Google “Change of address tool” won’t allow me to redirect an old website to a page within my new website…

So, I’m migrating about 10 sites into one new website. But these 301 redirections are not suitable to just land on the new home page of the site. Why?

Bit of background

I have undergone a re-brand of several businesses, in the past these businesses were service specific so let’s call these Service1.com, Service2.com, Service3.com and the new website that has been built encompasses all these services let’s call this one newsite.com

Now newsite.com has been built to specifically target those services we had in the past but under one new brand umbrella so redirecting these sites made the most sense to go straight into the page they have on the new site, example below:

Service1.com would now be located at newsite.com/service1

Service2.com would now be located at newsite.com/service2

Service3.com would now be located at newsite.com/service3

This is a very simplified version of how i structured the 301 redirects as all the pages of the old sites have a new location on the new site, I left this off to not confuse the point of the blog.

The problem I found was in the “Change of Address tool” in Google Webmaster tools it won’t allow me to add newsite.com/service1 as a ‘property’ because newsite.com has already been verified, I also was afraid of duplication within this crawl too so I backed right away from this idea.

I looked and looked for help but couldn’t find an answer, hence this blog post.

I took to the Webmaster forum and got an instant response from an ‘expert’ who said as long as the 301 redirects are in place then all should be good, but i still wonder why this tool exists and if it actually does help with the migration if this expert is correct.

Conclusion

You can’t use this tool for that process, but make sure your 301s are in place. My advice, tailor the 301s to the end user and the end user only.

 

 

Long time, no blog

While I’ve used this blog for my own research, I did initially intend to also use it as a library one day for someone I would hire or use as a handover if I were to ever leave the job I was in. The last 8 months have been the busiest of my career and the things I’ve had to learn on the fly has been the highest; I will try to remember and start posting regularly again about the things I’ve learned, here’s what’s happened in the last 8 months in brief and you can see why I’ve neglected this blog.

• Acquisition of the company I worked for resulting in many structural changes
• Re branding of all the brands from my previous company into the new brand (about 10 brands)
• New website project for the new group (now twice the size)
  • Expanding my knowledge of Umbraco
• New content filmed and edited across Australia and New Zealand for the new site
• Consolidation of all social media from both businesses to present a unified brand

Plus I’m sure I’ve missed some things.

But either way there was one thing I did today which I thought was appropriate for this blog. I will post this separately above.

Are quality outgoing links important?

Much is known about the positive outcome of inbound links and the higher quality (.gov, .edu etc) the better your overall value in search engines.

An interesting blog I read this morning flips this idea and looks into the quality of the links you link out to rather than link to you. The results show clearly that having high quality links on your site to reliable sources improves your ranking. Perhaps this is Google’s way of saying ‘If you trust the people we trust, then we trust you’ at least a little more. See the full experiment here.

m. websites rank better on desktop

It’s well known that Mobile ready websites are going to score points in Google but what about all those sites created before responsive was a thing. I’m talking about m.website.com built especially for mobiles when people visit website.com

Over the last month I’ve noticed these increasingly showing up in Desktop results above the non-mobile version of the site (Facebook pages for example). As google push towards mobile ready sites it appears the algorithm is confusing m.websites as a better option for all users not just mobile ones.

If the user is on desktop (like I was when noticing this). The user ends up getting a stripped back version of the site which goes against user experience and this is what Google should adjust.

How to get star ratings in google. Test

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LinkedIn: Fake friend notifications. You get me every time

Since Facebook (or MySpace maybe… can’t remember) started the trend, this icon became synonymous with someone reaching out to you online to connect, a digital handshake.

Perhaps I’m getting old but these dried up for me on Facebook a long time ago where a couple a week was normal to now a couple a month is even rare. Then came LinkedIn and the adding started all over again.

LinkedIn then changed the game; it decided no longer this was the notification of a connection but a broader notification of what your connections are up to and another for ‘people you may know’.

I don’t like this approach, it’s taken a simple notification (usually something you’d be interested in seeing) to a vague, “this is probably not a connection request” kind of attitude and it’s ruining my user experience.

I think this is an example of when Data shouldn’t drive the decision, I know it goes against everything in Digital to say that a high click rate shouldn’t define this as a success. But it shouldn’t.

It’s like yelling “Fire” because someone overstayed their visit at your house and you want them to leave, sure if you look at the data that’s a good way to get people out of your house. But you don’t do that because when there is a fire in 2 years time the haste your unwanted guest will leave is going to be life threatening.

This is what I foresee for LinkedIn, you’re torturing your biggest advocates when people like me who can’t leave a notification hanging are made to check this every time we log in, don’t desensitise the connection notification or it will become a grave yard of connection requests which will ultimately damage engagement long term.

Oh and while we’re at it, this is also not okay:

Google Maps confirmation and removing an old address…

Since October time has restricted the amount I’ve posted, but not what I’ve learned.

On the weekends I’ve been working on developing a new site for a financial advice website.

It’s called LIVE WORK RETIRE Financial Group (plug). The main goal of the organisation was to have a mobile friendly website. I also decided to help them with setting up Google Anayltics and Web Master Tools so that if in future they required all that data it had been set up from the beginning and not so much for monitoring.

One issue I’ve run into was moving their old address in Google Maps, they didn’t have that phone number any more and it kept ‘stealing’ the limelight from the authorised address I had them set up with… but only sometimes. To me I was shown the proper address and Google My Business page however to them (client) all they could see was the old Address.

Several requests for removal have done nothing yet and claiming the business is useless because of a retired number. All I can do now is wait for Google to sort it out, it’s a difficult problem and there should be a faster solution to solving these types of errors, I just can’t think of any.

Goo.gl needs some changes

I think Goo.gl is great for simple tracking on links. However a simple change that needs to happen is the ability to label each of the links you’ve created. Simple tags on each link would make it easier to track the links especially for when you use the same destination but want different redirects to test different placements.

Visit the site here https://goo.gl/

LinkedIn Image sizes increased

LinkedIn Business profile images are now accepting 300 x 300px images. There is still some work to do in this area, for a short height and long logo (like most logos) this size does not work and often makes the logos look either awkward or too small. There should be alternate options for logos, something like the following:

300 x 100px, 300 x 300px and 100 x 300px

This would allow for all logos to be represented at the same scale and not just benefit square logos.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook have different pricing methods depending on what the business is trying to achieve. These are the following options relevant to my business and when they should be used.

Boost your posts

Used to: Promote a single message to the target audience (Could be a single job)

Expected return: At $6 a day you can expect to reach 790-2100 people. (Before filtering audience)

Promote your Page

Used to:  Used to increase the amount of likes on your business page.

Expected return:  At $6 a day you can expect to reach 610-2100. (Before filtering audience)

Send people to your website

Used to: Increase the amount of traffic to a specific page on the website.

Expected return:  At $6 a day you can expect to reach 900-2400. (Before filtering)

Increase conversions on your website

Used to: Increase a secondary action on your website Eg) click on an apply button. – This option requires Web Developer help.

Expected return: Cannot be estimated.

Reach people near your business

Used to: Target specifically local people to the branch to Boost, Promote the page or Draw traffic.

Expected return: Heavily dependent on area population.