Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I do not wish to draw attention to my company, so I am using code names. For the sake of this discussion, we are a new car dealership representing Brand X Cars. The manufacturer of Brand X Cars pushes its dealers toward a website hosting company called CarWebsites in order to maintain a level of quality and control with each dealer. However, we have found the platform to be too restricting, and are switching to our own WordPress site. Unfortunately Brand X is claiming ownership of our original domain, BrandXCarDealer.net, so we have switched to BrandXCarDealer.com (which we prefer anyways). Now both websites are running, and there is duplicate content of everything. Brand X is not cooperative and will not 301 redirect to the new site, and we do not have access to the of the website for a rel=canonical. Brand X is also dragging its feet on shutting down BrandXCarDealer.net. We do still have access to change the content of the pages on the BrandXCarDealer.net site, but that is pretty much as far as our control goes. So my question is, is there anything we can do, without using a 301 redirect or rel=canonical, to tell Google to pay attention to the new BrandXCarDealer.com rather than the old BrandXCarDealer.net? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

Since February of 2013 our organic traffic at http://www.weddingshoppeinc.com had been declining. We were able to get traffic back up to par with numbers from the previous year by December of 2013. In March of 2014 our direct traffic took a major hit and hasn’t improved. We know our mobile traffic is part of the problem, but the issue has affected traffic from desktop and mobile devices. Is this an organic traffic problem, or is our decrease in direct traffic coming from somewhere else? Has anyone else seen this issue, or does anyone have advice? Here is what we’ve already looked into and updates to note: Before this issue, when we compared organic and direct traffic, direct was usually half of what organic was (i.e., if organic was at 10 visitors, direct was at 5). However organic traffic has followed normal trends and direct has dropped. In August we updated our .net code to MVC to drop our first byte from 1,700 to 300 milliseconds. However, if you look at our m. site, it’s around 1,000 milliseconds. We changed our SEO strategy in May to follow best practices. We’ve been rewriting old content. We haven’t ever done any black hat SEO, just have some old blogs from 2010-2012 that have too many keywords. These are getting edited. In March we moved our images to a CDN for our images. We’re currently working on server errors and broken links, but nothing significant changed around March to affect our traffic. Very recently, our web developers said that they believed our direct traffic had been getting tracked wrong in Google Analytics prior to March 2014. However they think they fixed the issue in a March push. We've taken this theory into account, but we also see a drop in revenue at the time of their push that correlates with the drop in traffic, so we know there’s a bigger issue. Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

So I discovered a website the other day that is a complete duplicate of ours: justinchina.co.uk This is our website: petmedicalcenter.com . Thanks to help from Erica, I dug in deeper to see why this was happening. It seems that the justinchinca.co.uk which is hosted by GoDaddy has their A Record pointing at our web host. So that being said, our website does not seem to be hacked which is good news. Would this still cause an issue with our Google rankings? Our host, Host Monster said to contact GoDaddy and GoDaddy said that a domain owner can point their URL to anywhere that they choose. Anyway, any feedback would be helpful. Thanks for everyone thus far that has helped me. Brant

which are the best plugings for loading a website faster? Wp smush it+ w3 total cache + having a good theme like thesis? This plugin is good to have? or having w3 total cache is enough: http://wordpress.org/plugins/db-cache-reloaded-fix/ thanks ! Best regards, Sebastian Papp & His Team

I'd like to know if there's any difference between using m.domain.com/pages or domain.com/mobile/pages for a mobile website? Which one is better? Why? Does Google treat the two differently? As you can see, I'm new to this! This is my first time working on a mobile website, so any links/resources would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

Or will it affect our ranking positively or negatively at all?