This process may lend itself to PPC a bit more than SEO. When split testing you will need to be aware of duplicate content, and considering that your ultimate goal is to figure out which landing pages are more effective, you will end up removing some of the pages anyway. On a large scale this isn't going to be as effective.

I would consider running a PPC account to test these pages and not have them indexed. Then, once you have a landing page that performs well, create it on the site and promote it with SEO.

In that case I would suggest changing a couple and reviewing any changes in rankings as a result. This is one to approach slowly.

Not sure how you have access (are they paid?), but by changing a large amount of links at the same time it may alert Google to some suspicious activity. Large changes in anchor text can be a sign of changes to bought links.

Personally, I wouldn't change them all either. Even though the year is wrong, there's still going to be benefits. e.g. if you are trying to rank for "holiday in new york 2013", your rankings will still benefit from keywords saying "holiday in new york 2012".

Take it steady and keep reviewing the results, but bear in mind you may be better focusing your efforts on building new links with new anchor text.

Hope that helps,

Ben

Hi Paul,

It would be useful to have a little bit more information. Is the year relevant to the rankings? For example "euro 2012" would be valuable for a site trying to rank for these as the year is going to appear in the search.

Do you have access to all of these links to be able to change them then?

Ben

If your customers would find it useful I can't see it being too much of a problem. I like a small selection of links in the footer. Often customers will look in the footer for contact links and information.

If it's just for SEO and you are putting in some keyword links I would probably say avoid it.

Hi Walid,

I would personally eliminate A and B purely based on the fact that they aren't targeted enough. I would put the "Free dliver on $50 purchase" in the meta description to encourage the click through, but C seems the most concise and targeted out of all of them.

Plus I'm a big fan of the " | " symbol

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the responses, I appreciate both of your points.

The main reason for me to do it is increased visibility in the SERPs. The original site sometimes ranks1st and 2nd and has that position pretty much secured. It no longer requires active resources for link building and over time it will get these naturally.

I ask because I have recently acquired the .com TLD and instead of just 301'ing this, I thought I could make use of it and get maybe position 3 and 4 out of it.

All content is unique, all links are natural and editorial references and there is competition that could touch it (that I can see :).

The question really boils down to whether G will rank two sites that exist on the same IP on the same SERP? Does anyone know if this is possible or if there are factors in place to prevent this.

Thanks

Ben

Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone could shed some light on the following.

If I was ranking number 1 for a term, what would the effects be of creating another site, hosted on the same server / IP, same whois info, same URL but a different TLD, and trying to get this to rank for the term also.

Does G restrict search results to one IP per page or is this perfectly possible?

(The term is fairly uncompetitive)

Thanks,

Ben

Thanks for your quick response Barry. I understand what you are saying, but I think I am coming at it more from a point of the search engines figuring out the difference between keywords.

Say for example the title tag was "cheap books free books" would the search engines be able to figure out that there should be two sets of keywords there as opposed to four inidividual words. Do commas help to define this?

How do search engines treat the comma?

Is there a disadvantage/advantage to using commas to separate words in the title tag. Which will be more effective as a title tag: "keyword1 keyword2 - Brand" OR "keyword1, keyword2 - Brand"?

This process may lend itself to PPC a bit more than SEO. When split testing you will need to be aware of duplicate content, and considering that your ultimate goal is to figure out which landing pages are more effective, you will end up removing some of the pages anyway. On a large scale this isn't going to be as effective.

I would consider running a PPC account to test these pages and not have them indexed. Then, once you have a landing page that performs well, create it on the site and promote it with SEO.

If your customers would find it useful I can't see it being too much of a problem. I like a small selection of links in the footer. Often customers will look in the footer for contact links and information.

If it's just for SEO and you are putting in some keyword links I would probably say avoid it.

Hi Walid,

I would personally eliminate A and B purely based on the fact that they aren't targeted enough. I would put the "Free dliver on $50 purchase" in the meta description to encourage the click through, but C seems the most concise and targeted out of all of them.

Plus I'm a big fan of the " | " symbol

In that case I would suggest changing a couple and reviewing any changes in rankings as a result. This is one to approach slowly.

Not sure how you have access (are they paid?), but by changing a large amount of links at the same time it may alert Google to some suspicious activity. Large changes in anchor text can be a sign of changes to bought links.

Personally, I wouldn't change them all either. Even though the year is wrong, there's still going to be benefits. e.g. if you are trying to rank for "holiday in new york 2013", your rankings will still benefit from keywords saying "holiday in new york 2012".

Take it steady and keep reviewing the results, but bear in mind you may be better focusing your efforts on building new links with new anchor text.

Hope that helps,

Ben