Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Christopher,

Have you looked at indexing in GWMT to see if they have indexed, how many pages, etc.?

Tom,

This was a very, very good explanation. Thanks

Hello Jason,

This is one of the best (ok, IMO the best explanation of responsive design I have seen to date) especially laying out the difference between server side - dynamic design - and responsive. The thought you placed into this whole answer to provide one that is concise and cogent is excellent. 
I like the point up about the lazy designer and page speed as something to be aware of. 
Typically, as an agency, we are not often dealing with a client bringing mobile and desktop forward. It is more likely we will be dealing with someone whose site has lost appeal, power, relevance, etc. and we typically build responsive for all. So the thoughts around url changes are helpful as well.

Thank You,

Robert

Steve

First, I stumbled onto this discussion and my mouth fell open as I gurgled out ... What the....

So, I then read the good answers from Thomas and Daniel and felt a twinge of relief. Here is what I suggest when you hear something like that: First ask the question It was your site that fell in rankings or someone elses? If they say someone elses, ask if they personally saw the rankings drop post implementation of the new design. If theirs, ask the same pointed questions if you were trying to help someone determine what the problem is. 
Now, once you ascertain (and I am willing to bet over 90% fall into this group) that they never personally saw the data, you have answer one: Somebody said that somebody said. OK, not great SEO work. But, if they say it is theirs or they got to dig through, ask this How did it affect the rankings and how did you determine that was the cause? Now you are getting into some serious SEO detective mojo! That's where we find the real answers.

Great question Steve!!

Good job Thomas and Daniel, Thanks for keeping the world clean!

Robert

PS - we build a lot of sites and 80% plus are responsive. We have see NO drop in rankings that could be attributable to a responsive design. BTW our site and several of our large firm owned sites are fully responsive and rocking cool. They are fine.

So, you got a link from DMOZ to your site and you want that to show up now!! (Cool, I understand). 
First and foremost, for you and anyone who is new, if you fill out your SEOmoz profile, you will be helping yourself as much as anyone else. Here is why: For this question, what I do, no matter who has asked it, is to go to the profile to see if you have a url that might be the site in discussion. (Makes my life and yours easier). While I understand the need for secrecy and discretion, I suggest all consider this: This is not your granddad's forum. People pay or work to be able to contribute. Yes, the occasional troll takes my email address off and spams me like a sandwich, but so what. You can prevent it by marking Hide My Email Address on my profile. Easy enough. 
Otherwise, to easily give you an answer requires a quick look at the site and the ability to run one of about 6 link checking software programs that we pay for. If one does not show it, often the other will. Next, if there is a url issue with the link, by being able to go straight to DMOZ it makes our lives easier.
So, final answer is this. If you are using OSE and it is not showing, try WMT to see if it shows there. Then, check a tool like ahrefs to see if it is there. Lastly, send me a domain and I will take a look.
Remember, your profile will allow others to get to know you, etc. In over three years, no one has stolen my identity even though I am really good looking and the ladies dig me man. 

Best to you

Yes, you are correct. EGOL and I are "poking fun" at one another.

No, when you resubmit or submit a "new" sitemap, it just tells Google this is the sitemap now. There is no content issue with a sitemap. 
Best,

Robert

Scamper,

Whatever you do, remember, the more you ask the more you learn. As you learn, answer some questions to. We are all here to learn and to help.

Best

Chris,

I am not sure you did anything wrong; I certainly can see how someone could have drawn that conclusion. Don't worry about it.

Gianluca

I think you made great points here. I believe someone told him that this was the SEO(s) doing something cool. - I am willing to be wrong. 
I did like      "May I ask you what kind of query did you use? I mean... www.------.com is not a logical query, is it?"

Best

Robert

Hello Scamper

Sorry, it's not some cool SEO trick. (At least does not appear so to me.) I believe it is due to two things: First, they have affiliates (publishers) that seem to be selling for them and by virtue of that putting content with their name on it on the web, and second, they seem to have done more link building with sites that publish. Now, if you want to test if your SEO team is doing this on purpose, try this: remove www as the sub domain and search on 911signalusa.com - you will get a different result. To see all your pages that are indexed on Google, put in Site:911signalusa.com.

