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Well, I think in many cases change is good. I understand your concern though.

I think redirecting the current url will be fine and you won't lose traffic. They are still clicking on the old url, and landing on the new. I don't think that will be too off putting for anyone based on experience.  We do 301's from totally different sites and still have the traffic when they land on a page. As well as that, you won't lose any link juice to speak of as the 301 will transfer 90% plus.

I would use the OurDomain.com/keyword or keyword-phrase as opposed to having the .html extension after it. And, dashes as opposed to underscores.

Best

Edit: Forgot your last paragraph. Be careful with adding pages of similar keywords like:

Purple Monkeys to Big Purple Monkeys, etc. You don't want to be so close that you impact one keyword while thinking you will move the other up. Remember that not every search is exact match. 
Look at where you are failing in conversions: Is it the ranking not bringing you traffic or is it you are getting impressions without click through (meta description maybe?) or is your traffic bouncing because your landing page sucks or is not answering their query.

Best

Thanks, but even though I mentioned links for that page, Gareth really helps with his comment regarding anchor text. That was a miss for me.

This is out of order: As to site map I would resubmit just to make sure, but if you have internal links to the page it will get indexed either way.

Removing the .php gives you a clean url. here is a good source and I have cut and pasted as well.  To remove the .php from StuntCoders

Just use following snippet in order to remove “.php” extension from URL.

| | ```
1 RewriteEngine on
2 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
3 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
4 RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ $1.php

