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Actually in cases like your example above its more an issue of an ambiguous URL rather than actual duplicate content.

The thing to do in the example above is to choose which version of your site you want (with www or without) to always use, and then set your server accordingly. In Apache this means using your .htaccess file.

If you decide to always display www (my preferred way) then this should be in your .htaccess:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on</ifmodule>

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

If you want your URLS to not use www:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on</ifmodule>

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Let me give you an example of one of the best "like" campaigns a friend of mine recently launched. They're in the office furniture business. Snooooooze. Here's what they did:

1. Announced a contest to win a top-of-the-line office chair.

2. To enter, you had to submit a picture to them of your current office chair, the more awful and woe-begotten the better.

3. They posted all entries to an album on their facebook.

4. Their fans were asked to "like" the chair that was the worst off and most in need of replacing, whichever photo got the most likes won.

5. The photos went viral because they were funny, and the contestants and their friends were spreading the word.

Edit: Obviously, I'm suggesting you try to come up with something like this haha. I'm not just rambling on

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.

Either take EGOL's advice and spend it on internal resources, or spend $6k contracting with a legitimate SEO services company. They will deliver far better results than shady press release businesses and east asian blackhats.

Have the new server prepped (your site uploaded, db's ready) before you switch the nameservers and there should be repercussions at all AFAIK. As the namerservers get updated around the world they simply point to your new server that is already there ready to go. The improved site speed will be a big win.

You could do this with one or two clever regex commands, the composition of which I can't think of cos its too close to quitting time on Friday. But yeah you don't need 9000 rules.

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.

From their dashboard there is a link on the right hand side of every domain that reads "Manage". Click that and select Add or Remove Owners. And on the next page at the bottom click Add Owners, then add your google account email.

I agree with your process. Its almost impossible to have too much information up front, because its hidden assumptions that are often the cause of delays and projects going off schedule.

"Then, six months or a year later, other changes had to be customized."

But here I disagree. IMHO this is the best reason to go with a well-known CMS. When that point comes in the future where a change has to be made, would you rather have a custom built web site that only the original developer knows well (if they even remember) or a popular CMS with thousands of developers around the world?

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.

Its preventing spiders from crawling pages with parameters in the URL. For example when you search on google you'll see a URL like so:

http://www.google.com/search?q=seo

This passes the parameter of q with a value of 'seo' to the page at google.com for it to work its magic with. This is almost definitely a good thing, unless the only way to access some content on your site is via URL parameters.

Not using 301s is about the worst thing you could do. Without a 301, you're basically throwing away all the authority your site currently has.

Use a 301 and you get to keep like 95% of your page authority, and your links will automatically get updated in the SE's when the spiders crawl over your site again.

Yes, almost all sites do this. If there is ever a chance someone could search for your brand name then you definitely want to be on top of the SERPs for those searches. If you don't think people will ever search your brand name then you've got  more fundamental marketing work to do before the SEO.

By way of examples: Amazon and Zappos both do this (in varying forms). A good rule of thumb is if Amazon and Zappos do it, you should give it serious consideration.

I don't mean to sound snarky, but just do a google search for your industry + blog. For example I just did a search for "real estate blog" and found some lists of 'top blogs' plus some high ranking blogs on the industry.

After you find some candidates, explore their site a bit and see if their views of the industry would be a good fit for the type of articles you want to write. Start commenting on their blogs and become a useful contributor that way, then once you're established approach them with an offer to write a guest post.

It is a great idea to block the development portion of your site. You can do that with your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /dev

But you're right, it doesn't sound like the culprit in your case. Its more likely that your competition is slowly gaining the edge on you. Make sure your on-page SEO is optimized and then try to get some more inbound links to your pages.

I'm not sure on the exact scheduling, but the rankings are only updated periodically. You should see your rank updated by tomorrow at the latest.

Bottom line: Google is treating it as a valid global TLD, but it will be a while (if ever) before people accept it as authoritative as a .com.

Do you mean start your own social network? The challenges and technical hurdles to doing so are much higher, but the potential rewards are also much greater.

I would say start a blog, get a post or two a week on it, and publish those to your social media accounts (especially linkedin, twitter, fb).

