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Hi Tom,

I would never throw away traffic unless it came from a "questionable" source.

If the reason for the domain switch is because the domain more accurately reflects the client's business, then the existing traffic is also likely to be relevant. This gets you "one foot in the door" in terms of conversion.

If you still have the existing site loaded, then you are in a good position, because you already know the URL and content of the existing pages.

My recommendation to the client would be to do the work to salvage the existing traffic for the domain. How well you do the job will depend on how large the existing site is, how much traffic it has and how much work the client is willing to pay for,

The process would be to add 301 redirects for all existing URL's on the new domain (that will not exist once the new content is added) in addition to 301's for all of the pages on the domain that you are transferring from. The best way to do this is to ensure that each is redirected specifically to a page containing content that is relevant. Obviously, if the old site is large and/or the budget is small, this will be more work than you are getting paid for. In that case, you have the option of redirecting groups of pages to a relevant category page, or in the easiest, but least advisable, just redirect them all to the home page.

If the existing traffic to the new domain is insignificant, then you shouldn't lose too much sleep over just redirecting them all to the home page, but if there are some visitors there, I would explain to the client that sending them to a relevant page gives him a chance of converting them.

If you choose not to redirect any of the pages you are just setting up a situation where you constantly play "catch up' on the 404's - you cannot know how long it will really take for every link in existence to be clicked by someone. Don't forget that the biggest link source will be indexed pages in search engines. These don't always get de-indexed in the time frame we expect, so there is no correct time period within which links will just go away.

I wrote a blog post on this recently after doing a "salvage' job for a client whose designer installed a new site version and killed off all his old pages without redirecting anything. While your situation is different, It talks about redirecting for relevance, so might be worth a read.

Hope this helps

Sha

Hi Tom,

It would help if you can clarify the situation a little more...

It sounds like you are intending to replace the old site with content that is totally unrelated to what is currently on the domain. Is that  correct?

The alternative would be that you are simply creating a new version or a site with similar type of content.

The approach will be different according to your situation.

Sha

Hi Eric,

This should give you the basics:

• Add Keywords to Product Titles and Descriptions
• Add UPC Codes (required)
• Add Shipping cost info (required)
• Add Seller Reviews
• Add Rich Snippets
• Optimize your Product_Type column
• Only use Google's product taxonomy for google_product_category

Remember not to confuse product_type and google_product_category. Both should be used, but the latter must use the correct taxonomy. Taxonomy is downloadable from the Google Merchant Center.

Do some careful reading on that page and throughout the Merchant Center. This is one area where crossing t's and dotting i's is VERY important!

Even though google_product-category is not required for all countries and products, recommendation is to use it for ALL products. Taxonomy is available for download as both .txt and excel spreadsheet.

Make sure your feeds are clean and push them every day.

Best of Luck!

Try 50 Grove , the Video Production Directory at Video Hosting company Wistia.

Since Wistia put this together for the benefit of customers, the contacts ought to be pretty solid.

They are also listed according to budget (and sortable according to least or most expensive).

Whenever Matt Cutts discusses this subject in the Webmaster Tools videos and elsewhere, there is always a caveat along the lines of "while google mostly take notice of noindex and robots.txt, this may not always be acted upon". The primary reason given for this seems to be if content is indexed via a link from another site, or exists in google cache. In these cases it seems logical that it may continue to appear in the index.

Your question reminded me of Dr Pete's Catastrophic Canonicalization Experiment - it seems his method proved quite effective

Hi,

I have a little issue with a client site whose programmer seems kind of unwilling to change things that he has been doing a long time.

So, he has had this dynamic site set up for a few years and active in google webmaster tools and others, but is not happy with the traffic it is getting.

When I looked at webmaster tools I see that he has a sitemap registered, but it is /sitemap.php

When I said that we should be offering the SE's /sitemap.xml his response is that sitemap.php checks the site every day and generates /sitemap.xml, but there is no /sitemap.xml registered in webmaster tools.

My gut is telling me that he should just register /sitemap.xml in webmaster tools, but it is a hard sell

Anyone have any definitive experience of people doing this before and whether it is an issue?

My feeling is that it doesn't need to be rocket science...

Any input appreciated,

Sha

Hi Ryan,

This has been mentioned a few times in the Google Webmaster help videos by Matt Cutts. This  Google Webmaster Help Video on fixing incorrect results in the SERPs is one of them.

Hope it helps.

Sha

Hi There Oznappies,

Hope its warmer in your little spot in Oz than down here on Kangaroo Island!

Google has a team of people who work on developing algorithms to find this according to Matt Cutts who talks about these crypto 404's in the linked webmaster help video.

I have also seen Matt mention in a number of other webmaster help videos that if you see something that is just plain wrong when sites are returned in Google SERP's that the quickest way to deal with it is to grab good screenshots (of the SERP and where it takes you) and then post the problem in Webmaster Central Help pages. By doing this it will be seen by either Google staff or moderators who can escalate the issue to get it dealt with.

This is prob your best option. Buying the domain won't guarantee that you keep the ranking - eventually it would get dropped anyway and/or you would have to put content on it, optimize and build links etc.

Hi,

Effectively it is your choice, but once you have chosen you should be consistent.