Best of luck.
``` |

Complete

I think the first thing you should do is understand you are likely a bit impatient. Typically for us, when we build or redo sites, the rankings are all over the place - schizophrenic. This can last for a month or more. You can also see yourself on page one number 4 for example, pat yourself on the back, and two weeks later you can't find yourself.

For office refurbishment Kent, you are actually doing fairly well given the redesign and, likely due to some degree on your Google Places ranking so highly for that term. (you are number five).

On the SERPs main page, you have two urls that are  ranking: ** www.completeoffice.co.uk/Services/office_refurbishment.php   **ranks 2nd on page 2 and your home page ranks third on page two.

Now, as it is you have no page authority for /office_refurbishment so that is affecting you. I would first suggest cleaning up your urls as throughout the site you have some-with-dashes and some_with_underscores. This url as noted has underscores and they are not a best practice. So get some links to this page.

I don't believe you have done the "canonical redirect" to clear up the www and non www as OSE still shows two with no redirect and when I use either, either resolves. If you haven't, you need to do a 301 in the .htaccess file of the non www to the www and set the www as preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT). Otherwise you are showing as two sites.

So, there are some basic cleanup items (cleaning up the .php would be nice too) to do and some link building (this is how you get found page by page by the bots) for pages and you should do well given where you are and the work you are doing. Understand that we all wonder why a given site is ranked below another regularly, you cannot focus on that and must focus on your site and making sure you have done all you can.

I hope this gives you some help and that you rank one on one soon!

Best

PRWeb is owned by Vocus (think Buffet). We are an agency and gave a lot of consideration to using them recently. We had several clients that we felt might be able to benefit. My main issue was in them wanting to get a big check up front and then wanting to tell us when we could send out a release. They tout that they know everything about SEO and that it is proprietary, but based on what I found I find that a gross stretch. So, do not go into it thinking they are doing SEO, I do not think they got it much more than being able to spell it.

With PRnewswire, they got a bit hit by most recent Panda iteration. Most will say that both companies are pretty close and from what we saw they are. I think one thing you must do is insure you are writing something truly newsworthy. 
We see a lot of attorneys use these resources and simply throw their name on regurgitated content. I just don't think it helps.
So, if you go with one of them or with Marketwire, be sure you write quality releases that people will want to read.

Hope it helps a little.

This is not a function of Google Places. These are called Place labels and they are set algorithmically. Having your Places verified helps but doesn't guarantee it. This is from Google: 

Having

The place labels shown on Google Maps are determined algorithmically based on a large number of factors, so there is no way to guarantee placement of your business on the map as a place label. One factor these algorithms consider is the accuracy of the business listing and the richness of the content associated with the listing, so you can improve the chances that your business will receive a place label if you claim it in Google Places.

Best

Ahhh, clarification. Thanks Karen

Well put Gianluca, I always appreciate your input.

The fact you have them under the same analytics account really says it all; while Google may not penalize it per say, they are likely to devalue the links. Frankly, we already know that reciprocal links don't work or one off schemes around them. Having sites that are on the same IP address or C block will also devalue the link. So, what to do?

An example for us is our main site. We build a lot of sites for others and for at least a year and a half now we no longer have those sites link back to us. In our new site, there are no links coming back from clients. There just doesn't seem to be a point in it. With your sites I think you would be better served to get your links the old fashion way.

Best,

We do a lot of WP sites for clients and I do not like the auto generated internal links plug ins. The problem is they have a tendency to link back in a loop to the page they are linking from and some over do the internal linking. The best bet in my opinion is to know that internal links are good as they can help spread link juice to deeper pages (use them judiciously) and they do help the bots crawl.

So, IMHO, internal links are good but you need to do them by hand in my estimation so that you control them.

Hope this helps

I was going to leave this lie and I already thumbed up Gianluca for his (as always) excellent response, but whenever I see the word spinning it bugs me. There was another question today re finding duplicate content on your own website. I went to copyscape.com and put in a portion of an article I had written about a drug in about October of 2010. I was looking to see if it showed up in two client websites as a blog posting. Imagine when I saw it in several other sites with poor grammar added and misused modifiers, etc.

So, the whole idea of using some crap spinning software and churning out anything in twenty different and bad permutations is the most counterproductive SEO tactic today. Then to submit it to clowns who are going to have links to you for a fee is the second most counterproductive.

