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Don't give out good answers too quickly...

Also, they could give you access to their Google Analytics account without giving you their password, just adding you as a user in their settings area, under user manager tab..

Branagan is correct in the above.

I don't know if SEOmoz accepts regular users of Analytics accounts (but I don't see any reason why they shouldn't), but even if they did, your client can add you as administrator. But of course this is not ideal and should not be necessary.

Google added the possibility of adding additional users to Analytics accounts especially for the reason you are asking, so it should work perfectly.

To add to my comment, one of the problems with my solution starts when your navigation changes, which it almost always does.

A solution to this is to for example to use a php include statement for the navigation/header from your old CMS in Wordpress and only link to your Wordpress main page from the navigation. Come to think of it, if you have a good programmer he/she can probably also make sure that new Wordpress pages and the navigation thereof can automatically be inserted into the navigation of your old CMS.

In short, you just need a designer/coder to port your current theme to Wordpress and a programmer to make sure the navigation stays the same in both CMS's.

In my research iframes do get indexed, only just by their URL and not by the page the iframe was incorporated in.

Wordpress itself is indeed an option, but I don't really see why you should an iframe.

It is better to install Wordpress yourself, on your own website in a different directory and put a link in the navigation of the old CMS to the Wordpress directory and have your current theme ported to a Wordpress theme. This way your website will look the same in both your old CMS and Wordpress, as I think this was part of your initial hesitation of not immediately using Wordpress on your own site.

As for SEO impact, that depends on how you look at it. By using an iframe your website does not benefit from the additional content association, but when you link back to your main site from the iframe, that will carry a bit of weight.

But an iframe is definitely not an ideal solution, no.

I would definitely not use no-follow, that just doesn't make any sense as your navigation links are part of your link juice to those pages.

Also, no-follow is meant for links that are outside a webmasters control or for paid links so they are not intended to be used by a webmaster on his own site linking to his own content.

As for too many links in the navigation (at least that is what I assume you meant), that indeed can be a problem for useability. It is always a good idea to see how well-known brands handle this problem, so have a look at for example http://www.ebay.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/

By not showing all links directly in the navigation you can have both a more user friendly website and get rid of the issue you think you have with search engines as then you can better funnel the link juice to the more important pages.

<quote>Do you have Google Adwords? You can change the settings in there to just focus on UK searchers and not US</quote>

I think what is meant Google Webmaster Tools, see https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

There you can change the setting "Geographic target". Should be located at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/settings?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.nut-job.com/

If you don't have an account, I would suggest to create one.

Sorry, but that is a question that is impossible to answer satisfactorily.

I suggest to start with reading this http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

The optimal redirect for both visitors and search engines is to keep the structure as it was, meaning #1.

The optimal solution also follows your options numbering, meaning that for both search engine and visitors the last options is the least desirable.

The optimal solution workload wise, is the exact opposite, as it often is.

Depending on how well related the content is, it might be possible to opt for #2 but it is very rare that option #3 would work well as the content of the entire website, including all its subdomains, has to be extremely well related and basically only cover one single topic.

A few simple questions might help:

• Are all the topics of every single page of the forgotten co-brands present on the homepage? If not, then #3 is not a very good option.

• Are all the topics of every single page of the forgotten co-brands present on the associated subdomain? If not, then #2 is not a very good option.

Another thing to consider is the amount of pages that will be re-directed. I actually have a problem with that at the moment, as I am really not sure how well that will be treated by the search engines.

IMHO you should look at how the redirects are for people first, bots second and equity/domain authority/etc. last. Not to mention that I think that no matter which group you put first, the optimal solution out of the 3 options stays the same as your numbering anyway.

Thanks EGOL, sound advice as always.

I don't think I have ever expressed my gratitude to you, but  you are amongst a very small group of people who I think has never given bad or even wrong advice for as long as I can remember. I learned a whole lot from you the past 10 years and partly because of you I am were I am today and for that I am extremely thankful.

Sorry for going off topic, but now I finally had the opportunity to thank you, I just had to.

Hi all,

I have a question regarding permanently redirecting many small websites into one, large new one.

During the past 9 years I have created many small websites, all focusing on hotel reservations in one specific city. This has served me beautifully in the past, but I have come to the conclusion that it is no longer a sustainable model and therefore I am in the process of creating one large, worldwide hotel reservations website.

To not loose any benefit of my hard work the past 9 years, I want to permanently redirect the smaller websites to the correct section of my new website. I know that if it is only a few websites, that this strategy is perfectly acceptable, but since I am talking about 50 to 100 websites, I am not so sure and would like to have your input.

Here is what I would like to do: (the domain names are not mine, just an example)

Old website: londonhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/london/

Old website: berlinhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/berlin/

Old website: amsterdamhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/amsterdam/

Etc., etc.

My plan is to do this for 50 to 100 websites and would like to have your thoughts on if this is an acceptable strategy or not.

Just to be clear, I am talking about redirecting only my websites that are in good standing, i.e. none of the websites I am thinking about 301'ing have been penalized.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

I would definitely not use no-follow, that just doesn't make any sense as your navigation links are part of your link juice to those pages.