There are some things to take into consideration before you make your choice.

Cyrus gave a good explanation of this in Whiteboard Friday a while ago. Definitely worth a look.

Have a great day

Sha

Hi Marcus,

There is a general belief that Google and probably other search engines can generally identify and ignore credit links and that part of this is attributed to location on the page. Footer links are the most obvious of these.

If you search Google Webmaster Central for references to credit links in footer or footer link value, you will find quite a lot of discussion of this.

Thanks Alan,

Pointed me in the right direction - only focusing on the external links.

Turns out a forum was shut down recently which was the source of more than 1200 links (and 1 linking c block, of which there don't seem to be a whole lot). Seems the client has not employed a very diversified linking strategy.

Thanks again,

Have a great night

In the process of trying to figure out why a site has suddenly seen a massive fall in traffic and just noticed that MozTrust has suddenly gone to zero - was previously around 2.

Any ideas on factors most likely to result in total loss of MOZtrust for a site?

That's great!

I'll keep an eye out for news on the subject 

thanks again,

Thanks William,

I figured this was what was happening, but I suppose I imagined since it is obviously going to create duplicate content issues that the WP people would have been smart enough to make it add a canonical tag or something.

Thanks for the info on the plugin - much appreciated!

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone can explain for me why it seems every tag that is entered in WP blog posts on a site creates a duplicate page (identified by ROGER and friends in SEOmoz crawl)?

Obviously if you can offer a solution (apart from the extremely obvious "don't use tags") I would be immensely grateful.

Thanks so much,

Thanks Alan,

I will continue to use the server response setting when generating other sitemaps and recommend that our Techs ditch the home grown script that assigns the single date and time in future.

II must say also, it is great to have such clear and reliable advice - very glad to have you around!

Thanks again.

My Tech lead is concerned that his use of a script to generate XML sitemaps for some client sites may be causing negative issues for those sites.

His concern centers around the fact that the script generates a sitemap which indicates that every URL page in the site was last modified at the exact same date and time. I have never heard anything to indicate that this might be a problem, but I do know that the sitemaps I generate for other client sites can choose server response or not.

What is the best way to generate the sitemap? Last mod from actual time modified, or all set at one date and time?

A couple of thoughts -

1. First is along the lines of the latter part of Tait's answer, but just a little different:
   Leave up all of the free questions for a limited time (ie 60 days), making it clear that a selection of the more challenging/interesting questions may be answered within that time period, but with clickable options on each one to enable users to escalate it to either 14 days, 24 hours or 15 mins (when online) by paying the appropriate fee. This would allow other people with the same question to see it and escalate it to get an answer that may help everyone.

2. Second is to set a limit on the number of free questions accepted each day and have the site indicate when the day's quota of free questions is filled. If people really want an answer they will pay, or get in earlier tomorrow to ask it for free.

Hi,

Just a few things to start...

• Use your name ... IAC is not automatically known to the world and since your name includes what you do, I would lose the abbreviation in most instances and take advantage of the value inherent in your name.
• rename your page files using targeted keyword phrase for each page
• follow the advice Daniel posted

Hope that helps

Hi Aran,

Thanks ... that is pretty much what I was thinking, just blew my mind when I saw it so wanted to check my reasoning.

The second domain is basically a part of the other site (which represents a niche), so I am thinking that those pages in the main site should reference the same pages in the niche site.

Your suggestion of using canonicals is slightly different from my initial solution - thought I should use 301 redirects so that juice is passed to the pages on the second domain. Is there a reason why you would use canonicals rather than 301's?

I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content.

I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me...

The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic.

Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?

Hi Anton,

If it happens to be an OsCommerce Store, there are modules out there that you can install which allow you to see and manually edit Category and Product Titles and Tags in the catalog section of your admin panel. Just check out the Oscommerce community pages for one that suits you.

In the situation where you are using product feeds which often provide identical titles and descriptions you can just edit the ones you want to change - what you don't manually edit simply uses the information from the product description.

If you are not using a standard installation like OsCommerce or some other shopping cart software that has these modules available you can get a programmer to write you a simple script which allows you to do the same thing (or write it yourself if you have the skills). We have several client sites that are dynamic (some wordpress, some custom php etc) where this has been a problem and our programmer has written me a script which provides a web interface which allows me to edit titles, tags and content as I wish. It is a fairly simple process (according to him!)

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your responses Alan.

Since these are client sites, it is our policy to seek permission before sharing information about site status. I will do this and provide some examples once permission has been obtained.

Well none of those things would appear to be an issue. However, all of them are small sites created for very small businesses.and so have only 5 or 7 pages (with a good amount of information on the pages). Perhaps the overall size of the site is a factor.

Have you noticed any bias against smaller sites in your research?

I decided not to worry too much about the statements from google indicating that they were going to consider key word rich domains as a negative for ranking since any of the sites I work on that have them are totally relevant to the content on the sites.

However, since recent Google algorithm updates I see these domains have suddenly slid from top 3 positions to page 4 or beyond in Google SERP's. Nothing has changed on these sites in the intervening time and no change is evident in Bing or Yahoo SERP's.

Is it just my imagination, or are others seeing the same thing for keyword rich domains? and has anyone yet determined the best way to deal with this problem?