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They are duplicate content, other than the products. From page 2 onwards, remove all of that content you have below the product results.

Also from page 2 onwards, change the title tags so you have "Page 2", "Page 3" etc. at the beginning - you want the SEO value for the headers here going to your main landing page - the first one. The meta description is the same on each page too, so add the page numbers to that, or remove it altogether for any page other than the main one.

http://www.redwrappings.com.au/products.php?c=australian-made&p=1 and http://www.redwrappings.com.au/australian-made/gift-ideas are showing as the same page, so add a rel=canonical for the latter address on page 1 and/or 301 redirect the former to the latter.

On another note, your meta description for page 1 is WAY TOO long. Get it below 150 characters. There's no point stuffing it with keywords. The aim of that is to get people to click through when they see your site on SERPs.

And on another 'nother note, I'd say this post does have a specific answer, rather than being an ongoing discussion.

For when you launch the new website, Google have a change of address tool: 
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en

As mentioned, 301 redirecting the exact old page to the exact same new page is the most important step. Plan ahead and map out your 301 redirects. You want to be sure of what's happening when the domain is transferred to give your rankings and traffic the best chance of remaining intact (or even increasing, which I've seen with some website redesigns).

I think you can change your Twitter handle more than once. If you have a good existing following I'd recommend updating your existing profile to the new handle, and (if possible) re-registering the old Twitter handle at another account - linking in the bio to your new Twitter account. That'll make sure you retain some of the link authority your current Twitter profile has built up and ensure people can still find you through any old links. I think custom Facebook URLs can be changed once.

I actually wrote a site migration guide last week, there should be a few points in there you'll find useful: insideonline.co.uk/website-migration-guide/

Just change the keyword at the end of this URL:

wordpress.com/tag/cakes/

You'll also see related tags to the right.

When SEOmoz stopped being an SEO consultancy, they passed their business over to Distilled, who are a UK-based company I believe. It might be worth checking them out. I've also had MeasuredSEM recommended to me.

I don't know if they take on business, but Ryan Kent and EGOL are two of the best posters on here, so find out if they do from their profiles.

You can geotarget folders in Google WMT, you just need to set up a new site for each folder. Duplicate content is not a problem, as long as the two separate areas of the site are geotargeted properly. Be aware of the language differences between the two countries and if you're from the US get a native-UK speaker to check the UK part of the site or vice-versa. UK-based links to the relevant UK pages will help a lot - and an advantage of having both locations on one .com is that all links will help towards it, rather than getting less benefit by link-building to two completely separate sites.

The one thing I'm not sure of is the potential issue you mention of setting the .com (with no sub-folder) to target the US, and .com/uk to the UK - it might be worth using your private question for the month if you haven't already to see what the SEOmoz folk know. Another option for the UK would be a sub-domain, like  uk.somewebsite.com

I made a post here with some links that will help you if you haven't seen them already: http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-country-site-versions-and-hosting

Are the titles relevant to the page content? Are they well over 70 characters (or really short in some cases)? It is possible Google has changed the title display on the SERPs if any of those things apply. They sometimes use a H tag, ODP listing, anchor text from links or some content within the page...if they're only showing the keywords in your case I'd guess the titles might be too long.

If it's only started to happen recently perhaps they're doing some testing...

Here's a useful link: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35624 - Google also say they might change the title tag if the same title is used multiple times across a site - something I missed! There's also some info on preventing the use of ODP data in tags.

You do lose some, but I believe most of the link juice will flow if you 301 redirect the page. I'd probably do what YouON suggests and leave the page intact with useful links to elsewhere on your site.

I see the value of associating anchor text with content links rather than navigation, but I agree with EGOL more than Ryan on this one. What if users are viewing the site with CSS disabled? Maybe because it's easier to view with a screen reader for blind/partially sighted people - it's not very user-friendly having the main navigation links only at the bottom is it?

That could be an issue. Was it targeted to the UK before?

Looking further into it, the Penguin updates throughout the year (the first in April)  don't match directly with the timing of drops you mentioned, but some of your "one direction" exact match anchor text links could have been devalued. The site-wide footer link here for example, on a completely unrelated website (that's a big no-no in Google's eyes): http://www.tapshop321.com/blog/

How about the explosion in popularity of the band? Your Domain and Page Authority is lower than most of the results on the first 3 pages. This is worldwide but illustrates the point - there will be a lot more competition from other sites now: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=one%20direction&cmpt=q

The 100 links per page limit isn't much of an issue these days. As long as Google can crawl your menu links (e.g. the menu is not hiding behind JavaScript) and you don't have hundreds and hundreds of links, it should be fine. Other than that you should do whatever is best for the customers rather than thinking about the search engines; personally I was a little overwhelmed by some of the menus on your site, but then again I hadn't taken note of what your site was selling, so at first didn't know what I was looking at.

