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What I'd recommend are:

1.  you could set your author and tag pages to be 'noindex,follow' - so search engines will still visit them, and follow the links through to the posts, but not actually index the potentially duplicate content on those pages

2.  make sure that your category pages are just showing excerpts of your posts, instead of the actual full post.

3.  determine your canonical url structure and stick with it

There's a really good blog post that covers this topic actually:

http://www.kidnapcustomers.com/how-to-make-a-website/wordpress-seo-duplicate-content-noindex-nofollow/

(Moz staff edit: see my answer below for resources that currently work -Dan)

Also - the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast is really good for helping to deal with these kinds of issues.

Hi there,

I asked this same question last week and got really good opinions from some of the members here.

Blog commenting can be risky if you'll just use it to optimize your keywords. However, if done right (written properly and with value), this is an effective way to build keywords, and credibility, online. If you're giving out comments that are useful, sort of like this Q and A here, then readers actually listen. Plus Google will also see how authoritative you are and will probably credit your site for it.

Here's a case study of one SEOMoz member, who have found out how blog commenting can still be effective Post Penguin. This might help you decide whether to still pursue that strategy.

Cheers!

BBB is one of those things that most business people have a strong opinion about (either for or against).  From a pure SEO point of view, I consider it a very strong link.  Here's why:

• From a pure SEO link perspective, the directory has a very high DA and MozRank (by far the highest MozRank of any of the directories recommended by SEOmoz)

• the directory is exclusive.  You have to be a business owner to get listed.  This prevents someone from listing 5 or 10 near-spammy sites, which crowd some other directories.

• they are very exclusive about linking out.  It's kind of annoying, but if you don't pay them again next year, you're link will be gone fast!  It ultimately ensures that they are not linking to businesses that are no longer operating.  This increases the overall trust of the directory.

• the average consumer feels warm and fuzzy seeing a BBB banner, and viewing the businesses profile on the BBB website.

I think I paid something like $300 or $400 for it, so maybe the price varies depending on your region and business type?  In any case, I'll continue to renew with the BBB every year.

Stay away from domain names containing brands.  After your hard work in building up the site, it can just easily be claimed by the brand holding company.  You'll need to turn over the domain to the brand holder without any compensation.  Even worse, you could be subject to a huge fine.

You can learn more about the process by which a brand holder can seize the name here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute-Resolution_Policy

Rand wrote a whole post a couple of years ago about when to go domain vs subdomain vs folder.  It covers things pretty well from a technical SEO point of view:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

When I read your question, it really seems more of a business strategy question, rather than a technical SEO question.  The one consideration is that - would franchisee's take a stronger ownership in their business and their territory if their business was represented by an individual domain name, rather than a sub-folder on a main website.

If you could see people going out and networking, and putting a domain name on a business card, they could probably acquire a lot of local business links in this way (Chamber of Commerce, etc) that would in the long run boost the brand awareness of the main franchise.

Giving each franchisee their own domain name might also help with local rankings, if you can get a domain name that includes both the business function and location in the name (for example PittsburghRugCleaning.com) - since exact match domains still get a boost over other domains that don't.

On the other hand, putting everything as a subfolder or subdirectory would be much less work from a hosting side of things.

Article Submission was a good tactic years ago but I think that the recent Google updates have limited their effect on getting good rankings. That doesn't mean that it can't work. Some folks are still doing it and have observed that article submission works sometimes for a few months. This tactic sometimes work in the short-term but an algorithm change can wipe your rankings achieved through submitting an article to a bunch of article directories, article portals, article resource sites, etc... Then, there's the issue of duplicate content  and the submission sites can essentially cannibalize the traffic that you could have earned.

Google is getting smarter about content analysis so the classic or traditional forms of article submission are fast becoming old hat. We should now focus on real authentic alternatives that can get readership and trust over to our site.

In recent months, I have been focusing on guest blogging as a way to help build up my company's brand, earn recognition, and perhaps get some quality great links back to my sites. The time i used to spend on traditional forms of article submission are now being redirected into doing something authentic.