I was just looking at basic content, etc. and the first thing I looked at was a dash light. I cracked up when read the product description: _We understand that sometimes, you just need that one compact dash light to add to your collection._OK, that proves it...cops can be wierd!

Hope that helps a bit,

Robert

Chris,

I can assure you I would not utilize snide as a communications tool with the rare exception of if I knew Tim was mean to kids or animals. So, I did use it as a tool to get him to go hmmmm? 
The reason is simply that having been at this a long time I see people with excellent intent get screwed by following some "scheme or strategy" down a road simply because they were unawares. Tim has a large celebrity news site that does well and he is not a novice to Q & A so has seen my answers before. I would hope that he understood I was not in the least using it as a put-down.

Tim, 
If it was seen as a put down, please, please forgive me.

Thanks

Robert

Given the only issue was the robots.txt error, I would resubmit. I do think it would  not hurt to generate a sitemap and submit that in case there may be something you are missing though.

Best

EGOL

If you don't stop it they are all gonna start worshipping...YOU!

In terms of the overall question, Why SEO, I would say don't. Just wait and see what happens.

Now, how did it feel when I said that? Shock maybe? Concern maybe?

That is the answer. If you don't what marginal ranking status (rankings are not as important as sales IMO) to go away, you will have to improve this.

**"how come we build our website so bad" **Typically, when it shows like this, someone was cutting corners and did not want to pay for a really funcional, fully SEO'd site with prior thought given to business model, strategy, most important items to sell and why, competitive analysis, a real web dev team, real web dev experience, real web design experience (not pretty sites, functional and pretty sites with good UI/UX). Sorry, but that is reality. I never cease to be amazed at how very bright business people end up with a ____ site because they got cheap on the one thing they should have spent money on. Think about it, it's an ONLINE grocery store...

Without going into a massive list (I just spent 10-15 minutes in research), I will say this you have more issues than you even realize. On top of that, the KW's you are ranking for are ok. But, they are not the best searched terms around your industry. So, where do you rank for those terms?

Here is the bright spot and I mean this: They hired you and you are digging and researching. 
But, with companies that take this type approach, typically what we see is this: someone comes to us saying hey, we need help, blah blah blah, really ready to fix it, blah blah, blah, and can you give us a proposal? Sounds good so far! Early in my career as a marketing firm, we would detail what all needed to change, when, why, and cost. The business then takes that to India, cousin Wilbur who once worked the phones at GoDaddy, or says to their bright new employee who found it all:"You have the list of what needs to be fixed; go fix it!"

So, that is all I can give you. Don't fix it at your own risk as others in your vertical are way ahead of you.

I sincerely wish you luck as you go forward,

Robert

PedroandJobu

Ain't you the wild thing!

First, in On Page reports, you are not seeing one of your new urls? Do you have that new url or the 301'd old one in On Page with a keyword? Go to your Campaign, 4th menu item is On Page - click it. At the top left of the report in blue links will be Summary and Report Card. Click on Report Card. 
Plug in the info here and get a report and it will likely show on next campaign. Now, go to your navigation bar and type in the precise url of the old site that is resolving to the new missing report page: does the new page show when you hit enter or something else?

This is just a quick and dirty way to see if a redirect is redirecting where you want it.

Hope this helps and tell Jobu I have set aside some Jack Daniels Black and a candle in the hallway.

Robert

Noufal,

I do believe we need more info. Are you doing this in a CMS, Adwords, etc.?

Thanks,

Robert

James,

The way you do what you are asking is like this:

Create a new page: Totnes Hotels or Hotels Totnes

Your title tag convention will be like this: Totnes Hotels | Why the Sea Trout Inn Wins | The Sea Trout Inn

If you believe having a highly crafted set of kw title tags is the answer to ranking all on page one, do the same with each other term. Now, note that the current title tag you have is way over-long and the last part is essentially of no value. You are trying to use title tags as a ranking tool  when you would, IMO, be better served to think about who your customer is (hint - it's not Google/Bing/Baidu). Make it recognizable and relevant for your customer and make sure it makes sense from a UI/UX point of view.