I'd focus your H1 tag more towards a phrase you're targeting - something like 'NLP Training in California'. You can also optimise your images more - calling the header image something like nlp-institute-california will help, as will adding to the alt tag.

The On-Page optimiser within SEOmoz PRO is excellent, you should run your pages through that.

An SEO who thinks adding thousands of useless pages will do a website good? Get rid of them, or (preferably) get them re-educated!

There are a load here: http://wpml.org/showcase/

If the rest of the content on each of those pages is unique and valuable I don't think you should have a problem. I did something similar with the meta descriptions on a website about a year ago as that was the only way at the time to programme them in the time available, and they weren't picked up as duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools (Search Improvements > HTML Improvements).

If you have the resources to make each description completely unique I'd say go ahead, but otherwise I wouldn't worry too much about it as long as the same cut-copy approach isn't taken with the rest of the content on the page.

Article spinning is terrible. As is anything that adds pointless content to the web. My mantra is to only add content that is valuable to a user or users somewhere. Take Marcus' advice.

It'll just look spammy. Exact matching anchor text seems to be becoming less effective anyway, and Google is good at looking at the context links are placed in, so if a Spanish link is inserted into otherwise English text that will probably look dodgy. And if you're targeting Spanish search engines, links from other countries have less value anyway.

Don't worry about it - I've done far sillier things.

There's always a small amount of authority lost through a 301 redirect or canonical, but as long as you set the 301 redirects up correctly I wouldn't worry about it. It should benefit your site in the long-term.

I've overseen a few site migrations where unfriendly URLs (e.g. /product.php?id=1234) were replaced with friendly URLs (e.g. /category/product) and more often than not, immediately after the migration organic traffic and rankings remained consistent or improved. I think there was one where traffic and rankings dropped in the short-term but then recovered to a better level within a month.

If you go ahead with the URL change and 301 redirects, keep a crawl/record of your current website, then when you've completed the redirects, crawl the old URLs to see if they're redirecting as you expect. If they're not, fix them as quickly as you can.

I agree with Tom in terms of the URL structure and breadcrumb trail, though I am a fan of short URLs, so I'd shorten some of the category names when used in your URLs e.g.

/transport/air
instead of
/motors-and-transport/air-transport

Also be aware that
/transport/air
is different to
/transport/air/

• so make sure only one version exists - with or without the trailing slash.

There's a good overview here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/15-smart-ways-to-find-guest-posting-opportunities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_localisation#Language_tags_and_codes

Australia isn't listed there but it's en-AU. It's necessary if you want to help Google recognise the sites are targeted to different countries, as Ryan mentions language and spellings differ slightly in various English-speaking countries.

If it's an article or blog post I think it's wise to have them at the start and end of the content. If someone has read and enjoyed the article, they're more likely to click the share icons if they're there when they've finished, rather than scrolling back to the top.

Will you get any relevant traffic from the link?

Does it look like a good place to get a link? Is the content worthwhile?

What other sites do they link to? How many? Are they good quality?

Will they place your link whatever it is if you 'donate' or will they only link to related websites? Is there an editorial decision to be made?

Is the link nofollow or is there a chance they might make it nofollow in future? Do you have any guarantee that the site/link will remain there in the near/distant future?

I don't think I would do it but they are a few things to take into consideration. Here's a WBF I just found but haven't watched yet: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-we-bought-links-and-it-worked and there will be useful stuff here: http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=paid+links

I should probably have opened the post with this, but here is Google's stance on paid links: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

I'd say a DMOZ link is worth applying for but not worth a bead of sweat if you don't get accepted/moderated.

It's the overall variety of a link profile that counts. If you get links naturally you'll have a mix of follow and nofollow, URL-match, branded, non-branded anchor text and some keyword match thrown in, homepage links and deep links, social and non-social...

I like the phrase "If Google did not exist but the Internet did, where would you get links?"

In answer to your original question, I agree with Doug. if you're offering a product it's a good idea to offer it to influential bloggers that your target audience visits for free, in return for an unbiased review and link. But if you're just starting out don't go for the biggest bloggers as they probably get inundated. If your product is great the most influential will pick up on it through some of the 'smaller' blogs.