What an interesting choice of career path Aidan.

SEO is like a religion as what most people in the industry say, and so you have to provide a strategic plan of your own.

Providing them a summary of what you have accomplished, from the tools/methods you've used (analytics, keyword research tools) to results (SERP placements and conversions) could show how serious you are with your work.

You have to constantly update yourself through forum sites or SEO blogs with the latest news and issues, especially when another Panda or Penguin update strikes.

There are a number of blogs out there from SEO practitioners and experts that can guide you through just like here in SEOmoz.

So good luck with your new endeavor!

Hi Titan -

I'm not an SEOMoz employee - so I can only speculate here.

From the blog post on Raven Tools - they made the comment that the reason they decided to stop offering the rank tracker is because they failed an audit for the Google Adwords API.  Google gave them an ultimatum - either stop using scraped data, or lose access to the API.

From what I understand, SEOmoz was recently faced with the same problem, and they chose to drop the access to the Adwords API, instead of giving up access to the scraped data.  This is understandable, since SEOMoz's tools focus exclusively on SEO - while Raven offers a a wide range of services - some SEO, some PPC, some Social Media, etc.

So, I would be surprised if SEOMoz would stop offering the rank tracker.  Though I really have no inside knowledge about this at all.

I think the SEOMoz rank tracker is an internally developed tool.  Raven tools, and a lot of other SEO tools in the industry used a company called Authority Labs.

http://authoritylabs.com/

Rank tracking is the only thing that they do, and from what I've seen, their data is a bit better overall, if you're just looking for rank tracking.  They also do daily monitoring of keywords, which is a bit overkill from my perspective - but could be useful if you're in a very competitive niche.

It's an interesting idea.  There's a very popular blog in the SEO industry that is 'do follow'.  He is very interactive and the comments there are generally good.

Here are some considerations:

• outside of the SEO industry, how many people really understand the difference of 'do follow' vs 'no follow'.  If you're topic is something niche and very technical, the fact that it's 'do follow' may potentially have 0 impact on the type of person that you really want to have leave feedback.

• be prepared to be a firm moderator for the comments.  I think you'll often find yourself on the fence you'll see a comment with marginal value.  I would try to set the bar higher on which comments you approve.

• Facebook comments might be useful.  Since Facebook comments show up on a users wall, and can generally be viewed by friends who might be in the same industry, it might be a good way of generating more discussions.  We've used Facebook comments for a few sites, and have had very little problem at all with spam comments.  The downside with Facebook comments is that the content is stored on Facebook rather than your own blog (though there are some plugins that attempt to address this by download the comments to the blog).

• The SEOMoz profile system is kind of cool.  Once a user has generated enough 'points' - their profile link becomes followed.  I sometimes wish there was a similar system for blog comments.  Maybe there is?

There's actually a tool inside of Google Webmaster Tools that lets you specify how they should handle crawling your URL parameters.  It's under 'configuration -> url parameters'.  It should tell you there if they are having any trouble to crawl your site or not, based on the parameters in your URL.

Google has actually just released a video about this topic today - and it would probably be worth reviewing as well:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/08/configuring-url-parameters-in-webmaster.html

Low cost usually means low quality so one needs to weigh the risk of hiring cheap labor for the content of your blog.  The post-panda environment does not look kindly to low-quality content and Google has incorporated machine learning ensure that it could accurately predict what the humans would judge a low quality site.

You have to find writers that can provide value for your money. Finding a person with good writing skills that is willing to work with your budget can be a challenge.

When dealing with a site that sources writers, one needs to ask questions that would ensure that the writer would provide what you truly need. Make sure that both parties have a clear understanding of the job that needs to be done. One would need to communicate with a prospective writer to see if he or she will be a fit for your needs. Ask for sample articles so that one can judge if a writer's skill is adequate.

