Aye.

Oh, and hey! I just noticed I know you from NOLA.

I think it depends on your site, the content, how intuitive it would be to split the article, etc.

I think SEOmoz had done an analysis awhile back that looked at which blog posts got the most links. Length of article was one of the factors they looked at, I think. Alas, I can't find that article now, though. Anyone else have the URL?

I think I understand. Since your site was de-indexed, Google has to start over indexing your site on the new domain. This is what should happen:

Google will follow any external links it finds pointing to your site, will find the 301 redirect, and will follow that to your new site. Google will then crawl your new domain. Google will "forward" most of the link juice from your backlinks to your new domain.

Via your internal link structure, the forwarded PageRank will be spread throughout your site. This will hopefully result in you regaining the rankings you previously had.

I assume you have forwarded each subpage on the old domain to the same page on the new domain?

I would also:

a) if you can, change over at least some of your backlinks to point to your new domain

b) build/attract links to your new domain

"maybe I need to upload the website with the old domain again and let google re-index it and only then do the 301, what do you think about that ?"

I'm not 100% certain, but I can't think of any reason you would need to do that.

Thanks for the suggestion. So far the only significant difference in optimization I've found has been that they added Schema.org markup.

"use hreflang and that acts like a canonical"

Google and other sources don't indicate that hreflang will pass/consolidate link authority. So I think hreflang and canonical tags are different in that regard. Based on that and what I've seen, I don't see that hreflang tag would negate the disadvantages of a subdomain. If you have evidence it does, though, I am very interested!

I've seen a variety of services on the fringe of the SEO world that send a flow of (fake) traffic to your website via Google, to drive up your SERP CTR and site engagement. Seems gray hat, but I'm curious as to whether it actually works.

The latest data I've seen from trustworthy sources (example and example 2) seems mixed on whether CTR has a direct impact on search rankings. Google claims it doesn't. I think it's possible it directly impacts rankings, or its possible Google is using some other metric to reward high engagement pages and CTR correlates with that.

Any insight on whether CTR manipulation services actually work?

Stephen,

Thanks for the explanation - I just had a client ask me about this script. Based on your explanation, this script will change your bounce rate. This is because once the event is triggered, the visit will no longer be considered a bounce, even if the user only visits one page. So it's an artificial/false decrease in bounce rate, not a "fix" as others claim.

I wrote a short blog post on this (and referenced your description)!

~Adam