Then worry about keywords in the Title Tag.

Hope that helps,

Robert

Ian,

Quick answer, no. Better answer, is your site verified in GWMT? If not do that now and come back and read the rest.

OK, now go into Google WMT and look at the dashboard. Click on Health, then Index Status: What do you see? are you not being indexed or are you being indexed? 
If you look at the graph, you can even see how many pages are indexed over time. 
If you are concerned some are not being indexed use Fetch as Google to check that.

This is the best way to handle IMO

Hope it helps,

Robert

Tim,

I am going to give you an answer that you missed:

"Ok so here is the question. A few months ago i decided to join pingler.com and pay for the service as i was using the free service, but after four months now i have not noticed any changes... "

So, what were you expecting to happen? Since you instituted this practice, how much content has changed or been added? If the answer is little or none, well why are you pinging?

In SEO, as in fitness, bodybuilding, etc. there are always 'magic' ways to improve. In about the mid 80's the craze in fitness was creatine. If you take creatine you can jump over a building in three weeks... etc. I do not know if the desire to find shortcuts is a more rooted value in the US or if it is global (yes, I have travelled, but just not sure). However, it is very apparent in all SEO and people seem to grab each item, ride it a short distance, jump off and grab another. So here is my suggestion: 
Read all on your site, check for dupes web-wide (copyscape.com), clean those up, insure your on-page SEO is in line with SEOmoz recommendations, create content and compare it to your competitor's - whose is better? If you said yours, send a copy of yours and your competitor's to three people who tell you the absolute truth; if all three say yours is better, put it up!

You can take every gimmick, black hat, gray hat, green hat (sorry can't disclose these as they are inner sanctum SEO level and above only) and creatine and I will manage: Content, answering the query, UI/UX, basic good SEO, etc. IMO there is no way you will catch me in three to six months. Yes, I mean it.

That is the best advice I can give you regarding Pingler.com

Best to you and Great Luck going forward,

Robert

icourse

I would suggest downloading the free version of screaming frog for an easy way to get status codes on any or all links.

As to fixing and "crawl bandwidth" being a problem, I disagree. If you are not being crawled it is because of all the 404's. I do not know the timeline for inaction on this, but I do believe "manual submission is not an option" is a recipe for disaster. Because fully analyzing your issues is outside the scope of Q&A, I would suggest you start manually fixing the issues and if on a CMS, start looking at plugins, etc. as a root cause.

Hope that helps

Robert

Tyler,

Without digging too deeply, I have a couple of suggestions to help you in the overall. 
First, I cannot find a 'canonical redirect' and it appears you have not set a preferred domain in WMT. When you go into OSE, typically you will see something like: "this url redirects to x and we are showing that as it is more representative... " When you have done the preferred domain and/or canonical redirect you are telling the engines that the domain: mysiteexample.com and the sub domain www.mysiteexample.com should be seen as one in the same. That will help a lot with what you have here.

On your internal links, go into GWMT and click on Traffic. Your dropdown will include internal links. That will show these to you. (Note that you likely will show both www and non in WMT. If you click on one and go to internal and it says no data available... go to the other.

For preferred in case you are unfamiliar, click on Configuration, Settings, Preferred Domain

Choose which you want and boogie on...

Hope it helps,

Robert

Hello Christopher

It appears you have done a good deal to remediate the situation already. I would resubmit a sitemap to Google also. Have you looked in WMT to see what is now indexed? I would look at the graph of indexed and robots.txt and see if you are moving the needle upward again. 
This begs a second question of "How did it happen?" You stated, "Robots.txt blocked 2k important URL's of my blogging site" and that sounds like it just occurred out of the ether. I would want to know that I had found the reason and make sure I have a way to keep it from happening going forward. (just a suggestion).

Lastly, using the Index Status in WMT should be a great way to learn how effective what you tried in fixing it is. I like knowing that type of data and storing it somewhere retrievable for the future.

Best to you,

Robert

Damn Miriam,

What do you do for fun...read SEO?!?!?! Thanks, you always find the gems. 
Robert

Loved your point re alpha and strange UI.