Hiring a free-lance writer would probably be cheaper but riskier. Hiring one that works for an outsourcing company can be pricier but there will be measures that would help to ensure quality for the content of your blog.  An outsourcing company would usually have customer service that will resolve any complaints or misunderstandings between a client and a writer.

You could use a wildcard operator in your robots.txt to deal with this.

Something like this should work:

Disallow: /subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=*

See here for more details:

http://sanzon.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/advanced-usage-of-robotstxt-w-querystrings/

Hi - i don't use blogger, but generally my policy for image alt text is to make the alt text relevant to the article that I'm embedding the image into.  For instance, if I wrote an article about backpacks to consider buying for a trek to the Himalayas, I would probably mention the brand name of the backpack, and that it was for a Himalayas trek.

I don't recall seeing any kind of rule about how long to make the alt text, but based on my usage, my alt texts tend to be between 2 words to a sentence.

Another thing to consider about is that, you're trying to describe why you're using a certain image on the blog you've just posted.  So in that regard, you could use the same exact image on different posts on your site, but use completely different alt text.  Maybe the first post was about a trek to the Himalayas, while the second post was about how to choose a rugged backpack.  In each case, you might want to draw out different characteristics of the backpack, and thus write a different alt text to match the page.

It looks like SEOMoz is using their robots.txt file to specify their sitemaps:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183669

You can probably do something similar:

http://www.seomoz.org/robots.txt

For what you want to do - link assistant is not the answer.  Keep in mind, just a few good links will go much further than the spam that many auto-linking software programs generate.

There was a really good article in YouMoz the other day about how to create interesting / buzzworthy content for boring industries (like copier services!) - take a look, and think about how you can apply it to what you're doing:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries

If I understand this correctly, you are the merchant, and you have some affiliate software.  Your affiliates will come to your software and get these links to use, which are not clean?  You then want the affiliates to have a clean URL to use to link to you?

That's actually done very commonly by many experienced affiliates already.  In terms of SEO, most affiliates that I know set their affiliate links to go through a sub directory link like /go or /jump.  That directory typically gets blocked in the robots.txt file, so that those links will be completely ignored by spiders - so as a merchant, you'll still get the clicks, but won't get any SEO benefit from doing that.

It really is better if you can just use an affiliate program that gives your affiliates clean links in the first place.  The cleaner your links are, the less likely that affiliates will think to cloak the links on their own websites, and use some techniques that reduce any SEO value of those links for you.  For your affiliates, the simpler / easier you make it for them - the better results you're going to see from your program.

Having other keywords will not affect the relevance of your main keyword, as long as you optimize each of your keywords properly. Adding more keyword variation as well as landing pages for those keywords is a good thing because:

1. Targeting more keywords can increase your search traffic.

2. Landing pages with contents that are relevant to the keywords can also increase the conversion rate of your site.

When you add keywords in your content, make sure it will appear natural, like they are part of the sentence structure. Check out this video:

I know its an old video but some pointers there might help you.

274

There's nothing wrong with upgrading your site.  In general, I would recommend to update your site, if you have the time to do it right.  Things to watch out for are:

• will every page still have a unique URL?  There are a number of HTML5 based systems which run the entire site on a single URL (look at how Gmail runs for example).  It can be great for an end user experience since the pages appear to load very quickly.  However, such a system would probably make it difficult for all of your pages to be properly indexed.

• assuming you'll have unique URLs - make sure that the new site will use the same URLs as the original site.  If not, plan to put in 301 redirects for all of the existing pages.

• just because you're going HTML5, don't forget the basics.  Use your title tag, H1, H2, etc on the new template.

• after you launch the new site, make sure spiders can still crawl the site properly.  If yes, then you should be all set with your new site.

It may be a problem with the location setting for your website.  Is your keyword really specific for the UK?  ... such that people from other areas in the world would not search for it?  If the local and global keyword search volumes are the same, it could indicate that all of the traffic for that keyword is coming from the UK, and that's where you're currently not ranking.

