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In answer to your question, rankings can increase on domain y if it's done right and done with the right purpose. From the sounds of it, you're probably making the right decision to go to one domain because you mention duplicate content. If there's no real reason to have multiple domains it can be extremely beneficial to have only one. It's much easier to tailor to that user experience and build an audience with more focus.

You will want to move your content over from domain x to domain y and then redirect your URLs properly. You will also want to do some cleanup during this time. If you have content that serves the same purpose (aka duplicate content) you'll want to choose the best piece of content and redirect the others there. It's much better to have 1,000 quality pages on your site than 10,000 that are low quality.

Again, I can't say whether you should stay with 2 domains or go to 1. You have to determine if it's better for your audience on a single domain or multiple and go from there. If the answer is move to 1 domain then take the time to clean up and redirect to the best possible page.

Good luck!

I want to see (and possibly compile) other marketers tips and tricks when it came to setting up their Google Analytics. I feel like I sometimes get into a rut when I setup GA for clients and I want to make sure that I'm not getting rusty with it.

Some of the things I'm interested in (but not limited to):

• How do you use dashboards?
• What funnels do you setup?
• How do you utilize goals?
• What are your favorite metrics to report to clients?
• What are the top items on your checklist when setting up GA?
• And many others I could include here...

I'd be interested in seeing what other marketers include in their GA setup and reporting. These can be super simple or expert level tips and tricks. It's a personal curiosity I have so that I make sure I'm staying up to date with everything but if there is enough participation I will compile everything into a YouMoz post or something as a guide for us to use and share.

So please share this question with others if you can. Thanks!

To get the star ratings under your Google organic results you must use Schema microdata in order to produce those. I don't think there's a way to get Google star ratings outside of the map packs.

So I have some questions (probably more of a discussion really) about how to do traditional advertising in 2015. I started working with a local company that has done very well for themselves throughout the years but has lacked in the digital marketing space. Today we are doing a lot better digitally and I have been put in a position that will also affect how we do traditional...which I've never really done before (I'm a digital marketer so why would I?).

Here's my question (or discussion item): If we have always done radio jingles (include Pandora here too), cheesy commercials, and traditional billboards and they seem to have done well through the years should we keep doing those?

I have 2 issues here as a digital marketer:

1. I have virtually no data on people that see or hear our advertisements because there isn't an Analytics platform for the real world. This means that I can't stay with them, better their experience, or nurture them along the way with my advertising. My thinking here is that I want to get them to my website then -- Please correct me if I'm wrong or if there are other ways of thinking for this out there that make sense.
2. I want to test test test these jingles, commercials, and billboards but I'm unsure how to. How can you tell what's working and what's not? Also, are there others out there doing things like this that can at least show me that jingles work (or do not work)? My impression is that they work because people remember the cheesy jingles and such but also that they don't work because everyone's take on them is "they are so annoying!" -- Again, please shed some light here and correct me if I'm wrong in my thinking.

My final note here and MAIN purpose for posting here is because I want to change the way things are done with traditional. It all seems to be the same thing over and over, and I want to get creative with this and push the limits. This is why I have turned to the Moz community, because I think we have those types of minds here.

What business are they in that they wouldn't benefit from having a phone number? With the exception of large companies like Google and Yelp, who have to hide their phone numbers deep within their websites because of the sheer volume they get that doesn't actually help their business, I don't see why you would want to hide that. And even if you aren't a local business you can always benefit from some "local SEO" to help your presence a little bit. We even took this a step further and made our contact phone number texting compatible and it has helped a ton from a customer experience perspective.

Again, this is all dependent on the business because I know there are exceptions. But to answer your question directly, no I don't think that removing the phone number will hurt your organic results directly and I think that you can get away with not having a phone number on the site (if it makes sense for the business of course).

I'm going to second what @effectdigital is outlining here. Google does what they want, and sometimes they index paginated pages on your site. If you have things setup properly and you are still seeing paginated pages when you do a site: search in Google then you likely need to strengthen your content elsewhere because Google still sees these paginated URLs as authoritative for your domain.

I have a question for you @effectdigital - Do you still self-canonical with rel= prev / next? I mean, I knew that you wouldn't want to canonical to another URL, but I hadn't really thought about the self-canonical until I read something you said above. Hadn't really thought about that one haha.

Thanks!

Something else to consider here is that Google specifically said "over time, we may decide to strengthen" that signal. I know Google says a lot of things but with this I'd rather be in front of my competition. And with e-commerce I've seen more than one study that shows SSL and security badges increase conversions and trust. Not sure how helpful this is, just my two cents.

It depends on the topic. I normally agree with this sentiment, I have given the same advice often over the year. In this case it was something that made sense to do because the audience via social and email is a very different demographic than we had on the main blog. The second blog was not built for backlinks or any spammy purpose, which is why we wanted to clearly show the relationship to Google without getting flagged for trying to spam. The purpose for the links would only be for user experience and not for SEO, we are good making all those links nofollow links. Even if we did them all nofollow we just wanted to see if there was anything else that could be done to show the relationship between the two sites.

The second blog was started less than 2 months ago and already has 50k+ pageviews even without the help of the original blog. Not a single backlink during that time, mainly because we were protecting our assets. Thanks for your feedback and not holding back on this topic, I like that even if I may not like the advice given that we're all open to the truth here in the Moz community. I definitely agree with you here about doing this for the backlinks, there has to be a purpose to a second site. In this case there really was a purpose, and it was all audience driven. Cheers!