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Are you redirecting with a 301 redirect? What is the url of the page you are redirecting from?

You can only do so much on-page optimisation.

Get the value of your domain and pages up by building links. Make something your audience loves, and you can stop crossing your fingers and just see how people naturally link to your site.

That's way better than putting effort in css to avoid text being shown as bold. Might not be in your job description as technical SEO but why not think of a technical solution to a customers problem...

Ah yes, didnt see the meta langauge tag. Sorry about that. Try the links approach. Takes more time, but works.

Your meta description is very short. Try to get close to (but not more then) 160 - 165 chars and see what happens.

You are cloaking your bold font to show normal font.

I'd suggest not to do it. I don't think SE's actually go that deep by looking at the css and trying to determine if your text is bold to the users as well... But because making words bold is probably in the bottom 2% of what you can do to optimize your page.

So before you get there... You should've done every other thing you could think of

1. Their might be a mismatch between what is in your meta description and what content there is on your site. If you talk about french fries in your description, but it's not in the content of your site. Google will more often choose a snippoet from your site. Second thing that could happen is that if you are listed in DMOZ, Google sometimes takes the description given there, to be your desciption in the search engines.

2. Try <meta http-equiv="language" content="EN">

But number 2 is not so easy. If you get a lot of links to your homepage, google will just decide that the .com url is more relevant to users than the /en/ version when ppl search for vallnord. So getting more link with Vallnord as <a>to the /en/ version might help with that problem.</a>

What's high quality and what would you get for 6k a month? If you get 5 quality links for that, that would be good. Get my point? If you get 5 links in lets say the Guardian, the NY Times, etc. You'd be jumping up and down. If you get 300 links a month for those 6k, than chances are they aren't really of high quality.

It takes time and effort to make something linkable. Do real research, write a decent post, or make a decent linkable piece of video, etc.

I can get you a thousands links a month, good quality (mark my Chinese accent) for only 400 dollars a month!

Ask them for examples and call the companies they do link building for and ask them what their thoughts are on the link builders.

Link building is patching up something that is broken. Make everything on your site with one thing in mind: why and when would this page I'm making now deserve to rank number one? People will than link to it because they really like your content, not because they get paid to post a blog about your site.

Choose 1.

Pick the one they make the most money on, or where they have a lot of staff members sitting on the bench, or where the competition is harder, or where the search volume is higher, or where you know the conversion rate of the keyword is higher .... or...

a combination of all that

GL!

Google won't ban a site just because it got a new owner. Google kicks websites out of their index who violate their guidelines.

So my best guess is that the website already violated the guidelines. You should try to find out why google thinks the website violated the guidelines.

Other thing: filing for a reconsideration request is often done, but not often done with any effect.

The first thing you have to consider BEFORE doing the request: has this action by google been manual, or is this an action based on the algorithm. If you have a poor quality site, lots of low quality back links, 26 adsense blocks on the site (I know you can only have 3, but just to emphasize...) then you can almost be 100% sure that it wasn't a manual action, but an algorithm change that got you kicked out/devaluated.

Thanks And would you suggest removing the old sitelink to make room for the new domain? How could we speed up the process of getting the sitelink up for the new domain?

A client of mine is introducing a new and improved bookingsengine. They're launching it on a different url than the existing one. The existing one needs to stay online a little bit longer for affiliate purposes.

The old engine url has a sitelink in the SERPS and ranks well on a few terms.

I'm wondering what you would do in this case? They want the new url to rank as quickly as possible also as sitelink of course.

Any help greatly appreciated. I have some thoughts of my own of course... But to keep the discussion as wide as possible... I'll wait a bit to add m thoughts.

That helps. So you redirected every url to the matching url on the new domain? Good!

That's all you could've done. Now the problem is: the new domain is new, hasn't built up long time value and probably all the links that are pointing to the old domain, haven't been spidered yet to be redirected to your new domain. That's problem one.

Problem two is a bigger one: all your links are now devalued because they are all being redirected to your new domain.

I'd try to find the low hanging fruit and e-mail them to change the link to the new site and preferrably not to the homepage, but to different pages on you site.

Leave the old code?

Can you explain a bit more about how you did the redirecting? What did you redirect? And how did you do it? So: what url's, based on what assumptions/facts/numbers to what url's did you redirect to.

I don't think there is any reason why you should change the analytics to the new domain.

Your body tag is this:

<body id="page_bg" class="color_blue bg_blue width_fmax">

And should be:

<body id="page_bg" class="color_blue bg_blue width_fmax" onLoad="rankingsPush();">

Code isn't wrong.

