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+1 Kate

To add on what Kate said, you can typically get a little more data to help you pinpoint what it is by clicking on other and then looking at secondary dimensions such as medium, ad distribution network, placement domain, campaign, etc.

Hi John,

Typically when you switch from Flash to HTML, you'll see a nice bump in organic traffic as search engines have a hard time with most flash sites.

In your case, you are using the hash bang to deliver content to users and the escaped fragments to deliver content to search engines on your new site. While this should be ok, it isn't always. It should be more effective for you than your main current site though. SEO-Browser is a good tool to simulate how a search engine would see your site. You can see your old site here (note, from the cached version it appears that Google is actually accessing some of your flash content) and your new site here.

Ideally, you'd have a site that relies entirely on HTML/CSS to display your content to users. In your case, I'd feel comfortable updating the main site to the new version. A couple notes here -

• make sure you remove the noindex tag from the new site when you transition from the old site to the new site
• you shouldn't have the two sites accessible by search engines at the same time as they utilize much of the same content

I've never heard of anyone going to a Wix site for SEO. If you want to use a simple CMS that is good for SEO, I'd recommend WordPress.

As Jeff pointed out, with something like a Christmas category page, you'll want to leave it up so that you can use it easily next year (and maintain any links associated with the page). You can easily remove navigation links to the page during the off season and add them in in the months leading up to the season so that you're again passing internal link equity to the pages.

Regarding the RSS feed content, I'd probably 301 it to a related video or to a relevant category page, though you could make a case for leaving it up, saying that the content is no longer available and providing related videos for the user to navigate to.

Hi There,

Simply re-ordering your content is not going to make it any more unique. I've seen mashing up content help sometimes (depending on how trustworthy the site is) but changing the order of the same phrases doesn't add to the uniqueness of the page. Honestly, the results probably aren't worth the time required to do this.

Good luck!

Geoff

Hi There,

As the other people have said here, 2 weeks isn't very long for Google to sort this out, though I know it feels like a really long time. While Google and Bing say they will treat 302's as 301's if they think it's a mistake, but I haven't really seen this happen.

Whenever I do a URL migration, I always submit a sitemap with the old URLs to help Google pick up the 301's faster. In your situation, I'd definitely submit an xml sitemap of as many old URLs as you can find to help Google pick up the updated redirects ASAP. Do you have any old files that you could pull URLs from (I know you don't have an old xml sitemap, but maybe a csv or something like that)?

Good luck!

As Mike pointed out, this is pretty subjective and I think you can pretty easily make either argument. I think I'd tend to avoid the slider as it takes up a lot of space, but that's just an opinion. If you really want to find out if one is better than the other for conversion, test it using software such as optimizely! Otherwise, I'd go with your gut.

To answer your questions:

1. I think the practice you described sounds good, should help establish credibility and trust, right?

2. Using the SEM Rush example, I might add a quote from one of the above clients for added credibility. On your /clients page, I'd probably do a couple things: I would add quotes/testimonials for each logo if possible - it's one thing to work with someone, but it means a lot more if you have a quote from them. Second, I'd look at doing case studies if possible.

As I mentioned earlier, you should really test everything. Everyone has an opinion about CRO that's based on their experience but every vertical, niche, and company is different as are their customers so don't just take someone else's word for it. Test everything!

As it's all sorted now, I really wouldn't worry about them too much. You can use the remove URL functionality in WMT, but this is a manual process so I wouldn't do this. If I were in your position, I'd probably just let the pages keep 404ing'. After a bit, Google will usually stop trying to recrawl the 404 pages. Right now they are probably trying to recrawl incase the 404 was an accident.

If it's causing a bandwidth problem, you can solve with a robots.txt as suggested earlier.