It all is something to ponder though. Thanks

Speaking of Heaven and Earth, you know you and I worship at the same alter. It is about user experience, content, etc. It's either what's my score, rank, etc. or it's name that uber huge parameter... EMD, Anchor text with keywords, etc. I find that it is easier to be fully holistic in the approach and not worry about that really, really, really important one item that will take me to the promised land! (wow, that promise land part came to me right at the end. I mean, dude, like, uhhh, you know).

PS - I really do think the thing Sergey was saying about the triple hypen link will bring true redemption to the web. (Couldn't help myself.)

In answering a question, I got to pondering something: When we check in with an app like a Yelp, does that affect the rankings? In other words, is more and more check in activity (assume without leaving any review first) going to have an effect like more and more click throughs? Has anyone done any type of study or measure of this? Thoughts? Ideas?

Interesting, Thanks,

Robert

Hello and Welcome Clement,

If you could be so kind as to give us a screen shot of the SERP showing the above result, that would be beneficial in a situation like this. The reason being, that it provides additional info as to how you are performing the search and, often a good screen shot will allow us to see the query parameters in the query string. 
But, I am fairly sure the reason you are seeing the result you are is due to you having searched this term many times and likely have clicked on the programa-ingles.net. remember, the search engines are trying to learn what you like and placing cookies to "assist" your search. Those cookies make your analysis to be flawed.

Notice that programa-ingles.net does not show in my search (it is not in top 30).

When  I do the search, having never searched on that term on Google.com.br, I get the screen shot labeled: _broad search, programa de ingles. _Note on my result, Baixaki is the first organic result. Now to prove the point, I am giving you a second screen shot of the same search where I then put a comma (,) and added the exact domain name: programa-ingles.net. Given I am also adding the domain, surely it will beat Baixaki... but it doesn't because even with the domain, Baixaki is too strong and likely clicked on a ton. Baixaki is second and programa-ingles.net is fifth.

One way you can try to achieve this result is to use an incognito browser (Chrome) and you will likely get the result I am. Another is to add &pws=0 to the query string.

Here, from Dr. Pete is an excellent post on using depersonalization 

That should help you a whole lot.

Ub4CO8s 4pILHlQ

Ben, My suggestion is to look at it as a broad swathe tool that can give you a ton of good data which will allow you to dig deeper. First: you can look between your rankings and your competitors by toggling the Show menu. You can see an overview with what improved or declined in a week and then by sorting on change under traffic or one of the search engines, you can make the order show most decline or most increase first. Now you are looking at what is moving. You can do the same with traffic if you have enabled GA.

At the end of a given term, you see a clock and an ecg screen icon. If you click on the clock you will see the history of all this. If you click on the ecg screen icon you get a competitive ranking analysis and keyword analysis. To me, that is a great feature. Also, I like the ability to see universal rankings, video and image rankings.

So, I look at the big picture, do a bit of drill down as needed, then if I need to, I look at some other tools to see where it is all headed or what I need to do to fix or improve.

Hope that helps,

Robert

Phil (and Martino)

Welcome to the best place to learn and discover, the SEOmoz Community.

When I saw your question my first thought was SE Ranking factors 2013 or 2012 and went to find it to give a link and, there is 2011. So, I will quote Dr. Pete in speaking to one for 2013: Every time we do it, though, it gets a bit harder and more complicated. It is getting tougher by the minute to be sure what works, etc.

So, I will provide an opinion that does come from experience, but not one that is fool proof. First and foremost, build your site for your customer/visitor, etc. After insuring you have solid on page SEO throughout, stop for a moment and be clear that Google is not your customer. Understand that spending 8 hours a day trying to mine links might be better spent with writing exceptional content, acquiring exceptional images, and insuring a visitor to the site gets a quick answer to their query. One of the biggest flaws I see in SEO is tunnel vision: Becoming too focused on one or two parameters of the algorithm and losing sight of the reason you built the site. I have seen extensive discussions on how to get this or that link, to use or not use a hyphen, the value of exact match domains, on and on ad nauseum. At the end of the day, if you have good content and if you have an accessible site with reasonable UI/UX features, you can beat a lot of your competitors in the rankings. NOTE: If you do, please remember to answer the query in your meta description and then again on the page they will land on. (Yes, I have a bit of tunnel vision on this). One last thing on content is that if you really put good content up, they will come to the site. Please keep after it.