Did you add this: onLoad="rankingsPush();" to the tag?

Using any other custom variables that might overwrite these? You checked in the new and old interface?

This, above the GA code snippet:

And this just in front of the snippet you posted:

Better to check the article again, because you're missing the essence of it working :)

Did you also use the PHP part of the code?

Good points from Lee. Adding on that, in general: if you get more .co.uk links, you'll be better found in the UK than in the US. If you get a lot of .com links, your findability will be less in the UK and higher in the US. Google will determine that, considering the things Lee said, you might be relevant to US searchers.

And then there is the IP. A .com domain can be hosted in the UK. Adding more to your UK relevance than your US relevance.

And than you have the links the .com domain receives... Same thing...

So not so straight forward to answer.

I don't think you can negatively influence your ranking if you use one capped word. I do think that people will be less likely to click on that result. It's harder to read (proven with numerous studies) so I don't suggest you do the same.

If your entire title is on big mash up of capped words, that I think google would consider spammy. But I don't know if they devaluate your title, of simply uncap the words.

I'd say: if url.location==url.relCanonical { leakJuice =0; }

That would be my algorithm for this situation. I don't see any reason why SE's would "punish" you for somethng that could be a mistake. If you rel canonical to a url that is in no way associated to where the tag is placed, I would use the same algorithm.

If the the tag is pointing to a copy of the page somehwere else on that domain I would say: give a minimum link juice leak. If the url is pointing to a different root domain, I would add a little bit more leaking to the algorithm...

Read this:

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/10/06/managing-redirects-301s-302s-and-canonicals.aspx

In my opinion, if you are pointing to a page as a canonical and the page you are pointing to is not a copy of the page the tag is on, you'll be sending strange signals to SE's and they will ignore it. Worst case they will penalize you. (But I dont think they do that)

Yes. Remove the noindex nofollow for / from the robots.txt. It doesn't add anything. It can only confuse SE's and lose you rankings.

1. In my understanding: it flows link equity back to john.long.com if it is a copy of /home.

2. It's not as simple as that. Try not to compare a canonical to a 301. rel canonical tells SE's that there is a copy of the page somewhere else. So putting a rel canonical on the kids toys to the washing machines will do nothing for your rankings. They are not copies of eachother.

I think, as Barry says, you'll see more improvement in what your visitors do on your site, then what Google brings you. Don't mix up cause and effect. I think because your visitors stay longer, Google will see that. And reward you accordingly.

The numbers don't say a lot, it's more the actual load time. You'll see that bounce rates and pages per visit will go up. I manage a website where we managed to cut the bounce rate in half. avg visit time up 40%, pages p/visit up 30%. Our visit rate went up by nearly 80%. So that was remarkable. And guess where the visitors came from: Google.

It's not only about sheer numbers. If you get a link from bbc.co.uk, theguardian, etc. etc. Those links are only from 2 root domains/C blocks, but will be very trustworthy/authoritive. So you have to look a bit further than just the numbers.

Followed links are of course giving more link juice than no-followed links (which give almost none or no link juice at all)

I would suggest not excluding the / in the robots.txt.

First you redirect the / to home.aspx but then you tell SE's to exclude the home page which you are redirecting anyway. Makes no sense to me, so I would remove it in the robots.txt. No use anyway, because the url is being redirected.

I wouldn't use the 301 redirect to home.aspx. Why not make some (technical?) modifications so that the home page is available on the root of the domain? It's much more beneficial to you site's SEO. Or the other way around, redirect home.aspx to /. Because way more ppl will be linking to the root and not the home.aspx page.

Ah. Yes. Delete the tag.

It's not giving the right signals if it is saying that the page you are currently on is a copy of the page you are currently on.

It's not meant to be used site wide.

Bing has an interesting article about it.

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/10/06/managing-redirects-301s-302s-and-canonicals.aspx

Search enigines wont even reach the rel canical tag, because they'll be redirected before anything else loads from the www version.

Just make sure you do link building to the non www version.

Totally agree with Simon. If you just want to have the domain, to "have". Don't bother.

(Search volume (exact/phrase match)cpcX) + competitiveness in that market + what the mad man wants to pay for it

Where X would be the earning back period. How long does your client want to pay for the domain before earning it back?

Paste snippets of the new content in Google's search box with " " in between and see if you get any matching content?

I would say, Yes.

