If its possible to fix the site without altering the directory and URL structure, that's going to be your best option.

However, I'm guessing you're going to be fixing URLs as well, and if that's the case you'll want to use 301 redirects to tell search engines where the content has gone. See http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

Finally, wherever possible try to get the owners of the sites with backlinks to update their links to you.

Wrong site. Try the black hat forums.

Yeah check out URL Normalization under the Indexing tab.

Rel Canonical should help with the issue. You should also go into google webmaster tools and put in all your URL parameters, so the crawler has a better idea of whats going on with being able to get to a particular resource with several URL variations.

I would use one account for the whole domain. In the reporting tools you can filter out data based on things like "URL contains France".

Of course you can do it the other way (many accounts using filters, later collate the data) but I prefer to have all my data in one place where I can then tease out the info I'm after.

Check out this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dealing-with-duplicate-content

It will give you a much more thorough answer than just a percentage of uniqueness. But if you want that kind of answer I mostly hear guesses between 20% - 40% unique content.

Thanks for the reply Jane!

It actually does have a fair amount of history, created in Oct 2008. I'm still on the fence having a hard time weighing the pros and cons. On the one hand you can set the H1 tag to be whatever you want, but the username changes your page title and the anchor tag text on all your site actions. I'm starting to lean towards 'create a new channel'.

My predecessor left me a gift of what is arguably the worst kind of Youtube channel name: Our company's name condensed to an acronym with some additional gibberish that may or may not have meant something to her.

In short: Our channel name will never be searched for, will never provide any ranking boost.

Now our Youtube success has been very marginal so far: 31 subscribers, 7,300 video views.

Given that situation, should I seriously consider scrapping my channel and starting  something new with a keyword targeted channel name? Or does channel name matter so little that I should hold on to my 7300 video views?

Unless you have a combination of great skill and lots of resources, you may be chasing the impossible. That being said, you should always optimize for the keywords that make sense. If you are running a business not in competition with wikipedia or a government service, then appearing in SERPs right behind them can be considered success.

I'd also suggest that you look into PPC (buying ads) independently of your SEO efforts, as both are important aspects of a comprehensive in-bound marketing plan.

Just to clarify my position, I do not think a plain text link will be counted towards your page or domain authority.

Also, I would be careful using a strategy that considers too many good links with high value as anything other than awesome. If your strategy only included such links, I think you would be doing very well.

The keywords meta tag is deprecated and not used by any of the major search engines, so don't even worry about that.

As for a general strategy you should focus on a keyword or two for each page and optimize for that. When you link internally in your site, use the keywords your optimizing for in the anchor text. When acquiring external links try to do this as much as possible. Don't cannibalize yourself by trying to optimize for the same keyword across all your pages.

I wouldn't worry about making landing pages in order to get them ranked - thats what your main pages are for. Use landing pages to test out what converts best with A/B testing, and as end points for your PPC campaigns.

There is a nominal value in submitting your press release to places like prweb.com. I've successfully used their site to get a few backlinks that helped out, albeit only a small amount.

Another tactic is to use HARO to get your organizations message published.

The true value of a press release is in its news-worthiness. If your PR is just thinly veiled advertising, its not going to be worth much. If your PR is exciting and new, it can go viral and a press release service can help with the first steps to getting it there.

Without a doubt add it to the main site under a folder like /blog. As John Barth mentioned, using it as a subdomain will pass all the domain authority value to the subdomain and not your main site, so its functionally equivalent to hosting it on a different domain.

If your dropdown is powered by...

• CSS: Yes, they can see it.

• Javascrip:. Most likely yes.

• Flash: Almost definitely not.

Unless you have a combination of great skill and lots of resources, you may be chasing the impossible. That being said, you should always optimize for the keywords that make sense. If you are running a business not in competition with wikipedia or a government service, then appearing in SERPs right behind them can be considered success.

I'd also suggest that you look into PPC (buying ads) independently of your SEO efforts, as both are important aspects of a comprehensive in-bound marketing plan.

Say you had links coming from example.com/page1.html and example.com/page2.html. You would have 2 external backlinks from one referring domain.

If you're doing on-page SEO, you can't focus on broad match, you can only optimize for the exact keyword phrases you use on your site in H1 tags, titles, and all the rest.

You could try to find all the broad match synonyms and stuff them into your title and H1 etc etc but then you're diluting the SEO value for any given page by doing so. Best to focus on 1 or 2 keywords per page and optimize for that.

My suggestion is to take the large volume you get from broad matching, and find the exact phrasing that takes the lion share of that volume and go with that.

As Dan mentions you must be careful though... within a set of related keywords that broadly match a phrase, some keywords are at the beginning of the buyers funnel and others are at the end. Make sure your site is optimized to take people along that funnel. Don't only optimize for the biggest search phrases that only people not actually buying use.

They both point to the same location on the server? So there's not a different folder for the subdomain?

If that's the case then I suggest adding a rule to your htaccess file to 301 the subdomain back to the main domain in exactly the same way people redirect from non-www to www or vice-versa. However, you should ask why the server is configured to have a duplicate subdomain? You might just edit your apache settings to get rid of that subdomain (usually done through a cpanel interface).

Here is what your htaccess might look like:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
  # Redirect non-www to wwww
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.org [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

<base> allows you to set the default attributes for links on the page. For example if I set <base href="http://www.mydomain.com/"> then I can make a link to and it will point to http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html

I believe this magic happens on the web server before the page is sent to the browser, making it a safe practice for SEO.

To the best of my knowledge this has no impact on SEO. Googlebot doesn't like it when you hide content, but that only applies to overflow:hidden and display:none as far as I know.