If that's indeed the case, you should try to increase the number of local search ranking signals, which could include:

• setting the target country in webmaster tools

• getting links from other .co.uk domains

• including an address and phone number on the site from .co.uk

• move the hosting to somewhere in the UK

There are lots of other hints you can give to Google about the geotargeting of your site.  Probably the first 3 would be a good start.

Hi Mememax,

I think your idea of providing Google Places support for local businesses with no website is a really good idea. But linking them to your site might be tricky. I havent seen any google places listings which are hosted on a only one, and non-related, website.

For one, if the listing is being searched and people will want to learn more, will you be able to provide those details in your site? Also, pointing them all to one domain is kind of risky.

Maybe you can offer google places and website support. Then include your link as the host on either the google places or site. That would mean more links for your site. Just a thought...

Hi there,

I've heard about some stories and case studies stating that organic listings seem to be disappearing and is being replaced by local listings. There are some articles about that online:

Is Google plus local replacing organic results?

Are your organic listings being replaced with local listings?

In your client's case, maybe the local listing has not been optimized yet.

You can link your Google + local page to the site as "publisher". This tells Google that the site is the publisher of the profile's content. Relevant contents on the site is also very important as they help strengthen the site's brand. Gathering customer reviews about the business is also very helpful.

Besides, according to SEOMoz's Eye-Tracking Google SERPs, local listings are more likely to be clicked in the search results.

Hope this helps!

Cheers!

Hi there,

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My thoughts:

Maybe one of their campaign, like videos, went viral. For that amount of new links, it has to be a link or content or video that is shared, syndicated or reposted, a lot of times.

My other thought would be using automated software and buying links. (Though I'm not saying your competitor did those).

You could check your competitors' site using tools like Raven Tools or Website Analyzer or Link Detective, to see where those new links are coming from. That will help you figure out if those are "natural" links.

Hi - I usually use the URL format shown here:

http://www.seomoz.org/api/keys

They have a "sample request" shown here, that you can use to get started.  I know they recently stopped supporting the old API format, and it caused a bunch of the scripts I run to stop working.  One of the tricky things about the new API format is the 'cols' parameter, where you specify the data that you want returned.  They added this to restrict the amount of data that is returned.  Before it returned a bunch of data, that maybe users were not really interested in - and so it used more of their server resources and bandwidth.

You can see details about how to use the 'cols' parameter for URL metrics here:

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/url-metrics

You have to add up the bit values for the fields that you want to have returned.  So for instance, if you want only the 'external links' data (32) and the 'mozrank' data (16384), you'd set the cols flag to be 16416  ... (32 + 16384).

Hope that helps ~

Hi there,

As far as I know, Google places (Google +) do not have the multiple users function. Google says only one gmail account can manage a claimed Google Places.

An alternative method is transfer your listing between Google places accounts:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17104

Hope that helps...

I really don't see too much value in article marketing at this point.  If you made a really high quality article, why would you want to waste it, by posting it into a place where no one would ever read it!

I consider guest blogging to be a stronger strategy overall.  It takes some more work from you up front, but in the long run, it will pay bigger dividends.

Search out a list of 20 to 30 blogs that write good articles in your industry.  Reach out to them (either a contact form, or Twitter, or LinkedIn ,etc), and see if they accept guest blog submissions.

If they do, send them your article for review.

If it gets posted, you'll have a link from a respectable site, that people actually read, and will send you some traffic over time as well.  It can be a good way to make connections with people that have similar interests as well.

Creating a page every time someone performs a search could probably spiral out of control pretty quickly.  If you have a certain amount of 'page rank', based on all of the back links you have, that page rank will get shared to all of the pages that you have across your site.

One way you could more naturally control what gets indexed, is by what you link to from your home page.  For instance, if you track the most blocked big sites, as well as the most blocked keywords, and have those pages 1 link from your homepage, you could expect those to get indexed naturally when your site is spidered.

As you get more links from other sites, and your trust from the search engines and page rank grows, you should be able to support more pages getting indexed across your site.

There is the issue of your site contents potentially being regarded as 'thin content', since many of the pages appear to be the same from page to page.

