

Here is an example page with information from one of their site developers - hoping this might help as it appears it is not a custom 404 page.

If you disable javascript and set your USER_AGENT to googlebot you will get a 404.
http://bit.ly/1aoroMu 

Any other insight you have would be most appreciated - thx!

I don't recall the page rank of SEOMoz.com prior to the company's change to MOZ.com. But did notice that MOZ.com currently has a Page Rank of 2 (which I find weird since it's such a strong, content rich, highly-regarded site).

I'd be interested in hearing about findings from the MOZ.com team on why the low PR and how has it affected your site since the change? (...and perhaps a look at the future through a crystal ball

I recall reading the MOZ domain changing article titled "Domain Migrations: Surviving the "Perfect Storm" of Site Changes" which had great info and addresses some reasons for PR loss in the 'Traffic and Ranking Loss' section: http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

A 2nd question we have about another site we're working with...

Currently if a visitor to their site accesses a page that has no content in a section, it shows a message saying that there is no information currently available and the page shows 200 for the user, but shows 404 for Google.

They are asking us if it would be better to change the pages to 200's for Google and what impact that might have considering there would be different pages displaying the same 'no information here' message.

We're working with another site that unfortunately due to how their website has been programmed creates a bit of a mess.

Whenever an employee removes a page from their site through their homegrown 'content management system', rather than 301'ing to another location on their site, the page is deleted and results in a 404.

The interim question until they implement a better solution in managing their website is:

Should they first add noindex,nofollow to the pages that are scheduled to be removed. Then once they are removed, they become 404's?

Of note, it is possible that some of these pages will be used again in the future, and I would imagine they could submit them to Google through Webmaster Tools and adding the pages to their sitemap.

Thank you all. At a high level based on your input, it makes sense to do nothing at all as traffic rankings for our site have been on the rise and this site has linked to us for at least 3 years with no associated affect. The only bummer is that it does appear to be scraped and some human intervention as many links are broken, but thankfully hit our 404 error page. We have contacted them 3 times over the past month, to no avail - most likely due to either language/translation barriers, or simply due to the fact that they have so many broken links that it's not worth their time to fix them.

To answer some of Doug's questions, traffic from their site is minimal but appear as quality visits: 94 visits per month, 8.53 pages per visit, 8:40 minutes on site, 10.64% bounce rate. Their link neighborhood doesn't look exceptional, however the website relationships all appear to be about the same topic - plastics.

The links are not in the footer, but instead a link from a specific plastic like Lexan 101 to our Lexan 101 page - pretty relevant, their site is a PR5 and is a legitimate business. They simply appear to be referencing our site for more technical information on the plastics they sell.

Just threw a red flag at me because of the excessive number of links from one domain and we work very hard to protect our reputation.

Any other comments are most welcome - again thank you all!

We recently discovered in Google Webmaster Tools that a Chinese website with a page rank of 1 has 64,476 links to various pages of our website which is about 120,000 pages in size. Their site covers the same topic as our site - technical information about plastics.

My question is, should I let things take its natural course or would it be better to 'block' their site using Google Disavow?

We had the same problem with our site. Finding the best performing or preferred page of the 3 versions is where you should have your developer place the canonical. Then the other two pages should 301 to that page.

When we did this on our site, it cleaned things up and helped in rankings.

Has anyone ever come across information about a website appearing strongly in SERP's in one region, but poorly in another? (ie: great in Europe, not so great in N. America)

If so, perhaps it is a Panda or Penguin issue?

We have used www.istockphoto.com for several years and like BeardCo mentions, you get what you pay for in the Photo area. iStock as you probably already know has great image selection, high quality, and nice - easy to use interface to find just the right image. We have noticed an increase in pricing on their site as well, but have been able to find other images on their site that work for the application we're working on at a lower price-point.

Extremely helpful insight Marie - I will be contacting you directly soon.