I tell clients nearly daily: Our job is not to make you rank first on Google, that is the job of the Indian SEO firm with the gmail email account... Just kidding: **Our job is not to make you rank first on Google; our job is to keep you ranked ahead of your competitors. **
I recently was in a very long discussion with a potential client we would really like to have. He has definitely drank the kool aid because he is obsessed with #1 ranking on the most competitive terms in his vertical. Yes, I understand from a business perspective why he is saying that and, frankly, as a business person I respect him a lot. The problem is that I must be very careful to provide enough other metrics that he can see what actually works.

Stay on moz and keep asking and reading. Answer where you can and understand everybody that has answered more than 3 or 4 questions has gotten something wrong. Because of the type of people here, you won't see people being burned at the stake for a wrong answer.

Best to each of you,

Robert

Hello Ricky

Miriam is correct regarding more info making life simpler for all, so please give us a bit more. 
That said, I will tell you that I believe in using maps in a site as opposed to images of maps for the geolocation feature they provide. For local, I prefer geo-tagged photos of real locations as opposed to a bunch of branding logos, etc. Having done a lot of real estate sites and tested various methodologies, I remain convinced, that the more you are clear about where you are re a site and local, the better the result will be when it comes to ranking. Given Picasa and given Google Business Photo efforts, I just think the proof is there. (no pun intended).

Best,

Robert

If you are in US for example and you want a site to rank in Australia for the same services, using a ccTLD for Australia is a good idea. There is an excellent "how to choose URL structure" in WMT that you should look at.

Right above that they explain geotargeting factors so it really is good info and an easy read. Obviously, you are going to need to pay attention to duplicate content and canonicals, etc. But, you are on the right track. Best of luck,

Robert

agreed and good point. (That is why we end up with soooo much SAS). 
Thanks

Hey Brandon,

Come sell for me! Just kidding. I do like your straight forward approach though. But, with link building I would suggest first changing your point of view just a bit. 
First, there are many ways you can assist a webmaster and acquire a link. What you did is called a reciprocal link. "I will give you one Brandon, but I want one in return." So, reciprocity. Those links are frowned upon by Google and are said to be of little value. (Yes, I am saying that is what "they" say.) But, if you put a link in your author info or in your content and someone picks it up, and later down the road for whatever reason you happen to link to that same site from yours as it answers some point you are making, it IMO is still a natural link both ways. (Larry nor Sergey will tell me though.)

Then you say this: **What I discovered was that they displayed random links from the "Useful Links" directory in the sidebar and in the footer. So all of a sudden we have a ton of links from one website. This site has hundreds maybe even thousands of pages. **
So, the value of the sidebar and footer links is less by far than in the content portion and that is likely helping you. But, personally, without looking at a business reason for not doing it, I would disavow all those links as preventive medicine. (Those who want to watch the world burn slow down a second and I shall 'splain my point.) My reasoning is twofold, first when I think of a site having natural links and I ignore whatever definition of natural that is in vogue, I look at a site/page that for whatever reason gains some measure of "popular" traffic. If, people are there for some reason (traffic) and they are being driven for any honest reason (not sent because they thought they won $ from an email), some percentage of them will "share" that find or that info, etc. (I sent the video of the guy pushing his girlfriend off the cliff to several people when I first saw it on CNN.) In SEO, a lot of what we do is centered around mathematics and probability, other is around behavior, other is creative, etc. But the probability portion provides that at some level, as something becomes more and more popular, more and more people will want to show it to others (link), NATURALLY. 
At the same time, lets take a site that has nothing really drawing traffic to it. It is there and gets X visits a day and occasionally more, but not a lot. If you look at its link growth, it should mirror the traffic to some degree. But, if all of a sudden it appears to start gathering link steam, without gathering traffic, I have to believe that in itself could provide a strong signal as to "natural" or not.