In my opinion, but I don't think there has been any concise research about this, a canonical is similar to a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect passes a lot of link juice to the page it is redirecting to, but not all. So I would say yes, this is hurting your SEO because you're not keeping all the juice you could keep when not using the rel = canonical. (or a redirect for that matter)

Just read that they do not support HTTPS/SSL at this time

So I guess you have to wait for that feature. (Which has been announced months and months ago, but I dont think it's comming anytime soon)

Edit: I must take that back. That only involves linkscape. It should work for the crawling of the pages. I'd wait another week. If nothing happens, contact the helpdesk.

A big player in the clothing retail in The Netherlands (where I live) is using it succesfuly. Look at this query and their results:

http://www.google.nl/search?q=zalando

Use it wisely. I agree with Alan that it can look spammy. So use a meta description viewer so you can immediatly judge if wat you made looks OK in the SE's. It definitely draws in my attention.

You've waited a while for a full crawl to be completed?

Did you add/activate all the right plugins/dll files?

 <configuration><location path="index.php"></location></configuration> 

Did you add the configuration part?

Is your home page available on the / part of your domain? Or is it only accessible via index.php? What CMS are you using?

I would suggest linking to a page that is relevant to the landing page you are creating. Your home page is usually receiving more than enough links from various sources. The underlying pages are often the problem. So try linking to a page that is relevant to the top 10 you created and is in a competitive space.

These are really Wordpress basics Atul

Might be a good idea for you to read some articles on wordpress.org about this.

You can find the wp-config.php file in the root folder of your domain. Where all the wordpress files are located and where all the folders are located like /themes /plugins. That's the root.

Making a .htaccess file isn't hard. It's just a txtfile which has been saved as a .htaccess file without an extension.

Just add the following code, where example.com is your domain

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

There isn't one by default. You can create one by uploading it to the root of your directory. So where the wp-config.php file and the rest is located.

You are correct.

File a bug report for this.

So if you have too long title tags because of this, don't bother changing it because SE's won't cut the title off.

I don't know any resources that talk a lot about bing/yahoo. I've read that yahoo/bing are more biased towards having the keywords in the domain.

I would do a bit of research on the url's that rank above you in the SERP's and look at things the higher ranking url's have in common.

If you are using Google adwords. you can simply place a Google Adwords conversion code on the thank you page of your order system.

If you want to measure what organic keywords bring you signups, setup goals in google analytics. As in: the url of the thank you page. When you then select for instance: google (organic) as a traffic source, you can set goal set 1 and see what keywords gave you conversions.

If there isn't a lot of competitiveness, there may be no need to build links? A comprehensive guide/article might already do the trick? Have you tried adding the articles to the site already? Targetting the keywords on the articles' pages in stead of the home page? You might already rank?

So you analyzed the 5 competitors and they don't have any resource sections on their site? Why not try the rest of the web with the query: "the keyword you are building links for" allintitle:resources or allintitle:list or allintitle:blog or something similar?

Upload a robots.txt on ermitage to disallow all robots indexing all files?

No, would be the short answer.

Every domain builds its own value in the SERP's. So registering that domain will involve lots of work to get it ranking.

If you do want to go for a exact match domain, I'd go for red-wagon.com in stead of wagonred.com. That way link building becomes more easy and red wagon and wagon red are two different things.

Using the new domain to help you rank on your main site will be a losing battle in the end. You can't pass a lot of link juice to your main site from your new domain. It's only 1 IP, 1 link (or only a few will count towards your rankings). So if you really want to rank for that keyword, build a niche site on the new domain.

I wouldn't do the simple "cut". You have to redo 850 titles? I say do em manually. Believe me, title tags are THE most important on page factor. Just truncating them won't give you any more SEO. Making them better and < 70 chars will.

Yes it sucks, yes it's a lot of manual shitty work, but it will bring you a lot more SEO wise, than just cutting them to 70 or so chars.

Do some proper research into what people are searching for, put your brand name at the end of the title, etc.

It won't be today, it won't be tomorrow, but someday his rankings will plummet like a rock dropping to the bottom of the ocean. SE's are getting smarter and smarter and they will find out how to compute for this lousy way of doing SEO. You on the other hand, have absolutely nothing to fear. I say, stick to your strategy, but try to turn your pages into more link magnets. Involve people in the content creation so other people can endorse your content. (By tweeting, blogging or liking your content). You will be the winner in the long run.

Should you be doing video marketing? Like Yeeees? Video results in the SERP's get higher ctr's compared to results that are higher up the SERP's, so that would be perfect for you to screw with your competitor.