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Thanks - good question. I agree with a previous poster that any website should possess friendly URL'S, such is a given these days and ultimately aids user awareness and navigation. You really should carefully research and think about the time required for URLS rewrites - these can be quit dangerous and if not done properly can damage your rankings. Certainly breadcrumb trails are a big plus so that's something I would definitely recommend.

So you're only taking about branded links then otherwise what a link actually is these days is not so clear.

Dude you need to figure out if you even have a poor link profile before you start thinking of disavowing anything. You could have poor content or duplicate content on your domain that caused the drop or as you suggested because you closed PPC... very conspiratorial! Is there a correlation between adwords and google search?

Something the EU anti-trust commision on the break up of Google need to look at that if it's true.

Can you give me an example of what a natural link looks like or is these days?

First thing, did you ever establish why your seo dropped off and why you disappeared from your original position?Secondly, what did those other agencies do that was poor?

I can't help you I'm too busy but I might be able to point you in the right direction - then the rest is up to you.

Hi guys

thanks for your responses. You've confirmed what I suspected, especially the implications concerning ccTLD's.

There are none. To be honest, it's more about being tidy and organised, and managing a domain's web presence in a systematic way, and not getting bogged down in other digital areas. If one gets their website techincally organised in a way that complies with the search guidelines, i.e redirects put where they should be, canonical urls correct, broekn links repaired, duplicate urls and pages removed and/or redirected, then I foresee fewer problems for SME's on the digital journey.

Cheers

Nominet have made a new TLD available, the .uk TLD. Some might argue that this is a cynical move by Nominet to get more money out of British businesses, but either way, we need to decide how we handle this. As I see it we have 4 options.

1. Do nothing - At the moment, only websites can register their .uk domain. That won't last for ever though, and eventually, if we don't register it, someone else will.
2. Register a domain but do nothing with it.
3. Register a domain and simply redirect it to the existing .co.uk domain. I suspect this is the best option.
4. Register the .uk domain and redirect the .co.uk domain to the new domain.

From a technical point of view, what is the best option? For businesses that have multi-lingual sites the 4th appears the best option but why do we need to act when we do not even know the SEO value of any of this, and where Google sit regarding the new British TLD?

Where is the evidence that these work? I have never seen them work. Google totally ignores the URL parameters tools in GWTs.

Make sure you disavow the right links. if it's done wrong your website will never recover.

other good things your can do is get fresh links, new links from other sources. depending on how much time you've got you could recover.

Have you looked at your competitors robots.txt file? they are probably blocking the very same searches you are talking about. if there is a particular bot like a Chinese crawler for example baidu that you don't want to come to your site you can block them via the command: User-agent: Baiduspider

Per se they don't but a high bounce rate will harm your site - no one knows the extent of this but an adverse bounce rate makes up a part of the quality ranking signals (more than 200) Google uses to evaluate a site in the serps.

Therefore having several 404's can effect a bounce rate figure negatively and ultimately harm a site to a lesser or greater degree.

However, 50 I don't think is high relative to the numbers of visitors that navigate to a second page which is a postive metric - if that is the case for you I wouldn't worry. But 50 404's on a website with 200 pages is bad.

Per se they don't but a high bounce rate will harm your site - no one knows the extent of this but an adverse bounce rate makes up a part of the quality ranking signals (more than 200) Google uses to evaluate a site in the serps.

Therefore having several 404's can effect a bounce rate figure negatively and ultimately harm a site to a lesser or greater degree.

However, 50 I don't think is high relative to the numbers of visitors that navigate to a second page which is a postive metric - if that is the case for you I wouldn't worry. But 50 404's on a website with 200 pages is bad.

First thing, did you ever establish why your seo dropped off and why you disappeared from your original position?Secondly, what did those other agencies do that was poor?

I can't help you I'm too busy but I might be able to point you in the right direction - then the rest is up to you.

Nominet have made a new TLD available, the .uk TLD. Some might argue that this is a cynical move by Nominet to get more money out of British businesses, but either way, we need to decide how we handle this. As I see it we have 4 options.

1. Do nothing - At the moment, only websites can register their .uk domain. That won't last for ever though, and eventually, if we don't register it, someone else will.
2. Register a domain but do nothing with it.
3. Register a domain and simply redirect it to the existing .co.uk domain. I suspect this is the best option.
4. Register the .uk domain and redirect the .co.uk domain to the new domain.

From a technical point of view, what is the best option? For businesses that have multi-lingual sites the 4th appears the best option but why do we need to act when we do not even know the SEO value of any of this, and where Google sit regarding the new British TLD?