Did the other page rank anywhere?

My view is to not do it - you're just confusing the search engines over which is the most important of your pages for that term. And instead of competing against your competitors, you're competing against yourself.

Take a look at this post from a while ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

Rather than something generic, you could think about the longer-tail for your homepage - something like 'cheap designer glasses' might not be as competitive but could still send a lot of relevant traffic.

I thought it was a useful answer, it's pretty much what I'd say.

I don't know of any studies into whether it improves CTR.

The sole skull & crossbones looks quite effective, but the descriptions and titles with the stars look spammy to me, so I probably wouldn't click them. I'd say be subtle, perhaps add something that might be enough to catch the eye without putting people off clicking. Remember Google can change the meta descriptions and titles if their algorithm deems they're not appropriate for the search - another reason not to go overboard.

I can see this getting to the stage where everyone in some SERPs has added a load of symbols to try and get noticed - that's when Google might add it as a negative ranking factor, or just not display descriptions and titles that use it.

Thanks for pointing that out - I had no idea. In the video Matt Cutts says subdomains are "likely" to be treated like subfolders. The change was also confirned here: http://www.seroundtable.com/subdomains-google-webmaster-tools-13960.html

I wonder how other search engines treat them? More research required...

Lots of quality, unique content is good for SEO. The warning will be specific to each page, do you really need so many links on one page? The 100 limit isn't firm, it was a guideline Google mentioned a few years ago, but their crawlers have become much more sophisticated since then. I think there was a suggestion that Google wouldn't crawl more than 100 links per page, or wouldn't pass PageRank on to the 101st+ links - it's not such an issue any more.

Check out this blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

If your pictures get shared more than links then it's still worth doing - it could lead to an SEO benefit as it's spreading your name around, and maybe Google will begin to associate you as an authority in the world of photography. Perhaps people will put your name into a search engine after seeing one of your photos, or maybe you'll have a Jeff moment! That would be cool.

I read somewhere that photos get liked and commented more on Facebook than links because with links people are clicking away from Facebook, so when they go back they forget to interact again. I can agree with that - and that people are sometimes unwilling to click away from Facebook. The same probably applies to Google+.

I'm an amateur photographer myself so maybe I should see what's going on with photography on G+...

In most cases I've seen I'd say make the content on each page unique, but in your case I'd say 301 them to the main page where you're based (yes, you will 'lose' them if you 301). You're misleading customers - your search result for [lichfield web design] for example would give potential clients the impression that you're based in Lichfield, and when they click through to see you're not some are likely to press 'back' straight away. Increased bounce rates can lower your search rankings.

Also, I wouldn't write like this "At every stage of the creation of your web design Tamworth and web development process" - it looks spammy and you should really be writing for people, using natural language. I'd imagine that sort of wording is likely to put some clients off. It's not necessary to keyword stuff, you can write natural content that still uses your keywords, and they don't have to be together. "We are a web design company based in Tamworth" does the trick, sounds natural, and keeps the 3 words close together. "Web Design Tamworth" is okay in the title for me, though some may disagree.

If you visit potential clients that could be a way you could naturally get the other locations onto your main location page ("Serving Tamworth, Lichfield and Stafford" for example) or you could say "only xx miles from Lichfield", or give directions if you have a public-facing office. I wouldn't list too many places though as again, it will look spammy.

Jeff's answer is good with regards to the sub-domain/folder debate but,

"My recommendation is to go with the subdomain, and there are a whole lot of articles that back this up:"

I think he meant subdirectory?! That would be my recommendation anyway.

One big problem with uploading static HTML files is that if you redesign your site and want historical content to match the redesign, you'll have to update every single HTML file.

There are also lots of high-quality Wordpress blogs so that's not really an issue. www.mydomain.com/blog/ is the way to go if you can. Whether to have it on your Australian or international site depends on which audience the content is aimed at.

Whichever link occurs first in the coding, so if the first occurrence is in the menu, yes - that's the generally held belief - though some have demonstrated ways to get around it (I don't have links, sorry).

In general links within body content are given higher value than links elsewhere, so that's why some SEOs have tried to get around this 'first anchor text link rule'. Google (and other search engines, probably) can recognise the difference between menu's, sidebars, footers etc. and main body content - it's something they're getting better at all the time so I wouldn't be surprised if this changed. But then again it could be easier for people to game so perhaps it won't.

