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Hi All, One of our clients is a hair salon, that's currently dividing into two separate entities. For over 10 years the hair salon has been for both men and women, but that's now changing. The company is splitting into two, the original website contains pages for both men and women, but will soon only contain pages for women's hairdressing. The problem I have here is that there's probably around 20-30 service pages that get really great, targeted traffic on the men's side. There's a brand new domain for the men's hairdressing company and I'd like to know how you'd go about retaining the SEO value instead of just culling the pages. I'm thinking that we should maybe take the content from the original website, re-write it slightly to match the new brand, add it to the new website and then 301 the pages on the original website across to the new website. Has anyone had any experience in doing something like this before? and will the SEO value move across to the new domain? Also, I'm scared that the internal pages of the new domain may hold more authority than the home page and could cause problems. Any ideas on this would be great.

I think it's best to give you an example to illustrate what I'm asking here. Current Brand Name: Keyword Driven Brand Name (keyworddrivenbrandname.com) New brand Name: KDBN (kdbn.com) What will the effects of this change be. I'm slightly worried that we have lots of links with the anchor text "Keyword Driven Brand Name" and we rank very well for terms like "Keyword Driven" and "Brand Name". I guess what I'm asking is, do we need to go and change all those anchors to KDBN and will this upset our search rankings. Or do we leave the existing anchors? But will Google see this as over-optimised anchor text and penalise our website? Decisions decisions! Also, should we leave the old brand name in our title tags, at least for the transitional period, i.e. KDBN | Targeted Keyword | Keyword Driven Brand Name Any help with this would be really appreciated, Many thanks

Hi there, I have the following domains: OLD DOMAIN: domain1.co.uk NEW DOMAIN: domain2.co.uk I need to create a .htaccess file that 301 redirects specific, individual pages on domain1.co.uk to domain2.co.uk I've searched for hours to try and find a solution, but I can't find anything that will do what I need. The pages on domain1.co.uk are all kinds of filenames and extensions, but they will be redirected to a Wordpress website that has a clean folder structure. Some example URL's to be redirected from the old website: http://www.domain1.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=357 http://www.domain1.co.uk/adopt.php http://www.domain1.co.uk/register/?type=2 These will need to be redirected to the following URL types on the new domain: http://www.domain2.co.uk/charities/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/adopt/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/register/ I would also like a blanket/catch-all redirect from anything else on www.domain1.co.uk to the homepage of www.domain2.co.uk if there isn't a specific individual redirect in place. I'm literally tearing my hair out with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

Hi I am thinking of acquiring a domain name, although it is currently being used in a completely different industry to the one I hoping to use it for. The site only has 46 links and was registered in 2009. It has a DA of 25, Home PA of 37 and PR of 2 I was just wondering how easy or hard it would be to optimise the website for a completely different industry, i.e. lets say it was initially bought to sell hair-care products and I want to use it to sell electronics. Would I leave the existing links in? Could I use that new disavow tool in webmaster tools to wipe the slate clean and start again? Really haven't come across this before, does anyone have any ideas? Thanks for your time, Steve

Hi everyone, I hope someone can help. The site www.danbro.co.uk suffered a manually penalty in April. It had a number of poor quality sitewide blog links and the link profile looked (and still does despite a massive improvement) unnatural. The work to over turn the penalty Since then 80% of the spammy blog links have been taken down. the other 20% of sites simply do no respond to requests (these sites were documented). The webmaster also has started building up more natural links as 95% of the anchor text could be classed as 'money keywords'.A low % of links included the brand name at all. A number of requests have been sent ( i told the site manager this should have been avoided but hay-ho). The last request of which i assisted them with was sent last week. The reconsideration was extremely detailed and documented all link removals and links that were still live yet poor quality. some questions Its been a few months since the penalty - should a brand new site be launched? If option '1' was to be implemented, is a 302 re-direct a feasible option as the site's content is vast? will this pass on the penalty? in your opinion Is the websites link profile the root of this penalty? If point '3' is true would you a) start a fresh site or b) continue working on balancing the link profile? Any help or case studies would be tremendous thanks in advance

Hi Everyone, i hope someone can help. Our site www.danbro.co.uk suddenly dropped across all keyphrases and even our brand name on 12th April. We receieved a notification of unnatural link building and so the problem was obvious. Since then we have removed a number of old blog links, forum links that we have built up over a number of years. Once removed we sent a reconsideration. There are still a number of links we are trying (but sometimes to no avail) to remove. It is quite frustrating as we do have a number of high quality links on really relevant sites and we do update our content on a regular basis. Does anyone have any other solutions of what we can be doing? changing the domain name is not an option as it is the brand name. any help is much appreciated

Hi Everyone, I work for a company called Danbro - www.danbro.co.uk Recently a massive penalty lead to a huge drop across all keywords in Google including the brand name. Since we have conducted a massive clean up; (requesting competitors to remove duplicate content, removing some poor quality links etc etc) We still have not seen any improvement whatsoever nor has Google responded. Has anyone ever received a positive response from Google? Since we sent a reconsideration request our ranks actually went worse!! Any advice would be great

I have a large travel site that has over 140,000 pages. The problem I have is that the majority of pages are filled with dupe content. When Panda came in, our rankings were obliterated, so I am trying to isolate the unique content on the site and go forward with that. The problem is, the site has been going for over 10 years, with every man and his dog copying content from it. It seems that our travel guides have been largely left untouched and are the only unique content that I can find. We have 1000 travel guides in total. My first question is, would reducing 140,000 pages to just 1,000 ruin the site's authority in any way? The site does use internal linking within these pages, so culling them will remove thousands of internal links throughout the site. Also, am I right in saying that the link juice should now move to the more important pages with unique content, if redirects are set up correctly? And finally, how would you go about redirecting all theses pages? I will be culling a huge amount of hotel pages, would you consider redirecting all of these to the generic hotels page of the site? Thanks for your time, I know this is quite a long one, Nick

I am designing the structure of a large travel webiste and have the following problem. The obvious structure from a users perspective would be to structure locations as follows: Home/Hotels/Country/County/City i.e. Home/Hotels/UK/Lancashire/Preston The problem is, it is the cities that I need closer to the root directory, instead of countries and counties. If I did Home/Hotels/City or even Home/Hotels/Country/City There may be too many links on one page and google may think they're spammy. How can I get the cities closer to the root directory as they are the most important pages on the site. Even if I did a text based sitemap I would encounter the same problem. *scratches head! Thanks in Advance, Nick UPDATE_________________________________________________________ Sorry I may have phrased the question wrongly. I should have said that I need the city pages to be less clicks from the root directory, as opposed to their actual URL structure. Ideally, I want to be able to access the city pages before the county and country pages on the site, as they are more important. Thanks A Bunch