Hey Justin,

I've done the complete DistilledU training. It's advanced in sections and at times, very basic. It's pretty much covers everything tho. It's very much learn at your own pace, as is MarketMotive and I have all my strategists or consultants work through Distilled and Moz as part of the their training for in house work. I don't know anyone who has done the Market Motive courses, but I can tell you after spending a little more time on it today, that I will be going through and possibly ordering it. We are also HubSpot certified as an agency so many of these certifications would benefit that tie we have with their products.

My guess, the advanced training you would be looking for - would be MarketMotive.com as I am looking at it myself for our agency and our teams! That's my 2 cents I plan on getting budgets set aside and getting it all lined up. I'm sold and going to move it into the pipeline.

Absolutely! This is probably a priority project in my eyes if you are serious about building this up and going in the right direction now.

Moving the BLOG to your domain.com will not only improve the relation to your site and content, but brand it as well. Having the BLOG on another  domain (as it is now) might help you from a link building perspective (more than likely not helping very much) due to the fact Google would know you own that domain, and perhaps place  less emphasis on  the inbound links to the main site.

First - setup your site/domain to host the BLOG as you mentioned. www.domain.com/blog.  There are a  few reasons for this.

1. It will allow you to reap the rewards of the  content you build (supporting your site/company/mission) and support the main domain,  and it's

2. The content you build, share and move into the social sphere and space will allow for inbound links to be shared across the entire site/domain. (don't build it into a sub-domain like blog.domain.com as this  is considered to be a completely separate domain and  won't pass any link value and  juice across the domain).  sub-domains are considered to be domains by themselves in the eyes of a search engine like Google.

3. The content you build (and load daily to the BLOG) will keep search spiders coming back for more

4. Keeping the BOG content on the main domain, allows you to share the content of the BLOG to your web visitors who might be searching via BRAND or specific, helping associate the brand with the content marketing resource you are building. This in itself is a gold-mine, as it will also act as another source for long-tail traffic opportunity, but you'll have to do  your due diligence on this from  a research perspective to capitalize on the traffic.

5. Content marketing is going to be BIG  (as it's already on the rise and exploding now). This will all fall under your efforts for the BLOG and  should be focused on.  The value here is  that  over time,  Google will begin to apply TRUST and AUTHORITY factors to the content you write  and submit - helping to support your brand as a  quality resource of shared information for people.

Make sure to use rel=canonical from  the old location URL's and point those over to the new URL's on  the domain.com/blog listing. Also make sure  to use rel=author for each of the articles on the new blog from a META position.

NOTE:  Handling a migration such as this is very complex (especially if the BLOG is extremely large with thousands, or 10's of thousands of posts and articles). Even a few hundred can be TRICKY!

Not only do you have to setup the files (BLOG) on the new domain, but you will have to write and execute 301's for every single article on the old location/domain and point that over to the new one.  Some CMS's like Drupal can assist with this if your programmers can handle writing the scripts. This is a  very technical undertaking, so make sure to do your research.  If it's a small resource, you can still follow the same protocols, but it will take much less time to complete.

I recently handled and oversaw a technical project like this months back that took quite a long time to do, troubleshoot as it had over 30K articles and 25K in image files over the past 6 years! It was a huge undertaking that  went extremely well, but you have to be patient.

Hope this  helps some!  There's probably a little more I didn't mention as I'm late for a  meeting with a client!, so if  you have questions -  let me know!

Rob

Yes, it looks spammy too and really isn't helpful to users and visitors who are reading the information you are writing and sharing. Don't scare your users away with spammy looking links. It's probably affecting the on page elements as well as constantly reproducing the same (internal or external links) on all these blogs posts. These type of 'footer' links at the bottom of all the posts also look spammy to the engines. If you do keep them there, select only 1-2 that are of importance and rel=nofollow the others. I

My recommendation if to link naturally inside the site and blog. Don't just link to yourself., your products, or your pages. Be bigger than that Link to other outside sources as well. Don't be afraid to expand on the type of links you use inside your content. Most people are, but when you link intelligently, and for the benefit of the user, the page's performance, click through, time on page/site, etc will improve. It's a win/win for you and your users experience. Not only will you see in time that you are linking to other really valuable sources for your clients, those sites will be watching who is linking to them, and might garner the attention of the staff there for a natural link mention on their site, or request for a 'quest post'.

Hope some of that helps! Cheers

Sounds like the indexing issues are causing some drops in ranking, even though good based content and domain authority are present.