Lastly, in SEO, when you have found the easy way to do something, generally, it is wrong or at best very temporary. Think about it, if it is easy every clown who professes SEO knowledge is doing it so there is no advantage. Those who truly work at SEO are the ones who succeed for themselves, their companies, and their clients. Write good content. Do the work to get good links. Then sit back and smile when you smoke these chumps.

Sorry for the rant. I had a moment

Amit

We run into this regularly and there is a way to deal with it. 
Whether or not the business is verified in Google Places, click on the Edit this place button in the top right of the Places for the business. You will see a link that says report a problem.
What we do that has worked in the past is to report the business as closed but you can check any of them and a detail box will appear for you to write in the problem. Now, it won't happen overnight and I suggest that if you don't see a change in about 4 to 6 weeks you have someone else report it as well, etc. 
Typically, we will see a change in a few months.
Best

Vjay, Happy to help.

Vijay,

You will find two schools of thought here and rather than giving any reasons (more readable, versus Google doesn't like them, etc) for this, I will tell you that domains with hyphens are fine. We use them with client sites regularly and they rank just as well as those without.

Good Luck.

It appears you have the www and non www taken care of. But, there is no DA or PA for this site. I did not that with the exception of the landing page most of the tabs redirect to another url. That url, antiquebanknotes.com has a DA of 10 and the first page has a PA of 20. There is only one linking root domain showing in OSE. (Note that OSE will not show every link but about the top one fourth. So if you have a lot of low value links, they won't show)

I don't know how you did the redirect, but if you believe you have a lot more authority than that for the url you asked about, that would be a place to start. Also, if the site is new, you won't have accumulated any authority yet. You will need to add some links, etc.

You can look in GWMT and see what links they are showing.

Best

From the way you are stating this, you are going to have a log with a different domain say yourblog.com.

You have a site that is mysite.com.

You want to in some way add the yourblog.com to the sitemap and have it be part of the mysite.com in the eyes of the google bot?

I do not see how that could work. But......there is still a way to accomplish this. Have the developer incorporate the WP blog in the architecture of the site. Such that there could be a menu tab: Blog (for example). Then you would have mysite.com/blog and as you added to the blog: mysite.com/blog/why-to-fire-a-developer, etc.

We just scraped a site like this and simply rebuilt it on a WP platform (it had an attached WP blog). Yes, it took some dev time, but to me was a better option for the client than the ongoing fees to the developer.

Hope this in some way helps. Personally, I would see what it would cost to move all to a WP or other CMS and do so. Best of luck.

WrightIMC

I am using Chrome and if what you are looking for is the Keyword Difficulty and Ranking report download, I have attached a screenshot of same. It is right under the top ten ranking pages for keyword. There is a download for excel and one for CSV.

Hope this was what you needed.

8Obrm

A hosting change would not cause the drop. Especially given that is only one page. If there were a problem with hosting change, it would likely affect most or all.

If the plug in that was used is the problem, you won't need to change canonical.

So, you are going to redirect your site to the new domain -** I want to transfer my site to that domain**. So long as you use a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file from url to url you will maintain most of your current link juice. When you ask about maintaining current rank on engines, I am assuming you are referring to the new, purchased domain and not to your current? (If you redirect with 301 there will be no "my site" only the new domain). 
Changing registrar should not effect your SEO. This is done daily by many. When we do it with new clients we do not see an impact from it.

Let us know if we are not understanding your question.

Best

That is interesting. My gut says it likely did not impact you with a footer link to your page that quickly. Could have, but I am just not that convinced. Along with that, I will tell you that while early on we would link from client's footer to our site, we just don't do it anymore. One, footer links are of little value (and another reason I don't think that was the cause of the drop) and it is obvious if you host sites for clients that they are all on same server/C block.

I would go ahead with what you have done in removing the text link and see what happens over the next few days. Even if it pops right back up, it won't mean that was the cause. I have a site that was page one number 3 for a given quality keyword term that a month ago, dropped to page 5 number 9. Today (a month later) we are back at page one number 3. I cannot tell you why. (Google was SE).

Hope this helps

Excellent question Socialdude.

So, First we tackle 301 from example.ie to example.com or example.com/ie. My first inclination is to do the redirect to the .com/ie due to the likelihood of url to url content being more similar. The argument could be that since .com is domain you should redirect to root domain as opposed to sub directory. I am still inclined to go to .com/ie as I believe this will still ultimately impact the root domain.