One question I had - I saw your site hosts both Chinese language words and English language words, and checks whether those words are being filtered.  Perhaps it would make more sense to only show the words in Chinese characters on the zh. subdomain, and the English words on the en. subdomain?  Just a thought.  Is there any difference between the zh and en subdomains, aside from the language of the template?

Really interesting website.

Was the domain previously redirected to photobooklaos?  Both the Google info:photobookworldwide.com and cache:photobookworldwide.com are showing up as photobooklaos.com, which happens if a domain was redirected.

As a first step, I'd setup Google Webmaster Tools for the site.  Telling Google about your site might help to reset that.  Additionally, you can use the fetch as Googlebot tool there, to see if there are still any redirects happening that might confuse Googlebot.

This Whiteborad Friday blog post might be able to help. This clip helped us to cope and understand the post-panda environment. Combine the video with the data showing the falling rankings as proof that traditional SEO methods that get low quality links are no longer effective. Showing them other articles and videos on the changes since panda/penguin might also help to change their perspective.

They may be finding it hard to change methods and tactics because it has worked well for them in the past. Convincing them that their techniques are no longer viable can be quite difficult as they probably still believe that old methods are still the best. Perhaps if you compile a lot of articles or videos from top SEO experts, then perhaps they  would come around an decide to change gears with their SEO campaign.

Hope this helps.

As long as you trust the site, and think you're linking to a valuable page on the web, there's nothing wrong with leaving them as 'follow'.

I don't see any reason why not to add it to any page that was actually created by a human author.  I'm not sure if it would be appropriate for a automatically generated pages like category or other archive pages for instance.  But with the new way of adding rel=author in the head section of a site, it's much easier to add now than before, and I expect it to be more and more widely used.

Kevin - there are a lot of different factors that go into rankings.  In general, it's better to have links from more root domains, rather than a large number of links from a few root domains.  However, you can't disregard the quality of those root domains.  If you only get very low quality root domains linking back to you, while your competitor has a couple of great, high quality links with the right anchor text, they could still hold you off for a while.

Sounds like you're on the right track though.

Putting a blog or other content on your website that is marketing focused to complement the content that is primarily meant for your business or customers is a good idea. This type of content allows one to drive new traffic, to get links in, or  to get social shares.

It would be good to keep  it on the same domain and to use subfolders. Like footballgames.com/blog or footballgames.com/articles.

But you do have to avoid stuff that might make your blog appear manipulative for SEO purposes. Try to link  across intelligently from your blog to your business content and vise versa. Don't have anchor text rich links on  every page of your blog linking over to the business pages. Optimize the blog to be helpful to visitors not just for the benefit of the crawler. A blog should try to entertain, educate, and build  trust with your audience so that one can improving the site's browse rate and get people to look at more pages.

Hope this helps.

Carla - the answer is .... it depends!

There are various different strategies for buying domains, and attempting to use them for SEO purposes.

The best case would be to negotiate privately with the owner of an existing website, and purchasing the domain and all of the contents of the domain from them.  Businesses merge all the time,  This is regular thing, and Google won't punish or look down on anyone for doing this.  It will be clear that the domain changed hands, probably by updates to the name servers, and whois information, but since the website never expired or dropped from the registry, Google would probably assume this was a merger.

Also, if you do this, one of the best strategies for dealing with the domain would be to redirect individual pages to the most analogous page on your site, to take greatest advantage of the merged site.

It's also possible to buy up expired or expiring domains.  There are different stages in the life cycle of domain name expiration where you can buy names.  If you buy them in what's called 'pre-release' status, the domains will be transferred to your own account before the name dropped out of the registry, so it will maintain it's original creation date.  You won't get the content with the domain, but this kind of domain purchase 'might' have some more life to it.

Finally, there are domains that have completely dropped out of the registry.  The links from these won't have much more life to them.

But in general, if you can buy the domain and website content directly from the original owner, it should show up as a business merger (or even as 'rebranding' in your case, since your website is new), and should be a relatively safe tactic.