Also, no-follow is meant for links that are outside a webmasters control or for paid links so they are not intended to be used by a webmaster on his own site linking to his own content.

As for too many links in the navigation (at least that is what I assume you meant), that indeed can be a problem for useability. It is always a good idea to see how well-known brands handle this problem, so have a look at for example http://www.ebay.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/

By not showing all links directly in the navigation you can have both a more user friendly website and get rid of the issue you think you have with search engines as then you can better funnel the link juice to the more important pages.

Sorry, but that is a question that is impossible to answer satisfactorily.

I suggest to start with reading this http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Thanks EGOL, sound advice as always.

I don't think I have ever expressed my gratitude to you, but  you are amongst a very small group of people who I think has never given bad or even wrong advice for as long as I can remember. I learned a whole lot from you the past 10 years and partly because of you I am were I am today and for that I am extremely thankful.

Sorry for going off topic, but now I finally had the opportunity to thank you, I just had to.

If you really would want to do something about it, I would say that you will be better off returning 404's, as it is less likely for those bad links to carry any (bad) weight if they point to non-existing pages then it is to establish a relationship between websites by 301'ing.

This assumes that you will 301 the old pages to a website not owned by you, as I don't think you would want bad links to one of your other websites. And because if you 301 the old pages to a domain not owned by you, in effect you are establishing a relationship with a total stranger who may do any number of bad things on its own, which in effect could harm you later.

But if it was up to me, I wouldn't do anything about those bad links. Just try to get new links of better quality and they will very soon outweigh the bad ones. Also, it is quite natural for any kind of website to have low quality links, so IMHO there really is no need to do anything about those old ones, just build better new ones.

Good quality directories are indeed a perfect fit for your needs, but I would not use that company or any company at all.

Do your own research for quality directories in your niche and/or locale/country/state, which will take a while, but IS worth it. Try not to use general directories, as there are so many directories out there it is hardly necessary. Do not use any kind of list made available anywhere, just check for "your niche directory" and if you find some high quality ones, do a related:domain.com search, both to check for new opportunities and to check what Google thinks of that directory. If related:domain.com doesn't return any results or returns websites that are not about that niche or locale, I would not submit to that one.

Then check if the exact page your link will be on is indexed in Bing, if it is, then it is pretty likely of good enough quality to carry some weight as Bing only seems to index high quality pages and leaves all the low quality out of the index, in stark contract to Google which indexes every crappy page their bot sees.

This way I find it still safe and functional to use directories, as Google sees that directory as part of your niche/locale AND Bing thinks the quality of the specific page is enough to be indexed. If both these conditions are met, the directory link will carry weight and because you can specify the anchor text, you will make your backlink profile more natural.

Many people are saying don't use directories, but don't believe everything you read, do your own research. If you do enough research you will find good ones and they will help you.

Indeed Yahoo = Bing, at least in most countries in the world.

As for gaining rankings, it seems Bing is placing more relevance on topic relevant links then Google, who still doesn't seem to care that much.

Also I feel that on-page factors are more important in Bing.

So getting very topic relevant links together with some on-page adjustments should help, but don't overdo the on-page as that might hurt in Google. Probably better to only get the relevant links...

If your existing subdomain is ranking and earning well, it is a risk to move that to a new domain, because not all authority/history/etc. is transferred and you have to be very careful about not changing anything else and still have to hope that all works out as expected.

Building links and authority to the new domain and then linking to the existing subdomain has basically no risk to your current business. Only problem is that you will have to create unique content and get new links, but at least there is no chance of hurting your existing rankings and the real possibility that after the 301 the subdomain is stronger.

But the above is short term thinking, for long term it could very well be wiser to bite the bullet and 301 the old to the new. But that all depends on what you want for the future.

***** Extra info: In the past 8 months I have acquired 10 EMD and 301'd old domains to those new EMD's. 5 websites gained ranking, 3 more or less stayed the same and 2 disappeared to 200+, from top 10. All this was done to websites 4 years old with stable rankings for 2 years and no SEO/link building done for 2 years.

So for me it really was what I felt the luck of the draw what happened with 301's. Later I found that it is not only luck, it also has to do with why the old website was ranking in the first place, content or links was most significant. This of course besides the fact that you should leave everything and I mean everything the same when 301'ing.

Don't give out good answers too quickly...

Also, they could give you access to their Google Analytics account without giving you their password, just adding you as a user in their settings area, under user manager tab..

Branagan is correct in the above.

I don't know if SEOmoz accepts regular users of Analytics accounts (but I don't see any reason why they shouldn't), but even if they did, your client can add you as administrator. But of course this is not ideal and should not be necessary.

Google added the possibility of adding additional users to Analytics accounts especially for the reason you are asking, so it should work perfectly.

No entirely sure, but I have schema.org setup on many of my websites and on none of them is there anything about schema.org in the section nor have I ever read about it.

Everything is normally in the part within div's.

This maybe helpful if it is a WP blog, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordlift/, but I have not personally used it so cannot vouch for it, just found it doing a search.

These links may help a bit

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/uk/archive/2012/04/13/optimising-website-content-for-higher-rankings-on-bing.aspx

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/04/05/social-and-seo-myths-reviewed.aspx

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/01/12/things-you-should-avoid.aspx