Next, since you will want pages to rank in respective SE's in each country, I would want links going to sub directories as much as possible. So, to improve fr, I need links to fr pages, etc.

I look forward to others opinions on this.

Best

Have you looked in GWMT to see if there is anything there from Google? I don't think it is a penalty, but if you are using someone else's content (and there are a lot of people with your product on the web) you will need to change that asap.

One thing here is more around copyright, etc. I was assuming the content you were transferring to Chinese was from a site your client had or you had. If that is so, it is not a problem.

If, by menu name, you mean title tag, it is important. If you mean you have a menu with a Main Tab = Cars and below that are several choices: Expensive Rental Cars, Moderate Rental Cars, Cheap Rental Cars, the main tab being cars will not hurt you. 
Look at the url  :  YourSite.com/cars/cheap-rental-cars

If that is how it looks, I see no problem with it. If it looks like this YourSite.com/cars and the thing you want to rank for on the page is cheap-rental-cars that by itself will not help but won't kill you. I would use the cheap-rental-cars and have a title tag that says Cheap Rental Cars | YourSite.com.

Hope this helped you out.

It is difficult to tell anyone "why" something dropped in rankings. On first blush, it could be around the content as you do have a large image at top so even on a MacbookPro 17, I don't see any real content until I scroll down. But, it is not terrible. With the content, it is a bit thin. If it is duplicated as well, I don't see how it could rank well.

Another thing could be that you are not getting the CTR you need and that is pushing you down a bit. Your meta description is too long and the call to action is at the end of it....in other words no one knows they can "get relief from painful hemorrhoids in less than 48 hours" as they never see it in the snippet on the SERP. Put that first. Get quality content on the page, maybe link to a couple of quality resources (med journal, wiki) from your main content, etc.

Hope this helps.

Edit, you have marked this as an ongoing discussion and it really is a question.

Andy

There won't be any problem as it is a different language. Even if you were doing it in Google, there is no problem with duplicate content in two different languages. Otherwise we would have to use totally different content on English/Spanish sites in TX.

Mikedw

For keyword research, I still have to say that the keyword tool for Google is my standard. I use others from time to time, but I believe Google does a good job with it. The other thing you can do is to look at what competitors are focusing on. (The caveat is that sometimes they are wrong so check to see that people are searching on a term before you go to the trouble to use it. Again Googles Keyword tool works great). One note here is to always try different applications as they come along. (I have never used SE Cockpit as Rusty suggests, so I will take a look soon.)

For your on page report card, go to Research Tools, click on On Page Optimization, Enter your keyword and the url, and click. In a moment Voila!

There are two ways to have your site crawled - one is in campaigns and the other is the crawl test. The campaign reports come out every Tuesday. For the crawl test, you will get a report usually within 24 to 48 hours.

Hope this helps,

iNet,

In answer to number 1, there is one giant in China and that is Baidu. Luckily,there are a lot of articles on SEO and Baidu (here is one 8 tips on Baidu and SEO). Also, there are articles on Search Engine Land, etc. so you should be good to go there.

As to number two and three, since I have no direct experience, I would have to refer you to the above.

We are handling a couple of sites in South America and working on an African site. The one cautionary would be that the only way to work with another language is to have a true language pro. So, you have to have someone who works professionally with translation of Chinese for mainland China on a regular basis. I would personally look for someone who has lived there or lives there now that already has clients or a body of work.

Sounds quite exciting, good luck.

Samuel,

I don't think there will be a negative effect unless there is an abundance of these and the page becomes spammy. A couple of cautions would be: "at the bottom of articles" links lower in a page have less value, links in the footer are IMHO of little or no value and tend to clutter everything.

Your site has a nice clean look right now and you dont want tons of links all over the place. If you keep quality content and diverse links you should be fine.

I still don't think you will be harmed by Google. Keri posted a good link below regarding a down website. You should give it a read. I did.

Jose,

My first question would be: Are you absolutely sure nothing exists of the old site. I have heard this many times and had top shelf server pros go in and recreate. Are you sure in any case there was no back up? etc.

If you have no other option, my inclination is that you should get a page up to speak to customers first. Let them know what has happened and provide a time line to resolution. When you say larger scale, that is the scary part for me. So, my next inclination is to do a 302 to the blog and then do the 301 when the new site is up and do it url to url.

Mozzers I am prepared to be wrong on this, so pitch in please.

Best

Clovis

You state:** However, we are having serious problems with my hosting service and the site is unavailable for more than 15 hours.**

Do you have a plan to have the site back up shortly? Next few days even?