Also, the .v1 site looks to be a testing platform?Could that be possible? I recently had an issue with an enterprise client site with very similar issues - with multiple testing versions of the domain up and indexable, causing massive amounts of duplicate content, indexed content and indexing issues.

I would plan to assess any content that could me migrated over to the main site from the .v1, and 301 redirect (and rel-canonical) the old .v1 site pages. Keep those in place for a few months to ensure that all the value of the 301 take effect.

By migrating some of this valuable content over (or all of it), just make sure you use both properly executed 301 redirects, and to take it a step further, apply the canonical tag on the .v1 pages with redirects to the exisiting and correct pages on the main domain. This way, we know for sure all any value is being passed.

SIDE NOTE: Having that many pages, indexed content doesn't mean the site will do well. In fact with this poor setup, the site's massive amount of page URL's might be causing more damage. Too many pages will bad page quality scores can and will bring a site down. Plan to migrate the pages or sections of the site to the main domain (that hold the most value), 301 and rel-canonical the other's, and remove the bad pages with little to no value that may be causing site wide damage in search indexing.

In dumping lots of content from the site - redirect those URL's (being dumped) to a helpful 404 page, which will try to salvage any user hitting the page, and redirecting them to back into sections of pages of the site. Also - make sure that page has a useful 'search' option that is clear to allow them to search for something they might have tried to land on through organic indexed content.

Finally, once you see indexing improve and redirect those pages automatically in the SERP's through reporting in weeks or months to come, then you can shut down the old .v1 pages without fear of losing any value you had.

It's a lengthy process and a big project, but the client (and site) should see huge value in the time you are taking to manage it. It will maintain value for the site in the long run and help build a better platform going forward.

Cheers!

Jesse's right. AS much as your client doens't want to upgrade and rework the entire site (build an equivalent in HTML or PHP), there isn't much you can do. This is a full FLASH site, locked SWF and Google isn't going to crawl or index any of the content or information.

You could do a few other things to help the business on a local level:

1. Build up all the social profiles and media needed to support Google local search. Social media, Google+, FB and Twitter sould be a good start. Even a LinkedIn profile to support the company and business.

2. Add in a WORDPRESS customization feature to the site, and build up a blog for content marketing and development. Work to create content around each of these categories and redirect users back to the company site. You don't have specific landing page URL's to use and optimize, but it's a cost effective start if they are unwilling to bend on going the route that will benefit them the most.

I've had clients like this and it's the hardest thing to tell them everything they have or are doing is wrong on many levels. It's probably the most sensitive area when dealing with a client you don't want to upset Tough road ahead for sure.

Cheers!

1. Remove the punctuation. Although it doesn't really damage search listings or impact how SERP's look at your site for rankings, as Chris said, you only have so many characters to work with in the <title>field and it's best to really optimize the <title> to improve end-user experience :)</p> <p>2. Craft custom <titles> for each and every page, and consider where you place the KW in the field. Importance will be taken into account as well as position and meaning of the KW in relation to the <title>. Try mixing things up to see where you impact ranking positions. I would still remove all punctuation (but perhaps, keep a few pages ranking now, with punctuation to see if you impact the rankings) See #3 below.</p> <p>3. Look at choosing a few test pages in the domain to work with to monitor rankings for this very test, and analytic's data like bounce, exit, click through, etc. </p> <p>4. Doing this will also help you reveal how the customer reacts to the page once they click in, after the find it in the organic SERP listings. Did the punctuation impact your rankings, and if so, was the click through higher, while also decreasing the bounce and/or exit rates from said pages from end-user? A great experiment and test platform :)</p> <p>It's not an exact science, but more a art and science mixed together ;). I wish you all the best with this, as it sounds very interesting. Keep us all posted on your findings!!</p> <p>Cheers.</p></title>

I would say there is another option Julien. Just because your 'primary' KW is the focus of the homepage, it doesn't mean it is the highest converting KW for your company/site or for that specific product. Of course, you have to dig for data a little looking at how best to approach it and how that internal page performs, what KW's drive traffic (digging deeper than not provided)

Yes, your homepage has the most domain authority value (mainly, but not always). It's again, not the best page to rank for all your terms, if the bounce and exit rates are above average and/or high. This indicates that those KW's are not converting for your homepage at the best possible rate.

In the past, I have moved the KW focus to the actual product landing page and taken the focus away from the homepage, optimizing and working on improving the UI/UX, information, product, image, video etc, on that specific page - in hopes it would outrank the main primary page and thus, convert at a higher rate. As these product pages when worked on helped the 'visitors' get directly to the page that they are looking for, without having to search for it and navigate to it from the homepage (yet, another click). Why not simplify the process sending them directly to the main page of information?