Once you've got that down, if you still have the resources to create a social network then go for it! You can use existing services like Ning or Drupal Connect to speed up the process.

As David points out the meta keywords tag is ignored by every search engine that matters. If you poke around the SEOmoz tools you'll notice they recommend getting rid of them, only to prevent your competition from sniffing out your keywords (they still can, but they have to put more effort into it).

Post tags, in a wordpress context, is more a way of organizing your content for the benefit of your human readers, not the engine crawlers. A lot of blogs will use a tag cloud to show topics that are often covered, provide a cool visual element to the page, and to help their readers browse to stuff they want to read.

There is a potential to hurt your SEO with these tags. If you're on wordpress I recommend the SEO all in one pack plugin. Using this you can mark your tag pages (and author pages) as NOINDEX to prevent any possible duplicate content penalties.

No, to count as duplicate content the text on the page needs to be largely the same. Googlebot is really good at parsing out navigation and thematic elements of the page separately from the content.

This matters mainly because of the potential for link dilution - most people agree you won't be explicitly penalized. See http://www.herseo.com/blog/2009/05/30/how-important-is-it-to-htaccess-redirect-to-www/

The best way to address this is to set up a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. I recently did this for my own domain with the following code:

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

Add that to your .htaccess file and drop it in your root directory.

Meta Refresh can pass link juice, according to Matt Cutts:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

But as Ryan Purkey suggests, a 301 is the accepted best-practice here. With Meta Refresh you need to be careful to avoid looking like a black-hat to a picky google algorithm. Some more discussion here.

You want to go through each page of your old site and if it had any links or authority at all, create a 301 redirect for it. That tells the engines your page has permanently moved, and tells them where to find the new page. This will preserve the majority of your authority for every page.

If you 302 them all to the homepage you're telling the search engine "this content is related and is a substitute, for now". However, you want -all- your pages to continue being indexed with as much authority as possible, not just the homepage.

After you've got your 301's set up correctly, then you can focus on creating a 404 page that is helpful to your users. Usually this means suggesting content based on the keywords in the URL, or including a search or link to the homepage.

It depends on how your site is structured.

For example if you have a page at

http://www.yourdomain.com/products.php

and this shows different things based on the parameter, like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/products.php?type=widgets

You will want to get rid of this line in your robots.txt

However if the parameter(s) doesn't change the content on the page, you can leave it in.

You should either get the old 404 page back or create a new one. A good 404 page can lower your bounce rate significantly. If you redirect what should be a 404 to your home page, you could end up with engines indexing those pages with the homepage content, setting yourself up for a duplicate content situation.

301 redirects should be used if you have content that is moved. It shouldn't be used to redirect non-existent pages somewhere else, and it should be kept in your htaccess until there are no more links pointing to the old URL.

There's no limit to how many keywords you can try to rank for on your site.

However per page its different: targeting 3 keyword phrases per page is ok, 2 per page is better, and 1 per page is best.

The only question is how much time/resources can you devote to creating high quality pages and getting them ranked.

Hard to say because its not clear where one ends and the other begins. A good link-building strategy will include a social component. I would say you should plan to spend time on:

• Making sure your content has social features like share & like buttons

• Creating great content that functions as link bait

• Reaching out to similar sites to build relationships

• Monitoring and responding to facebook posts and tweets

The first one is sort of initial setup, after that is in place divide your time equally between the last three, and make adjustments as it makes sense for you.

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.

Before I say that you are correct in your guess, let me preface by saying its probably a bad idea.

You are correct in your guess

From everything I've read Googlebot doesn't count iframe content as part of the page its looking at. However, if your site is bogged down by the amount of ads, chances are you're overloading your pages and getting docked by the post-panda google algorithm. Sites with lots of ads have seen decreasing rankings. Also, putting content in an iframe could be seen as suspicious by Google, further devaluing your site in its eyes. This isn't to say you can't make this happen and still rank in Google, but re-thinking your ad and revenue strategy could be the best long-term bet.

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>

Hi, is this an ad?

http://www.google.com/search?q=eadgear.com

Which page is the link coming from? Is it a real link that looks natural, or are you on some kind of spam/auto-gen'd page?

I use a very simple litmus test: Would I personally find this directory useful?