It appears that the duplicate content you've found (and other dupe content we've found) is actually our content that other sites have repurposed. Seems like Google has determined our site as the culprit, so this would be an issue we need to address - the only thought that comes to mind right away is adding an 'Author' tag, then start working on what appears to be a hefty cleanup project, something that looks like you are an expert on and will most likely be working directly with you in the near future!

The 2nd level pages that have little content and lots of links are 'noindex,follow' but I'm nervous about the number of these tags throughout our site which could be seen as spammy to a search engine. Of note, the 2nd level page section you have found ranks quite well since it is a subdomain which is interesting. Our suspicion is that since we made the 404 (200 success) error that Google detected on Dec. 9, 2011, we have been on some sort of Google 'watch-list' and any little thing we do incorrectly that they find, we immediately are penalized.

The homepage description of our company is reused on industry directories that we are listed on, so perhaps we must consider re-writing our description to be unique, and adding more content to the homepage would be a good thing and is certainly easily doable.

Thank you Marie,

We 301 redirect any traffic going to root.com to www.root.com, and any content that we moved from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com has been completely removed from www.root.com. There doesn't appear to be any duplicate content between the two. There is some duplicate content that we treat with canonicals on subdomain.root.com - very small portion of total pages (less than 1%).

As for your other questions, no warnings in WMT. Robots txt file looks clean, canonicals are in place correctly, and no accidental non-indexing that we know of.

Here is the actual site that might help to look at:

http://www.ides.com
http://plastics.ides.com/materials
http://www.ides.com/robots.txt

Thank you all for your insight - good stuff, but still stumped.

Here's everything we know that might help point out why the main domain (ie www.root.com) was penalized by Google. We redirect root.com to www.root.com with a 301 redirect, and it is setup this way in Google Webmaster Tools too.

December 9, 2011 - the site's 404 error page was incorrectly setup as a 200, resulting in a quick bloat of 1 million plus pages. The website dropped from Google immediately. The error page was correctly setup 2 days later. The site still appeared in Google's index via site: query. However the site didn't reappear in Google's SERPs until May 2, 2012.

October 25, 2012 - the website again drops from Google for an unknown reason. We then moved a significant portion of content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com. Pages from subdomain.root.com began appearing within 3 days as high they appeared previously on Google. From December 9, 2011 throughout this entire time we were correcting any errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools on a daily basis.

February 26, 2013 - The website yet again is dropped from Google, the subdomain.root.com continues to appear and rank well.

Due to moving most of the content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com, the index for www.root.com from October 2012 dropped from 142,000 slowly to an average of 21,400 ending at today's 4,230. However this index count fluctuates greatly every few days (probably due to moving content from www.root.com to subdomain.root.com).

Of note, the site is NOT a content farm, but legitimate unique technical content that is hosted for hundreds of clients.

Again any ideas are most welcome!

We have a client who's main root.com domain is currently penalized by Google, but the subdomain.root.com is appearing very well. We're stumped - any ideas why?

Thanks! Do you use SEOMoz for rankings check?

Good question, I don't know the answer - but it does apply to our business, so I'll follow this discussion for insight. Thanks for asking this Bob.

First thing every morning I login to Google Webmaster tools looking for any errors, review data, sites linking to us, etc. I then login to Google Analytics and SEOMOz to check traffic to our terms to see if there have been any changes that need to be addressed.

What's your daily checklist?

I posted a similar question the other day that may help a bit.

Dr. Pete posted a very good answer -
http://www.seomoz.org/q/too-many-noindex-follow-tags 

Thank you Dr. Pete - exactly what I needed to know!

Can you have too many pages on one site with noindex,follow tags?

Just curious, because we're looking to noindex,follow lesser important pages such as bios about our team, privacy and terms, etc.

I think that article alone just scared me away from using Disavow

Thanks Mike!

In looking at their site, they are a Chinese distributor of plastic materials. They do in fact have a link to our homepage in their footer throughout the website, which appears to be about 13,200 pages (according to site:www.site.com on Google - not super accurate from what I understand, but gives a general idea).