Work to identify other KW's you can use to draw focus for on the main homepage and shift that focus around.

When building out your product page for the KW, I suggest as I mentioned above - work everything about the UI/UX, design, information, photos, videos, etc etc making it an extremely valuable page (think - make it THE MOST valuable page you can think of) to help visitors, thus, more than likely converting at higher rates, decreasing bounce and exit rates to the page.

As well, the added page authority, which will strengthen the domain authority overall on the site will improve the overall experience to users.

Just a thought to help you out on success I have had with similar issues.

Cheers, Rob

Are these FORUM posts/page URL's part of the primary root domain? Are they in a separate FOLDER or DIR within the ROOT of the site? How is it structured? Are they still being crawled and indexed? Are they still indexed?

My bet is that you could map out these old post/URL's and possibly 301 them to more relevant information on your site, that deals with, or discusses the topic at hand. You don't want to flat out remove them, have a pile of 404 error's show up and then have to worry about salvaging the damage later. Map out the pages you want to dump - see if there is relevant more up to date conversations that are within the same topic and 301 redirect them to those locations.

You might want to considering removing the one's you can't 301 to more up to date relevant information, if there is no page to do so. You could map these out and possibly create content on the site or BLOG that answers the forum's post, but that might take time and money? That way, future people would find information to handle that very question and not be posting a question about it in the Forum

Unfortunately, in my experience, FORUM's have this issue and I think will continue to have this issue. There is no once recipe to fix the problem of outdated forum posts, or outdated URL's  - but you can leverage some of that and turn it back into traffic for the site - and traffic that is still valuable if it has a purposes (redirect). If not - you can remove the old URL's/posts, let them 404 and remove them through GWMT systematically as they begin to populate your crawl reports from Google.

Either way, it's an option to look at to clean up the site and site pages/depth if you feel those pages have little to offer UX or visiting customers Remember, Google has confirmed that pages that hurt your overall site score, can pull down your natural rankings in the SERP's if pages that are of low-quality don't help the site, users or the user/customer-visitor experience.

Hope that helps a little! Cheers

This information might help you make a decision, but it sounds like your strategy will be mainly focused on the Signapore marketplace. I would read this to help you decide which domain you want/should run with based on the business or personal site and geolocation for operations. Hope this helps you a little. Without more information from you, it's difficult to give you points on which one would be better based on your goals

|

The .SG domain has 9 extensions as shown below :

|
| sg | This category is available to all with a valid Singapore postal address. A foreign applicant may apply for a domain name in this category as long as it appoints a local agent having a valid Singapore postal address as the Administraive Contact. |
| com.sg | Commercial entities may wish to register in this extension. Applicants registering for a .com.sg will need to be either registered, or in the midst of registering, with the Accounting & Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), IE Singapore or any professional body. A foreign company which is not so registered may only apply for a .com.sg domain name if it appoints a local agent as the Administrative Contact. This local agent shall be a legal entity that is similarly registered by any of the afore-mentioned organisations and is duly authorised by the foreign company. |

Really detailed overlook. Nice touching on everything.

Just something to add if you want to consider this in your planning scope. My proffesional opinion is surely sub-folders, keeping away from sub-domains (unless for a very specific reason needed).

1. If you are building a multilingual site, you should also consider how you will be building back-links through various methods (content development, company blog, etc) and will those be done in each language to support the authority needed to build rankings in each language you are working to expand on?

2. If you are going to be building different divisions of the domain (Chinese, and perhaps later going French, German, etc), consider building out TLD's for each domain that's needed in specific languages and focus on building those separate sites. That way you can focus on content development, social media and marketing efforts specific to each language, thus improving your options for the search in each country.

Just some thoughts to think about depending on the scope of your project and sites.

Cheers!

Make a list of each site you want to look for guest blogging and posting opportunities. You are geo-located in the UK, so I would even segment those lists into 2, .com and .co.uk sites. Then look at the domain profiles, DA/PA and back-link structures. Map out all the data to profile each site you can (use Moz! tools) and list out all the data.

I would then start to prioritize them in each category. I would certainly look to use the .co.uk sites over the .com, unless the .com sites are heavily authority related. That's about that. The .com's aren't a total loss, and consider using them when the domain profiles you gather show that they are themselves authorities in their niche markets.

Cheers!