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The reason for leaving the homepage is purely branding.  It will eventually be redirected to the holding company's site.

Thanks for the help.  Great point of view on how it could be viewed as negative SEO in the 'bots' of Google.

-Greg

Hi Irving,

Thanks for your response.  I hadn't thought of this as a way for a competitor to do negative SEO to another site.  It does bring a good concern to light though.  From what I have seen, the link farms typically did not have good content, nor were they relevant.  While that would be good to harm a site, these two sites are in the same industry which makes the very relevant.  I have seen other companies 301 an old site to a new domain before and have no issues.

What would you recommend?  301 the entire site, including the homepage?  Or removing the 301's completely?

Thanks for your input.

Hello, I just started working with a new client. Since then the client has purchased another company. We have re-branded the new companies home page and 301 redirected the rest of the site's links to the corresponding pages on the holding companies site. Since then the rankings have tanked. I looked at both companies back link profiles and realized that they are quite spammy from the last SEO contractor they hired. That said, the site was ranking fine until last Friday. I was wondering if anyone had seen temporary rankings decrease after 301ing a domain to a different site? Thanks!

Hi Kathryn,

I ran into the same problem a while back.  I had multiple tags on posts that were redirecting to the same post with different URLs.  As you said that creates a dup content issue.

I did exactly what John said to do, and it took care of the issue.

-Greg

Hi Jason,

Consistency is going to be key when formatting your sites URLs.  If you choose to use 'www' or 'non-www' there is not a difference.  Where people run into trouble is not using 'rel=canonical' in the tag to show the search engines that 'www.yoursite.com' goes to 'yoursite.com' or vice versa.  If you do not have these tags in place the search engines will view the page are two separate pages, and you will run into a duplicate content issue.

So to recap, be consistent and use the appropriate 'rel=canonical' tag and everything should turn out just fine.

-Greg

I am trying to figure out the number of searchers that use wildcards (*) in their searches.  I cannot find much information about a percentage or even ballpark figure.  If there is not information on that, what is the percentage of users that use the 'advanced search' options?  I am guessing the numbers would be semi-similar.

Thanks!