Hey Ariel,

Here's a couple lists of bots that some people are blocking - you should probably review your server data to see which bots are visiting you that you want to block:

• http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/badbots.html
• http://searchenginewatch.com/robots.txt

In addition to the moz resource Chris referenced, here are a couple more pages that might be useful for you:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10793906/how-to-allow-known-web-crawlers-and-block-spammers-and-harmful-robots-from-scann
• http://www.distilled.net/u/robots-txt/

Good luck!

This is pretty hard to give a good answer to without knowing the site, but a significant sudden drop is usually not tied to smaller factors like page speed. Rather, they tend to be tied to low quality link building (penguin), low quality content (panda), over optimization penalties, or technical problems (look for noindex, robots.txt, nofollow, canonical issues).

I know it's a bit broad but without a specific URL, I'd start looking there.

Good luck!

-Geoff

This is really a market research project, and you have a few different ways to figure out who your customer is.

You can get market research reports - Here are a few examples that turned up from a Google search:

MarketResearch.com | IBISWorld.com | TrendReports.com | ResearchAndMarkets.com

You could also do your own market research through a site like AYTM.

You could also use a service like Qualaroo to ask your website visitors questions or you could create a survey on a site like AYTM but send it to your previous customers instead of their panel.

With the data that you gather in the above processes, you can begin to build personas as already suggested.

Good luck!

-Geoff

Hey Fabrizio,

I think this is a very case by case issue. For musicianspage.com, I would probably lean towards make it JS based or removing it primarily because most of the profile pages that I saw are pretty empty and I wouldn't want search engines to find a lot of thin content here.

There could be value in this if all users had a more complete profile AND they participated in a lot forum threads - this could help with content discovery (for the threads) and pass link equity to the threads, helping them bring in traffic. If this is your goal, you would need to do a leader board, not just online users, so that you are getting users who have actually answered questions and these users are most likely to invest in their profiles and fill them out well. As it stands now, if you want to keep the online users, I'd probably make it JS based.

Good luck!
-Geoff

I've seen a lot of spammy links pop up for some of my smaller sites and they have usually been scrapers. When these would show up in OSE, the links wouldn't be on the page anymore. While I wouldn't initially be too concerned, here's a few follow up questions for you:

• How many of these shady links are you seeing in OSE?
• Do they have optimized anchor text?
• How many links/root domains are in your backlink profile?
• Are you seeing these links reported in Google webmaster tools?

If these links aren't making up much of your backlink profile and they aren't optimized, I wouldn't be concerned. If you have a small link profile and these links make up a good portion of your profile, or they are highly optimized, they might be something to watch for.

If you're really nervous, you could just use the disavow tool now.

Hey Randy,

A couple things here. First, a big part of you being targeted by Google for comment spam depends on proportions - if you have 30 links in comments pointing back to your site and you only have total links to your site, then yes, that could be a problem. If you have 4500 links pointing to your site, probably not a big deal.

If you have a decent size backlink profile, and the links in comments drive a decent amount of valuable traffic, I wouldn't shy away from this. If I did it, I'd just use the naked URL, not any anchor text. They already nofollow comment links so I wouldn't worry about this.

Finally, while this might not be bad, make sure that you're adding value to the conversation, not just dropping in links - not worth it to upset people and get yourself blocked.

As everyone else has said, it doesn't really make a difference whether you have a file/extension as part of the URL. But if you do change your URLs and 301 redirect the old URLs to the new, you will lose some link equity (typically about 10%-15%); I'm not sure if this devaluation is reflected in OSE/Moz metrics.

That said, I would recommend showing the directory without a file extension (using consumerbase.com/ instead of consumerbase.com/index.html). If you change platforms in the future to something that runs off PHP or some other language, displaying .html file types might not be an option but you can always display the directory. If you set yourself up now to display without the doc type, you don't have to worry about these changes in the future as much.

It is going to be a better strategy to focus on building links that are higher DA and Trust than building a ton of links very quickly. Focus on building links from multiple domains rather than just getting a lot of links from a few domains (such as sidebar links).