My answer for this site is no. I can't think of a point at which I'd want to browse sites from around the world loosely based on an industry. Frankly I'm surprised this directory has so much domain authority. My guess is their value in the SE's eyes will continually drop.

1. You should move your content from your old blog into your new wordpress blog.

2. Then you should 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new URLs. This is done in your .htaccess file on the old server

3. Submit a new sitemap to Google and also take advantage of their change of address form.All done in Webmaster Tools.

4. Keep your old site with the redirects up as long as is financially or otherwise viable.

5. Consider asking site-owners to update their links to your new URL, but be careful and polite on this because you don't want to lose the link altogether.

I would suggest finding a niche market and going for that. As one example, you list wordpress, drupal, and joomla as your area's of expertise, and go on to say you can provide expertise in any other CMS. You may find more success in picking one, and becoming a recognized expert in that CMS specifically. Also focus locally. You still haven't reached page 1 for "web design cork", so that'd be a good first goal.

I also noticed some spelling errors and non-transparent colors in your logo, little things that would stop me from contracting business services from someone. I mean no offense, but those should be fixed asap.

Check out http://www.seomoz.org/top500

<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.

A cleaner way to do this is to use a print css file. In your HTML you call it like so:

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="print" href="our-print-version.css">

Then you have only one document for both print and screen, and you can 301 one of your duplicates back to the original.

This is basically a way for sites to try to control the performance hit of being crawled too often by the bots. I don't think its ever worked to get a site deemed unimportant by the engines crawled more often than they would otherwise. If your site is not getting slammed by bots (and if it is, you probably have bigger performance problems to go after first) then, like Ryan Kent said, there isn't much use for these.

I'm guessing you'll get some good responses from this forum. If not, try doing a search for SEO and your city, or SEO and your industry (ex "SEO retail"). Those at the top of the results have already proven they can rank for their target keywords, so they should probably be able to help you as well.

Good luck!

The campaign crawler shows URLs with rel canonical tags as a notification, not as an actual problem. In other words, the crawler goes over your site and reports "Hey, btw, these pages all have rel=canonical tags on them, just thought you should know". The crawler is not saying "there is a problem with your rel canonical tags". On this metric, the more the better in my opinion.

Ideally you'll keep your URLs as short as possible, you'll notice SEOMoz does this here by limiting the Q&A section to the /q subfolder.

You also don't want to stuff keywords into your titles, URLs, or content.

However, www.example.com/review/razer-mouse-review is a far cry from keyword stuffing.

As far as the order goes, I believe that an exact match such as "razer-mouse-review" is slightly better than "review/razer-mouse" for someone searching "razer mouse review". Its a really minor difference though, to the point where the page with higher authority should always win in a match between those two. I wouldn't go through the trouble of changing those URL's and 301'ing them (which will cause you to lose a small amount of authority).

It could be that the comment spam is now being punished, coincidentally after you stopped it. Run the keyword grading tool on your pages to make sure your on-site is as good as it could be, and continue building legitimate links. I would never suggest using black-hat techniques like buying comment spam.

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.

I had a conversation about this very topic recently, here is the advice I got:

Headings get totally different treatment in HTML5, we have to throw away everything we knew about this from HTML4/XHTML.

In earlier versions of HTML we only had headings (h1 - h6), there are no other sectioning elements at all. That is why we had to be very careful about our usage of the h1 tag, and there was always controversy regarding it usage.

In HTML5 the sectioning is much more powerful. We have a whole bunch of new elements for sectioning and the algorithm used to generate the outline is far more complex, and flexible. In short, it no longer matters how many h1 tags we have on a page.

We must still adhere to a structured approach and be careful to generate the right outline (one that reflects the proper structure of the document), and this is what this theme does.

To conclude and clarify, in HTML5 it doesn't matter if there is multiple h1 tags on a page, what matters is how they are used in conjunction with the other sectioning elements, and that the outline produced represents the correct structure of the document.

Robert check this article out re: frontpage and htaccess

Frontpage is an html editor that helps you build a site. Apache is a server that site can run on. It sounds like you have both.

You'll want to edit the .htaccess file in the root folder of your website, wherever the file for your homepage sits.