Since there are so many links, digging around it looks like for every plastic they sell, they link to the technical information on our site. My gut instinct just to be safe is to disavow as there appear to be a handful of Chinese sites doing the same thing. I'm thinking this because our site is linked to from several very high level authority sites with solid PR like UL.com and hundreds of .edu's (not sure if edu domains matters that much any more).

Makes sense, thank you Mike.

All incoming links from the site link to various pages of technical information on our site about plastic materials, and little if any link to our homepage.

I learned this morning in our Google Webmaster Account about a website has 30,746 links to our website. Both our website and their site present information related to plastic materials, so in essence they complement one another.

However, is having that massive amount of links from one site to ours a bad thing and should we use Google Disavow?

Also, they have a PR3 while our site is PR5 (not sure if that matters much).

All good ideas. Another way which we've used that works is to add either of these two tags in your section of each page the reproduce the blogger's articles on your site:

• • this basically says, don't index this page and don't follow any links from this page
• • this tells search engine robots that it's ok to follow the links from this page, but don't index the page

One other option is to have one page on your site that hosts a feed from the blog (using something like FeedBurner) and then apply one of the above tags to just that page. Then you don't ever have to worry about creating new pages each time the blogger posts.

Hope this helps!

I know that in Google Webmaster Central, we can see general Googlebot crawl stats based on dates. Our site is crawled daily.

We're trying to find out the time of day Googlebot visits our site - know of any ways to do this or tools out there?

Both great answers - thank you Sean and Brighton College.

This just confirms my suspicion that it's not a good idea. You know that sickening feeling you get in your stomach when something doesn't feel right? That's the feeling I got when approached from our customer about doing this. I think that gut instinct as Sean alludes to has a lot of truth in SEO.

I agree with both of you on "it's better to have a few good outbound links" and "the more inbound quality links vs outbound, the better."

Thank you!

We are working with a large, global customer that has asked us to link to their website from about 5,000 pages of our website. The links would either point to one page on their website, or they would point to specific pages throughout their website.

Is this a bad thing from an SEO perspective, as in - would either of us be penalized from search engines for doing this?

Would it also help if Joel put a canonical on the new index.php page?

Thanks Jarno,

Good to know from your geographic location. Looking at analytics shows traffic is down about 60% from Google visits originating from the U.S. to our main domain.

The last ia_archiver blocks an archiving website - saw it in Bruce Clay's robots.txt (http://www.bruceclay.com/robots.txt).

But we are looking at cleaning up our robots.txt file so it's nice 'n tidy. There are things in there that can now be removed, so thank you for the reminding tip!

No errors in Google Webmaster. Did receive a message on Nov. 5th saying http://www.ides.com/: Big traffic change for top URL but no reasons listed.

Your html sitemap is best for website visitors, so best practice is to list the most important sections/pages. Google can use your html sitemap page to crawl the rest of your site as long as the structure can be followed.

If you have lots of pages, then it's best to us an xml sitemap to submit through Google Webmaster. Once your xml sitemap is in the root directory of your website, you can also let search engines know its location through your robots.txt file like this:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.SomeDomain.com/sitemap.xml

If your site changes over time, it's a good idea to create fresh sitemaps - just set reminders for yourself in a calendar.

Here's a puzzler...

Our main domain (www.ides.com) doesn't appear in Google (but does on Bing and other engines). We think this is due to duplicate content which we're fixing.

However our website's subdomains continue to appear prominently in SERPs, even on Google - here are some examples:

• IDES Prospector = prospector.ides.com
• IDES =  support.ides.com
• Cycolac FR15 = catalog.ides.com

Why would Google penalize a main domain and its subdomains?

Another tool to help generate a sitemap and even check broken links is called Xenu (weird logo, but good free product).

Carolina,

I'm with Jarno. As for traffic to domain.com for the past 3 months, you might take a look at www.compete.com - while not perfect, it may give you an idea if the non-www domain was receiving traffic.