I said that to provide a predicate for this: If you build quality content that people want to read, you will gain links. As more people come to the site, find it as a resource, etc. more link to it. Over time more links bring more traffic and more traffic brings more links. What could be more natural.

I can tell you from experience it works and that we still have certain link building initiatives for sites. Occasionally, I will allow someone like you a link just because I want to. I do not ask for a reciprocal link. I can tell you that if you want to write something that fits for one of our sites and the content is good, I will give you the link without blinking. Just make sure it is not you are writing an article for a veterinarian site and linking back to a gambling as that affects my traffic.

I hope this helps and, hell, if they read this I will thumb them up.

Best Brandon, Good luck,

Robert

Marie,

Have you used ahrefs.com before?

If not I think it will be very useful to you given that I know what you do. I took a small site we handle and looked at what I have in WMT and then ran it on ahrefs. On WMT we are showing 68 distinct external links. On ahrefs we are showing 62. Worst case about a ten percent difference. (For finding those 6, download both csv files and sort and should be quick. Obviously with thousands you have more work.) 
With ahrefs, you can simply sort them by nofollow, mark your GWMT data, then boom. You are real close to magic.

If you want to see it, etc. I have a conference call with a bunch of Cannucks at 0930 CDT for about 45 min. After we can talk if you call me. Oh, sorry, forgot you were up North...

Hope it helps,

Robert

As to whether to change or not to change to new domain, you seem to be answering your own question:

Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam.

As to the 301, you are not moving page rank, but link juice. If, your intent is to mitigate the penalty via the 301, it will not do that. The "penalty" is the penalty. So if the algorithm is giving no value to a link with a PA of 50, by having the 301, you are not going to get that value. It will be the same as it was on the original site.

Now, if you want to just clean up and move down the road, a clean site and domain could be the way to go. You can do 301's, but anything that would happen to one will come to the other (someone will say: 301's lose X% of the juice so I will say it is usually not even 10% in my experience). But, if you are a PR of 2 in a non-competitive niche that is B2B, you may want to consider just going cold turkey if there are a lot of pages and hassles.

Use the new domain, add great new content, etc. Make sure your product pages are different and product images are different. Make sure you out SEO the others and you will likely see the PR get to two fairly quickly. In a non competitive area you can get a site to PA of 20 for a main page in about 3 to 6 months depending on content, etc. So, you are back at it and growing without the fear of complications.

Hope that helps, 
Robert

GKLA

Thanks so much for this post. I hope a lot of those who answered before will thumb it up so others can see. The point is this is a business (BBB) and they trade off of their being not for profit as meaning that they are unbiased. It does not mean that in the least. I have seen cities where reasonable industries are not allowed and yet they are allowed in others. I have seen individual directors where I have bought a business, offered to compensate those who had complained of the previous owners, and still not been able to change the director's point of view. That one person (who IMO "owns" that BBB) controls all. Yes, I have seen others who conducted themselves very well and I felt like it was money well spent. But, my first experience spoiled it all for me:

Years ago as an RN I started a nursing company in a major US city. (Top 5 in population). About 6 months to a year in, a guy comes to my office from the BBB. He starts in with how they are getting a lot of calls about my business and it was important that I be a part of the BBB. "How many calls are you getting?" Quite a few. "Really??" Oh, yes, people blah blah blah the BBB. "OK, give me the names or organizations of some of those who called?" Sir, we do not give out that kind of information!! We are not allowed to!!! "Oh, so can you tell me on what days they called and at what time?" No sir, that data is confidential and part of the blah blah blah as a non profit blah blah.

Please note that at that time my business was HIGHLY SPECIALIZED. I was a critical care registered nurse with very specific cardiovascular ICU abilities who started the business at the behest of a couple of CV Surgeons to bring people with my skill set to a particular hospital. We had branched out at that time to hospital number two and we did not have a sales force going out to hospitals. We simply had someone call us from hospital number one who knew someone at hospital number two. So, we were not good at marketing and we were too busy to do it. No one other than the management at those hospitals knew about us. The nurses we recruited were almost all word of mouth through our contacts and the nurses who worked for us due to the skill set that was needed.

