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>

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!

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!

HAHA. Great. Thanks for the 'prop's. Going 4th and 5th level deep for sub-domains can also impeed the user experience when wanting to reach it directly (typing it manually is a pain!!)..

Thanks anyways, glad I could be of some help.

Stay away as much as possible for 4th, 5th and 6th level sub-domains, although I have never seen it go beyond 5. I would really try to emphasize the value of re-tooling the domain structure for long term benefits and linking. Keeping sub-domains running isolates link value and doesn't benefit the entire domain - thus making link building a much harder challenge. You are losing link 'juice' for every level of sub-domain used, as the value drops for each section of the domain that extends - hence the reason sub-folders are the way to go (as you already know)...

Good luck with the client and site. Sounds like a tough call. All the best and I hope it works out

Hey there!

You should try to stay away from sub-domains, unless they really serve a purpose for the domain - then different strategies can be put into place. As I don't know if it's the route you need to take, I am going to proceed to give you an alternate option :).

1. You could always use sub-folders which in a nutshell would allow you to build links to the domain on many fronts and have them all count.

** NOTE: any links built to sub-domains don't flow link 'juice' to within the site. Those links build for whatever reason, will only pass value within that specific sub-domain.

2. What I would do, it replicate and migrate the structure of the sub-domains into the root domain of the site (www.site.com/subfolder1/ and 301 and rel-canonical all the sub-domain pages and structure to the new locations. That way, all link juice, value, etc already established is already kept in tact and just redirect all that value, trust and back-links to pages within the domain.

This to me is the best option to relocate the content, improve the domain structure using sub-folders instead of sub-domains, and maintain the back link profile already build (or existing) on the site/domain URL.

Other factors might affect reasons not to pursue this option, but I have always had success with this in large enterprise sites, when wanting to restructure the way domains handle sub-domains

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!

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

Hi C nature,

OK, there are many schools of thought on this, so many SEO's will have different views. Nothing wrong with that Sure, Search engines and research speculates now that exact match domain names are no longer the be-all, end all of SEO relative positioning.

I have done several tests with regards to this, building test sites that are exact vs non-exact match domains based on market research. The exact match always (90%) of the time, beat out the other versions.

All my hyphenated domains tests have always taken longer (ave 44% longer) to start ranking, gathering rankings based on KW research than the non-hyphenated counterpart.

One other thing to consider is how search engines perceive hyphenated domains. Because they have been known to be used/abused by spammers (which ultimately made them less credible from a trust perspective). This in turn was a direct correlation to the amount of time I mentioned (ave 44% longer) to get ranking.. search engines have a tendency to take longer authenticating these domain types, vs their non-hyphenated cousins.

If your looking for quicker results, perhaps focused around 1-2 main keywords, then the exact match domain (non-hyphenated) would be your best bet, to build the site/domain around. For that specific keyword or 2, it will yield the quickest results over time. Link building, social profiles etc will still need to be built out to get signals moving in the domains favor to establish itself within the SERP's.  It will be up to you to build out a more structured plan around other keywords/terms to focus on for short and long tail search through content development and on-site optimization.

The competitiveness of the 'target' keyword can also play a factor into the domains non-hyphenated domain and ranking performance. If the domain also has brand level keywords (something like coca-cola-softdrinks.com might be difficult (if not near impossible) to even begin to rank for due to the brand authority recognized online of the actually coca-cola company site). It really depends on the scenario.

If your looking to build something long term, that could eventually be recognized, your best bet would be to build a site/domain out with a brand' style domain using a 'company brand name' and optimize it around that. It won't be exact match, and may take longer, but over time will build the trust using brand authority will yield better results.

If you think about it, typing in something like your example above (business-broker-alabama.com) would be a real pain in the a#$, LOL. It would either be the non-hyphenated or a brand level domain optimized around the focus on your domain example which would yield a better user experience from the get-go.

I'm thinking about re-doing my test/thesis over to determine if recent statements on exact match domains has changed in value. I think I feel inspired to do it again !! Time to start digging.

My opinion would be either non-hyphenated or brand level domain building. Stay away from the hyphenated and spammy looking domains.

Hope this helps. Cheers!

Yep, having a natural link profile is what it is all about. No follow and follow links, social media links, text and website links, forum and blog links. It's all comes together in the link graph overall, as a whole - and allows the search engines to calculate.

No follows, don't actually pass any 'juice' on a link level, but having these signals allows search engines to calculate the nofollow into the variable, and give weight in itself.

It's a wonderful thing

Hi Cindy -

Why would you set the default URL to non-www, and then set GA to track the WWW address? I think you should send all your traffic and tracking to one or the other. That's the first step in cleaning this up.

I would suggest mapping everything to the www version as you have this set in for your 301. Sooner than later would be best to get accurate tracking started.

oh - and fix the tracking code - to include the WWW version and not the non-www. That also needs fixing.

Cheers, Rob