Hi there, I think having the exact same alt text on the links is not a problem unless you did received a warning from Google about excessive usage or worst yet, spamming using that alt text.

But just to be on the safe side, I would advise for you to check those 600 links to see if they need to be disavowed. Normally, links that you need to disavow are:

• "Unnatural" backlinks that you created on your own or are purchased. This is especially for those with targeted high-volume keywords in the anchor text.

• Backlinks that are auto generated.

If those 600 links do not fall into any of those categories, then I advise for you not to disavow those links. It would be such a waste if you disavow those links from good sites that link to you because they think your site is good.

AOV

Guido - the reason the .com version is showing up now, is because you have the .IT version redirecting to the .COM version ( a 302 redirect is in place now ).  As long as you have that, you won't see the .IT version in the search results.

What's your goal here?  You'll have an Italian language (.IT) version of the site, and an English version (.COM)?

I would make a clear project plan for each site first, including creating the content for all of the different sites.  If you really want to go ahead with this plan, I would make unique English language content for the .COM site, and unique Italian language content for the .IT site.

Then, register each site with Google Webmaster Tools, and set the geotargeting option to the specific target country for each site.

If you just want to have a single website - the .IT version - then just use a 301 redirect to point the .COM version to the .IT version.

Let me know if you have any other questions ~

Sincerely,

Mr SEO Addicted

ahh, I see.  I think there can be cases where it's valuable to pull in a feed.  Perhaps an index of relevant headlines around a topic, or maybe headlines from a users blog posts.  I wouldn't use it as the primary basis of an SEO strategy though.

Also, one tip if you're planning on doing something like this.  It's much better to cache the results of a feed on your server, rather than pulling in a live RSS feed every time a user loads a page.  Given the value that Google places on page speed loading, you would probably have a greater negative impact on page load speed by adding RSS feeds to your site, unless you have a cache system in place.

Hi there,

SEOMoz has a great article about link building for 2013. With all the changes that has been going on with Google, you may want to try and do proper SEO for the website, meaning no keyword stuffing and buying of links, as Takeshi Young had said.

The focus now on link building is providing "evergreen contents". These are valuable contents that people would want to share, repost and retweet. Examples of these are tutorials, know-hows.

Also, it is important to build a reputable and authoritative online presence. Social networks, groups and communities can help you with that.

Hope that helps!

to shift from one language to the others i decided to put a php code that automatically recognizes the browser  language and redirects users from .it  to .com and vice versa, do you think is a good choice?

I'm pretty sure that's not a good idea.  For one, when Googlebot comes to your site, it will probably always get redirected to your .COM domain ( depending on how you have the redirect setup, but I'm sure it doesn't have show itself having Italian browser language) - so your Italian language content would never end up getting indexed.  This is also probably the cause of the 302 redirect I see when I come to your site.

The most pure SEO way of setting this up would be to make two separate sites (two separate virtual hosts on your server), the Italian one, and the English one.  Each time you have new contents, just add it to the appropriate site.

There are lots of debates about the best way to setup multi language sites.  The most common options are either a sub folder, a sub domain, or a separate domain.  Since you've chosen to do a separate domain, you should go ahead and set it up as a unique site, rather than tricky server side redirects, which will confuse those silly search engine spiders!

Lots of companies have setup separate international domains, for example:

http://www.coca-cola.com/en/index.html

http://www.coca-cola.it/

http://www.coca-cola.com.cn/#/home

Sincerely,

Mr SEO Addicted

Name.com, NameCheap.com, Dynadot.com  are all good and have reasonable prices.  I personally use fabulous.com for most of my domains.

As annoying as Godaddy can be, I was happy to see they now offer two-factor authentication as a way of protecting domains.

I think reputation of a registrar can be a factor - mainly if they mess up something in your account, or don't handle renewals properly, causing your site to go offline.

You're welcome. Happy to help!

Yes - I can say from experience that this is true.  You'll also feel much more inspired to keep working towards 'coat stand', after you've achieved the mini-success of already ranking for 'cheap coat stand'!