** I wonder if this kind of instability can cause some punishment on Google**

Assuming it is not a regular occurrence and the site will be back up in the next day or two even, I do not believe it will be a problem with Google. One thing you could do as soon as it is back up is request to have it reindexed in GWMT. That just gets anything that may have been missed addressed.

I don't understand when you say **Unfortunately we also have no provision for him to return to work. **

Are you meaning the server or an employee who in some way has caused the problem? Again, everything will center around your timetable with getting the site back up. If you can fill in some of the details it will help mozzers in assisting you.

best

While you use "corporate entertainment" more often on your desired page there is a big difference in the page showing in SERPS and your desired page: Home Page is PA=50, desired is PA=20 and home page has over 100 linking root domains while desired has one.

Remember, optimized is more than the keyword term. Also, recheck your on page as there is no H1 in desired. Don't just repeat Corporate Entertainment. Make the content make sense.

Best

What Rasmus says holds the biggest clue. Did you redirect domain to domain or each url to each url? If you did it url to url, you would be seeing any benefit. If domain to domain, you may see benefit....some day.

Svetoslav

Excellent response.

If what you are trying to achieve is to have a canonical that is the www version, you are better served doing two things: First go to Google webmaster tools and select a preferred domain (from GWMT):

To specify your preferred domain:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you've removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you'll need to repeat the verification steps.

Note: Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

To do the 301 redirect of the non www to the www here is the script from Scriptalicious:

**RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]**

Hope this helps you.

Have you done preferred domain in Google?

I don't know how you could have done the 301's and still get both resolving. Have you run xenu or some other program to insure the 301s are there?

Adam151

I am unaware of any methodology around predicting results in SEO. The reasons behind this are myriad, not the least of which is the fact that while you are improving your page/domain, any good competitor will be doing the same to some greater or lesser degree. So here is my suggestion for you:

First, go through your site and insure that your on page SEO is as perfect as is possible.

Look at what your competitors link profiles and see what links you can pick up.

You can look at the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors on SEOmoz. Knowing that most in SEO believe this to be about what most impacts your rankings, you could devote your time to each on the basis of their effect. Such that, Page level link metrics and Domain level Link authority features take up nearly half of your resources.

I suggest running a campaign and throwing in your top three competitors so that you have a good idea as you move as to what is taking place. By tracking what causes the moves, you will no better going forward.

Look at what is being considered more and more important by the SE's. Things like freshness (QDF) and being sure your local is full on perfect. Remember there is more than Google and insure you are also in Bing Business Portal and in Yahoo Local.

With all of that, then tracking the changes for impact, you might later have a better predictive model.

Best

OK, a template is essentially a design architecture so I am assuming you are in the same vertical, different local markets? Then, it is going to be an issue of competition, your on page, your ranking, etc. versus others IMHO.

Bucky, 
I am guessing that many are having trouble answering this as there is just not enough information. Given that it is broad, I would say if they are all in the same vertical, I would be surprised that you only had **one out of 60 that was getting virtually no traffic.  **

If they are in different verticals, you have to look at competition, duplicate content, ranking, etc. Obviously, if this domain is consistently on page 5 and the others are on page 1 of SERPs, there are more questions to ask.

Best,

Sorry Webfeatseo, I totally missed last question there.

If you decide to delete the Places listing and start over, here is a great blog post on that very issue: The Right Way to Remove A Google Places Listing by 540SEO

Sometimes, the only way to ultimately get it right is to delete and start over. Remember, you will be better served by following the guidelines than by not. Here is another link to how to with a lot of links at bottom to good local experts: Optimizing Your Google Places Page by Geoff Kenyon

Miriam also gave you a good list of don'ts above. Good Luck

inhouseseo

I have looked at several of our sites and see no change in results for site:

You stated: **Things I have changed: **

I have added canonical URL links in the header, all have www in the URL.

I believe what is happening (assuming you changed the canonical URL prior to the change in results of site:) is the change is the result of the canonical application you have added. However, I am not sure how you could still have an aggregate of 48K pages, are you sure this is accurate?

If, you are showing 12K of www, and 36K of non www, I would guess that the 12K were duplicated within the 36K. Therefore, you would have only 36K pages on your site.

Typically, when we encounter a site that has both www and non-www we select a preferred domain in WMT and do the 301 redirect in .htaccess file. Once this is done, over a short period, we will have only what we have chosen as the preferred domain www or non www.

