Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello geniuses!!!

Here's my Friday puzzle:

We have a plastic surgery client who already has a website that's performing fairly well and is driving in leads. She is going to be offering a highly specialized skincare program for cancer patients, and wants a new logo, new website and new promo materials all for this new skincare program.

So here's the thing - my gut reaction says NO NEW WEBSITE! NO SUBDOMAIN! because of everything I've read about moving things on and off subdomains, etc (I just studied this: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday). And, why wouldn't we want to use the authority of her current site, right?

While she doesn't necessarily have a high authority domain - we're not talking WebMD, here - she does have some authority that we've built over time.

But, because this is a pretty separate product from her general plastic surgery practice, what would you guys do? Since we'll be creating a logo and skincare "look and feel" for this product, and there will likely be a lot of information involved with it, I don't think we'll be able to just create one page.

Is it smart to:

a) build a separate site in a subfolder of her current site? (plasticsurgerypractice.com/skincare)

b) build a subdomain? (skincare.plasticsurgerypractice.com)

c) build her a new site (plasticsurgeryskincare.com)

I feel like I've thought about this so much that now I'm thinking in circles and can't figure this out, so I hope someone can help!

We have a group of physicians who currently practice privately, but are going to become one entity with one website. However, they are going to look like sub-entities, if this makes sense - instead of every practice being "One Practice Medical Group" they'll be "Lakeside Primary Care - A One Practice Medical Group Company," and then the other guy will be "Red Mountain Primary Care - A One Practice Medical Group Company" and so on for about a half dozen practices.

They all have personal sites already, and many are concerned that they will lose any history for their personal sites and will not rank as well in Google as they do right now.

One doctor really wants to keep his own site, and then just have a link on his profile page of the new entity's website. Isn't this counterproductive?

Also, if we do redirect all the personal websites to the new entity's domain, it will pass any page rank they already have, correct? Should these be 301 redirects, or 302 redirects? None of the current sites really have a lot of "link juice" but we're working with several strong personalities who want the benefits of the big entity but the autonomy of a private practice.

Thanks Patrick - I had tested it myself in Google and saw the same results you did. I assumed this was some crazy gimmick, but wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something that's "up-and-coming," you know? Plus, of course, the client was all pumped about being FIRST ON GOOGLE FOR EVERYTHING and I wanted definite answers to talk them off the ledge with

One of our clients was approached by a company selling a service they're calling "autocomplete engagement," which they're claiming has the ability to manipulate the auto-suggest feature of Google. They are not selling content, or technical SEO, and claim that the average "SEO guy" cannot garner the results they can.

My questions are: a) has anyone heard of this tactic, and b) can it really be done? c) if it can be done, what can a company do to manipulate that information beyond a strong technical SEO and content strategy?

Thanks for your input. I started playing around with the Rank Checker Firefox extension this morning, and I like it so far. I was just hoping to add more tools to my arsenal in addition to Moz's keyword ranking tool.

I'm curious what tools and tracking mechanisms everyone uses to track rank, especially with all of the changes in the last year. I've read a ton of articles that say even in 2014, rank will continue to matter, but besides using the keyword rank tool in Moz, I was hoping to learn what everyone else uses to track rank on a keyword and page level (are those two separate things?).

Thanks for the input, I appreciate it!

I just found out one of the writers we employ has been simply copying and pasting content from other websites into our clients' websites. She's been doing this for about six weeks.

We are going to speak with our clients to apologize and let them know that the problem is being rectified, but my question is how to best address this issue from an SEO standpoint? I know that the content needs to be rewritten, but those links are now six weeks old - is it best to remove them altogether and start from scratch, or just rewrite the content under the old link?

Are there any steps that I'm missing to solve this?

I think so?

We're massively confused because of the ambiguity with Google themselves.

Here's our business model: one medical practice brand (like Mayo Clinic), but with locations across the state of Arizona (i.e., Mayo Clinic at Phoenix, Mayo Clinic at Tucson, etc).

So do we need one brand page for Mayo Clinic and then a Mayo Clinic at Phoenix Local Page, a Mayo Clinic at Tucson Local Page, and so on?

So, so confusing. And, we don't see ROI from Google+ like we do from Facebook/Twitter, but feel like we need to be on the Google+ bandwagon anyway.

A client is one brand with several locations. Previously, we had created a Google+ Page for each location - now we're finding out that we should have created only one brand page with a Local page for each location.

Two questions:

1. Is this correct? Do we create a brand PAGE, with separate LOCAL profiles for each address

2. If yes, is there a way to merge the work that we have already done on the pages to the Local profiles? We don't want to lose the followers and updates that we've made to these pages.

Thanks for the help!