Now, that does not mean they all lie or that they still use the famous "Lot's of people are a calling about ya." But when you are young in business and that happens, it lingers for a long, long, time."

Sorry to hear of your problem. Hope the word gets out so that others who are BBB members realize what can happen.

Best,

Robert

PS If you truly want to see how BBB handles a consumer complaint from the Businesses point of view sometimes, have a problem with a large auto sales company (branded dealer) that contributes a lot to one of their locations. Uhh, why do you need a car sir???

Yes, it is. I thought you were going to redirect the whole site to a single sub dir.

If you want a really good tutorial, this Best Practice on SEOmoz is really thorough.

I am pretty sure when I looked you were on a LAMP stack with the sites so should not present any probs. 
Best

In the total and in the beginning, you will affect the SEO with the change, but the question becomes how much. 
Another consideration is brand equity and whether you would lose any. If, the only reason for changing is to show that one is under the umbrella of the other, I am not sure of that as a good strategy. Why not just put something on the site that makes that clear?

If however, you are having dupe content issues, want to consolidate staff, want to try and boost one site, etc. then you can 301 A to B. With the tradebriefs having higher authority, I would do as you suggest doing and go to it. So, indiaretail 301's each url to the appropriate url on tradebriefs. Not 301 indiaretail.com to trade briefs.com.

The last two with subdomain and sub directory is not the way to go IMO. The subdomain is its own domain and does not share linking, etc. With the way you are showing a single sub directory, that would kill a ton on your site and you would waste a lot of your linking.

The 301 url to url is the way to go.

Hope that helps,

Robert

I would be more than happy to show them that is BS. they won't listen because they are_____. Do they have a report showing a yahoo account with that domain and 698 clicks to a specific url? That is the question.

They are just so full of it you want to scream. Again, if you need help with any of this, call or PM and I am happy to get a dozen experts on board. (And I really argue well and quietly.)

Best

I have not heard of them deleting the data and see no reason for them to. Frankly, they don't keep any pertinent metrics, so what's to hide?

Best

Amber

This just continues to bug me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is something amiss here in what they are saying and I think you already know that. First, if an ad runs for a given company X and if the ad resolves to a landing page that is a part of that companies site that you are handling analytics for, then how could that traffic show as organic search traffic? If they are saying it shows as "search" traffic they are correct but stupid. Whether organic or paid, it is "search" traffic.

What is likely happening is this: their traffic is showing as referred traffic because of the way they do the spend. It may even be showing as direct but harder to show. I have attached a couple of screen shots for your perusal. Note in the first you see traffic from Yahoo, etc. Note that if this were organic Yahoo traffic, it would say Yahoo (organic).

Hope it helps,

Robert

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Jasmine,

This is excellent. I totally zoned on giving them limited access.

Damn,

I shoulda been a comedian (is that the right spellin')

Dash,

I am thinking this is Aardvark at play and not the other animals. OK, just messin' wit ya.

First, I suggest using SEOmoz's Algorithm Change History to check your dates. Feb/March 2011 certainly appears to be Panda/Farmer and given such a large percentage of queries were hit, you were likely in the group. So, just check the change in traffic to the updates and you will have clues.

Now, with the new site, 404 issues, etc., you may be wanting to regain lost ground a bit too quickly for reality. Here is a good article by Jason DeMers around "fixing" the issues, etc.

Next, focus on the content you have on the site and continuing to put newer and better content on. Stay away from too many overly optimized links with anchor text issues, etc.

I would certainly counsel that you focus on content instead of penguins, etc.

Best

I wish I had seen this earlier, quite the interesting question... So company A is "buying links or content that might be in the gray area and outranks CoB for some keywords. Company B is the good guy. 
First, and I think foremost, if I am associated with company "B" (someone hand me a hankie at the nobility of being a true martyr), I am going to take two steps back and ask this question: "How do we know that company A is doing anything gray and how do we know what they are doing is the reason for their ranking better than we are?"