So, if we started with 1,000 pages of www and 2,000 of non www, then if preferred choice is non www. We will end up with 2,000 pages total.

My suggestion would be to go into WMT and select a preferred domain and do the 301 redirect in the .htaccess file. Once that is done, I believe your problem will be resolved. rel=canon will not accomplish this in and of itself. Give it a few weeks and check your results.

Best

No worries, the thumb thing was actually a joke. (Even though I do have a very fragile ego!) I am glad you got it worked out, but I would definitely look at what Miriam said. Even if Google does not have an issue today, it does not mean they won't tomorrow. Remember, before Panda shut down a gazillion sites, those people were all just doing fine. 
My experience is that you are not served by using phone number or geography in categories and descriptions. So, consider changing those things that are most aggregious.

That is a bit unclear, sorry.

What I was asking is why Google would just not put the data in, instead of notifying him in WMT or in Places that they had doubts/concerns? I get that they are Google, but it seemed counter productive.

Thoughts?

Miranda,

I am sure Doug is correct as to the reason for the "spike."

Now, a work around could be found in Places, especially if you did some work around their local. You could look at who is looking and coming to the site, etc. Keywords, etc.

I would certainly give that a try as well.
Best

Ahhh, France. The wine, the art, and, uhhh the French...that is the issue. Rand did a WBF on the cc domains and those French with their "French searcher problem."  (They can be so damn....French sometimes)

This advocates using the .cc domain as the best solution in France. However, when cost isan issue you may have to go with what you've got. The advantage of a subdomain or folder is you are likely to get some of the juice of your domain over time.

Rand actually breaks out the advantages and disadvantages of each option quite well and I do not believe my condensing it will help you as much as that short WBF.

To those who would think I was being condescending to the French in the first paragraph, my favorite city in the world is Paris and my fourteen year old son was born there and is a dual citizen. Favorite movie (ok one of my favorites) Paris je t'aime. 
Bon Jour

This is what we did with one client who was not ranking in the first 5 pages for anything in his profession/niche. We bought an exact match domain utilizing hyphens for a major keyword (3 word phrase). His original domain was his name and Lawfirm. You must understand that law firm is not a good keyword.

We then built a new site that was fully optimized around his discipline and what will be most beneficial to him from a client type point of view.

We then did a 301 redirect of url to url www.oldlawfirm.com to www.new-law-term.com in the .htaccess file. Over the first three months we got about 80% of the previous authority and are still getting some now.

Understanding that we are good at SEO and that we write new content, get new links, have him blog, etc. We now have him ranked on Page One of Google and Bing for about half of the best terms for him.

Was it the exact match domain that did it....not alone, but I do believe it helped. I think it still does but don't believe that will be true in say 2 to 5 years.

So, to just get it and use it as a redirected to the old site I would say, don't waste the time or energy. If you are willing to work a bit, you can do some voodoo with it.
Best

Then I would do it as you have and just understand it will take a bit longer.

Keri, 
Just saw this and will send.
Thanks,

I would go with the code the way Rasmus has laid it out for you. I will check out the tool and let youknow.

Nancy

** I want to add a 'cool' way for the user to display the pictures **

So, you want a method for site visitors or customers to display their travel pics?

If so, the first question is how are you building the site? Are you using a CMS (content management system) like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, etc.? Are you having it built online by one of the canned website companies?

If you are using a CMS, I would suggest going to the plugins for that particular CMS and seeing what is available (WP has PhotoSmash, etc - Joomla has RS Gallery 2). Note that you need to research this a bit and be clear on what you want or don't want.

As to the SEO stand point, there are various ways you can work with JQuery, AJAX and still maintain SEO (I won't go into each as that would be a bit). You need to decide on one and then follow up with questions around it. (JQuery slider and maintaining seo for example.) I think if you use a CMS, you will find a good solution that is SEO friendly.

As to the images and amount per page, etc. here is what I would say. First, travel site: try to categorize the images by geography. Make sure each image has a way to put in alt text and give the user a good description of what it is, why they need it, and how to develop good alt text. So a given page would be travels to Costa Rica - this allows users to post pics from their recent trip there. By keeping it geo located, you will keep your keywords around Travel and Costa Rica. (You could sub into Diving, Volcanoe exploring, Rain Forests, etc.

You can then have good title tag, url, H1, H2 meta descrip, etc. With your images try to insure they are geo tagged and consider a way of using Schema as this will put you in the forefront.

Hope this helps you out,

Edit: Nancy I totally forgot to put in that you should also have a mechanism for GeoTagging by the user as that will be huge in a travel site. Let us know how it works out.