Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Our company gets inbound links from news websites that write stories about upcoming sporting events. The links we get are pointing to our event / ticket inventory pages on our commerce site. Once the event has passed, that event page is basically a dead page that shows no ticket inventory, and has no content.  Also, each “event” page on our site has a unique url, since it’s an event that will eventually expire, as the game gets played, or the event has passed. Example of a url that a news site would link to: mysite.com/tickets/soldier-field/t7493325/nfc-divisional-home-game-chicago bears-vs-tbd-tickets.aspx Would there be any negative ramifications if I set up a 301 from the dead event page to another page on our site, one that is still somewhat related to the product in question, a landing page with content related to the team that just played, or venue they play in all season. Example, I would 301 to: mysite.com/venue/soldier-field tickets.aspx (This would be a live page that never expires.) I don’t know if that’s manipulating things a bit too much.

I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before.  Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site.  I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps.  I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it.  So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT.  I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages.  Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.)  Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?

When doing the following search on Google "Ticket King Milwaukee hours" we see the wrong hours displayed at the top of the page. Just to the left of our places page, you will see "Tuesday hours 8:30-1:00 pm." That 1 pm closing comes up for every weekday, even though we are open until 6 pm weekdays, and 3 pm on Saturdays. I have checked the hours listed on our G+ page, our "Places for Business" page, our "about us" page on our website, and can't find where they are getting this incorrect data. I even went out and checked most of the "List your business" sites that I have registered with.
I have submitted this to Google, but have not heard back. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can fix this, or at least find out where this bad data is coming from? I did find a company blog post from 2010 that listed our ours in a somewhat confusing way, but it was still correct. (I have since fixed that old post.)

I am using copyscape to check for duplicate content on my landing pages. I found three sites that have the exact same sentence as mine, on a page that I rank well for on one of two key terms related to the product. The sentence is not essential to my product page.  Do I risk losing page one rank on a key search term when I remove that sentence on my site, in hopes of possibly improving the page on the second key search term? Do I leave it alone? This is an older "template" site with very little that I can do SEO-wise, and I have managed to get a few key prodcut landing pages on page one of Google.  It has seen a drop in rank on many landing pages post-panda, and I'm doing my best to clean up what I can.  Do I leave well enough alone for a page one rank on one term, or swap out that sentence in hopes of getting better rank on two keywords?

The company owner here has our (company) website as his home page.  I excluded our static IP’s on Google Analytics, but is that good enough to keep Google from using his search traffic as an indicator of anything negative. Does Google still take into account his activity, but simply block it from my reporting?  Finally, does one person actually have that kind of influence as far as time on site, bounce rates, etc.  Should I convince him to find a new home page?

I noticed that my page one ranked landing pages that don't get a lot of love from me have dropped in rank big time on Google this week.  This is a site that has static (meaning, I can't freshen up the content easily) landing pages for products that we sell.  The pages that dropped are the ones that have the fewest inbound links, and don't get much attention on the social media side.  Our most important landing pages have also dropped, but just a few spots on page one.  This is a first for me.  Does anyone think that this is a "lack of freshness" penalty? We are still number one on page one for our brand search terms.  Would fresh content give me a shot at getting the pages back up?  I'm willing to update them slowly, but before I go crazy, I'm reaching out to the pros here.

We have a competitor whose home page rocketed up to number one, page one, on our key search term after they did a website redesign.  They even beat out the original retailer for that position, as they are resellers of the product (not affiliate sales, resale in the secondary market.) They are the first to knock the original seller out of the #1 position. In the past couple of years that I have been doing in-house SEO, they have never ranked on page one for the term.  I ran their site through the SEOmoz page grader for the specific search term, loading their page that is ranking, and found that they grade a “B,” but have some alerts for keyword stuffing, (the search term is on the home page 30+ times,) and they have eleven tags on said page. Aside from the two things listed above, they have pretty good site architecture on this new site, and are pretty well branded, etc.  Should I expect Google to catch the keyword stuffing and eleven tags, and possibly adjust their rank?  Will their keyword stuffing come back to bite them?

After running one of my landing pages through the SEOmoz on-page keyword optimization tool, I see that my keywords are 13 characters from the front of the title.  My page is already receiving an A letter grade.  The 13 characters in front of my keyword phrase are not vital, but they related to the keyword phrase.  Is it that important that I drop the related word, in order to get my keyword phrase to start at the front?