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Hello everyone, One of my clients is undergoing a major rebrand, which will require some substantial changes to their domain / URL structure. Primarily, we're going to: Move from a high-ish DA site to a low DA site Change the subdomain URL structure (more on that below) Update the content (copy, design, structure) on www. site to match the new brand The content on the subdomains should remain the same 301 redirect all pages from old site to new site where applicable The current site architecture makes great use of subdomains, which are also going to be changing in terms of name. So, we're moving from oldsubdomain.olddomain.com to newsubdomain.newdomain.com (and not oldsubdomian.olddomain.com to oldsubdomain.olddomain.com). The content / structure of these pages is going to change minimally. We understand that we're going to take an SEO hit overall, but are there things we can do to minimize this hit? Anyway we can 'estimate' the hit? Anyway we can educate our client to as to what to expect beyond (it is going to be bad…). Please let me know. Thanks!

Hey all, I've been thinking about the pros and cons of case study formats (On-page vs. PDF), and was curious to see what you all think. An on-page case study is crawled by search engines and has fewer barriers in terms of visibility. The only pros I can think of for a downloadable case study (with no opt-in) is that it's less likely to be plagiarised (generally a low priority) and can have a custom design that may not fit with your website's look and feel without clashing. Also, I suppose it makes it easier for visitors to save the PDF for future reference. Have I missed anything? Do you have a preference? Keen to hear which you prefer, and why. Let's brainstorm! Cheers,
Carlo

We have a client who is adamant that during the rebranding of their company and website, a holding page is put in place from August 5^th till go-live date on August 21^st. They don’t look like budging on the matter, therefore we are looking to set up a 503 HTTP code on the holding page to tell Google the site is down for maintenance and redirect all pages back to the holding page. The general consensus is that implementing this for such a long period of time will see Google de-index all pages and the site will lose masses of traffic as a result for a substantial time afterwards. It would be great to get some insight on best practice for this situation, how Google will determine the situation and the consequences of such actions. If you have any case studies of similar situations or have firm knowledge of how this scenario would affect the site, I would be delighted to hear from you!

Hello everyone! I manage 3 large eCommerce sites that sell textbooks, digital learning solutions, electronic teaching resources, etc., to three different markets in the education space (K-12, College, and Post-College/Career Search). Currently, the 3 sites live on three different sub domains of the companies main domain.  Is this best practice?  I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority. But... What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain?  Some are for marketing sites, some are for digital products, some are customer-specific sites, etc.  We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly. Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)?  Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain. Just looking for some insight on this, as I will be doing an SEO/marketing/conversion overhaul going forward. On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles, pages with too many links, and so on and so forth.  That's another problem for another day...

From an SEO agency perspective.  What would be the estimated man hours and hard cost to rebrand a large site (1000+pages)?  And all that would go into it, like 301 redirects and etc.? I have a pretty good idea, of what it would take and how perilous it could be from an SEO perspective. Because of anchor text / 301 redirects / organic potential traffic loss and etc. I just don't know the man hours and hard cost would be.

I'm trying to get a company logo to show up next to the search results for a search on [company name] AND a separate author photo to show next to the About page of the author of the same site for a search on [author name] There is author markup on the company's "About" page and Google's structured data testing tool shows that that page is correctly configured to show the author pic. There is publisher markup on the home page and the tool shows that the page is correctly configured to show the company logo. However, no company logo shows up in the search results for the [company name] search--just an author pic next to the "about" page for the [author name] search. if I add author markup to the homepage in addition to the publisher markup, I get the author pic showing up for both [author name] and  [company name] searches. How is anyone making this work?  Thanks.

Greetings, Nearly 6 years ago, our company switched its entire business model from providing customized vitamins to a women's health publisher that offers medical advice, news and health tips. We have actively developed a decent link profile for our new brand around women's health and specific health conditions. Nonetheless the old vitamin-related keyword profile is still very prevalent. We have many hundreds of links with old vitamin-related anchor text scattered across the web linking to our main site and to many vitamin mini-sites that we own. What is the best way to rebrand ourselves and basically eliminate this old link profile? My first thought is to immediately park / take down all our vitamin-related domains, and eventually these links will no longer carry any weight in the eyes of Google. The other strategy is to attempt to contact all the sites with the old anchor text and ask them to take the links down. This is not an exciting option to me as I know that this is tedious and a slow process with many dead-ends. Thanks in advance for any advice. Kind regards, Eric Darby

I am about to launch an eCom project for a new company. The client has three URL's available. I recognize keyword density is slowly becoming less and less of a factor, but still has significant relevance. I haven't had much experience working on .NET URL's and would like to know anything related to the effects of .NET url's vs. .COM url's.  Also, just what you would go with and why? Option 1 "EXACTMATCHKEYWORD.net" (17 total characters) Option 2 "MOSTLYMATCHINGKEYWORDcompany.com" (21 total characters, with company) Option 3 "ABEXACTMATCHKEYWORD.com" -AB represents the company's initials/logo. (19 total characters) USEFUL POINTS 1. 95% of purchases will be one time purchases (so I'm not focused as much on company branding as usual). 2. The company name is actually "exact matching keyword Company" 3. We will be targeting 100's of terms, but the "exact match keyword" represents 1/4 of total search volumes and thus is extremely important.