Why, because believing you are the more noble, smarter, best dressed, etc. is a common refrain of those who are not looking close enough at themselves. So, no, I am not advocating black hat SEO with the hanky comment  (because IMO, it is not the brightest SEO - yes those doing it are free to throw the darts now cause frankly I don't care). I made the hanky comment to get your attention as I would my staff when we start to say how good we are. Forget it as it is irrelevant when it comes to the battle.

Our clients are not paying us to be Pollyanna. Yes, there are those who do anything for a ranking and that does not matter. What do I want? I want to out think them. I want to out create them. I want to out motivate my team. I want to argue for quality content, good UI/UX, metrics that make sense over metrics that appear to make sense. I want to stomp my client's competition into an unmitigated hole and own them. Yes, I will do it fair and square as I don't have time to deal with dumb penalties. But, I am not going to throw out a rotator cuff patting myself on the back over the color of a friggin hat. I am going to win because I am smarter, my team is the best, and if all else fails, I will simply outwork them and write the content myself because I know I am that good.

Sorry, if that turned into a rant, but the trap of whose hat was the whitest today is a big one for a pro seo.

Best to all, God I love this forum,

Robert

Nakul,

Your issue is that you are just too reasonable! YP oes not want the client to see what they are not doing and that is the reason for all the obfuscation. It is the classic pay us $XXXX per month and we will send you leads. Now, we won't tell you what keywords we bought, what the ad said, what the CPC was, etc. The reason is simple. When you are handling small accounts it is next to impossible to do real PPC at an agency fee of even 18% because, if the average account is $500 there is more work than the $90 commission. On big accounts with $5K plus spends it makes sense, but not small.

So they just obfuscate and BS their way through. Guess what, they are all EXPERTS at SEO at the YP companies (most are AT&T). I will say this, having dealt with the issues that anyone experiencing what Salemtas is going through who wants to have a meeting with them and the client should call me as this has become a cause. I will get on a teleconference into the meeting with the YP reps and let them question my credentials. It would be fun. (By the way, I am in therapy over this issue and hope to get it resolved in the coming decade ;)'

bcbsm

I originally ask a similar question a little over a month ago. Oddly, for every search we did, except one, we got the correct meta description which we had change a week or so before. But, on one specific search the old meta showed.

EGOL had the best answer with it was likely that for every potential search term, the change had not occurred due to essentially Google not being able to touch everything at once. So, if there is a server sitting out somewhere that for whatever reason has not been populated with the change in meta, it handles a given query, and the old pops up.

Since then I have seen this query several times and it must be more prevalent now than in the past.

I realize it's not an "answer" but it's as close as we came.

Best

Robert

Tompt

To me, it is rather interesting the way that the satchel ad and several link gaining "methodologies" similar to it have worked while others do not. The beauty of an algorithm is in its lack of ability to measure intent.

Marie makes a great point with Brand as anchor text vs. keyword, but in the case of a more known company, a brand could be a keyword. At what point does a company become too large or well-known or well-branded for such tactics to become schemes versus methods? Also, if interflora was Interflora Flowers or Interflora Flower Delivery, does it revert to method or remain scheme?

I thought the Search Engine Land piece wherein they question at what point a penalty is a mere "show" of penalizing, further elucidated the problems that Google faces while trying to in some way keep it clean or level or whatever. Matt McGee added: (My italics for emphasis)

**In this Interflora case, Google’s timing has been particularly benevolent: The penalty took effect about a week after Valentine’s Day, and has now begun to be lifted one week before the UK celebrates Mother’s Day. Those are two of the most popular flower-buying holidays of the year — second and third in the US, according to AboutFlowers.com, and likely similar in the UK. **

So, was Google being strict or lenient? If it had been Robert's on time flower delivery, would I have gotten back so fast? Would I have been penalized given I was much smaller?

Great questions, but at the end of the day what is troubling is this miss IMO by Google: With the satchels, The Cambridge Satchel Co. uses a common method to "get the word out" via Google Chrome. Google brags about the success they helped Cambridge Satchel achieve. So, did no one at Google notice the conflict of interest?

Best, good question and good answer by Marie,

Robert