Hi Egol,

Honestly, Google+ still has not brought impressive referral traffic to our website...there are few but Facebook and Twitter are our biggest source and Pinterest is also showing a good potential.

Thanks,

Roy

It's really going to be a bit complex to get this done right.  But based your example above, it looks like you just want to redirect anything with a query string back to the base url.

There's a discussion specifically about that right here:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3203401.htm

You could start with this code and refine it from there:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1? [R=301,L]

Good luck.

There was a fad a few years about doing microsites, where everyone was trying to create as many 'feeder' style sites as possible.  Lately, the trend has reversed, (Penguin / Panda) where the focus is more on creating a single great user experience and a brand associated with it.

In your case, 'personal development' and 'personal development training' could be considered as competitive, just based on the sheer number of ranking pages, and the number of advertisers for the 'training' keyword.

By putting the two blogs as subfolders (or even merging them into a single blog with 2 authors), you can expect to gain backlinks and build up social activity around your site at a much faster rate, compared to running them on separate blogs.

It potentially would be more fun for the blog authors as well, as there should be more readers and potential comments and discussion, and readers who follow one author stick around to join the discussion on the other blog authors posts.

So, I strongly vote for a single site / blog platform.  Of course, you may have to contend with some personal egos, to convince two people to share the same blog, but for SEO and ranking, it will produce much faster results.

Well, because they are 'orphans', you probably can't find them using a spider tool!  I'd recommend the following process to find your orphan pages:

1.  get a list of all the pages created by your CMS

2.  get the list of all the pages found by Screaming Frog

3.  add the two url lists into Excel and find the URLs in your CMS that are not in the Screaming Frog list.

You could probably use an Excel trick like this one:

http://superuser.com/questions/289650/how-to-compare-two-columns-and-find-differences-in-excel

In terms of post panda / penguin linking, the best thing is to stick with an honest strategy by observing the following rules:

• use cookie crumb style links within all pages.  These are good for usability, as it allows users to know where they are on your site.  They also provide a way of including rich anchor text links on your site

• use internal link anchor text in a natural way.  For most pages, there are several very closely variations of anchor text that fit to a close theme.  For instance, in one case, I link to a certain page on one of my websites the following keywords --> free domain appraisal, free domain name appraisal, free domain name valuation, free domain valuation.  The page in question is very relevant for all of those variations and ranks well for all of those variations.  It just takes a little bit of extra thought to think of these keyword variations, and can ultimately generate much more traffic for the page in question too.

• cross link related pages with relevant anchor text.  There may be related pages within different category pages.  Rich in content text links between those pages provide value to your readers and should not hurt you in any way.

• I think a basic site hierarchy is reasonable to follow.  Pick major categories for the top level links, and related topics below each of those categories.

Hi there,

Bing is all about good, original contents, authoritative inbound links and well structured webpages. If you want to be optimized in Bing, you may want to focus on those.

Here are some useful information on Bing optimization.

Search engine optimization on Bing

How to build quality contents

Hope that helps!

You could try adding the pages you want to remove to your robots.txt file.  Since you're not linking to them, and it's very unlikely that Googlebot will index those pages naturally now, this might be a better way of telling it which pages to explicitly not index.

I'm not really sure how quickly this will trigger Google to remove those pages from the index - but they do reference robots.txt on the actual "Remove URLs" page of WMT ---> "Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ..."

For that technique, you'd want to add something like this for all of the pages you want to remove:

Disallow: /oldpage1toremove.php

That should work.  If it doesn't, then I would probably just submit the requests through the "Remove URLs" tool.

I've never had a problem on creating a large number of redirects on a site before.  It's something that happens quite a bit, for instance if a site is moving to a a site to a new domain or a new CMS, where it can often be very difficult to exactly recreate the same URL structure.

There's no limit to the number of redirects, just the number of hops.  If the site had existing redirects in place, you might want to update those existing redirects as well, to point to the new final destination.