If you follow someone on Google+, content they share will be biased higher in your search results, if you're logged in to Google yourself and don't have personal search results disabled. That's the only definite. Here's more: http://moz.com/blog/using-google-plus-to-appear-in-the-top-results-every-time-whiteboard-friday

As for showing other social signals on OSS - they're a useful metric to know, and will probably become more of a ranking factor in future. Shares from established Facebook/Twitter accounts with lots of followers will probably carry more weight.

See Moz's Ranking Factors survey for more info:  http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

It depends on how your content is translated - is it auto translated or a high-quality translation by a native speaker of the language? Google have said that auto translations can be a really bad experience - so in this case your translated content could be ignored, and maybe your sites could be penalised if it looks like you're generating the content to spam links. If your translations are good quality, you should not have a problem - but you do need to send the correct signals to the search engine crawlers.

• Markup your content or sitemaps with the hreflang attribute. Note the 2 values when targeting particular countries e.g. hreflang=”fr-fr” if your content is for French speakers in France and hreflang=”fr-be” for French speakers in Belgium. The language and country codes are linked from the above page.
• You should also have a Webmaster Tools account for each TLD, and geotarget the domains to the relevant country.
• Country-specific addresses, phone numbers and currency on each translated website can all help send the right signals about your content too.

Google's advice is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192

In answer to your question, I'm not sure, just make sure you do everything properly to avoid potential problems. I'd say it won't be 1 or 4.

Do the blog links help to answer or provide further information on the question? If so I'd say it isn't a problem as long as it isn't done to excess. 100s of links from one website sounds like a lot so you should be careful depending on what quality and quantity of external links you have elsewhere.

Yahoo Answers links are nofollow so you won't be getting much (if any) link juice from them.

Check out the free Xenu Link Sleuth and this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xenu-link-sleuth-more-than-just-a-broken-links-finder

I haven't used it myself (yet), but Screaming Frog could help as an alternative, though the full version is paid. This post compares the two: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog

Yes, use hyphens for filenames, and lower case.

"I have an about page with the url "www.heartwavemedia.com/about" and the SEO title San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | About"

I'd say the URL you have already is perfect. For the "SEO title" (title tag) I'd go with "About Heartwave Media" - the unique part of the title tag should be at the start.

Think about what is best for the human visitors to your website, and not the search engine crawlers. People expect an "about" url to be at www.example.com/about or www.example.com/aboutus - it's also memorable and easier to type in. I've always said this is the best way, and Google is getting smarter at ranking content that is useful for searchers: http://moz.com/blog/be-the-result-that-google-wants-to-rank

If every URL on your page had "san-francisco-video-production-" in it, it's not user-friendly, and it looks spammy, so to Google it's definitely going to look spammy, either now or at some point in the future.

Also be aware of keyword cannibilisation. You want search engines to know your website is about video production, but you don't want to confuse them over which page they should rank highest. This is an old article but still relevant: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization  It's fine to mention "video production" and variations of that theme throughout your website, but be aware of the cannibilisation issue. If you think it's most important to rank for "San Francisco Video Production" then that should be your homepage title, arguably with your brand name at the end.

The anchor text in a link is just one of many ranking factors so keywords often rank at number 1 if they contain no backlinks with the same anchor text. Also, anchor text isn't as important a ranking factor as it once was as it was abused, and it doesn't have to be exact match keywords either e.g. "orange men's shoe" could help "orange shoe" to rank and "red automobile" could help "red car" to rank.

Wikipedia pages do so many other things well - in depth content and internal linking being just two. And the site has huge authority of course.

This video should be a great help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Depending on the type of site/competition it might even be possible to rank well in other countries with the current setup, by building links from these countries for a start. Assuming otherwise though...from what I've read (I'm not speaking from experience) I'd recommend sub folders, as James mentions. As well as adding them to Webmaster Tools make sure you specify the language in the Doctypes and meta language (e.g. I think Australian English is au) and adjust localised spellings. You might want to get a native of each country to check over everything - even the search terms the client wants to rank for elsewhere might not mean much or get much traffic in another English speaking country. Get some links from each country too.

This is worth a read too:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies

I'd more than likely go for something different on each page. Make sure you're describing the page content accurately in the title.

You don't need to include your brand in any of the titles. Some people believe it's better to have the brand name, some don't. Amazon for example - they're a strong, well known brand - so it makes sense to include the brand name as it can encourage click throughs from Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). For a business like yours I wouldn't think it'd make a big difference either way. As you're targeting local customers, it could result in extra exposure for your brand name if you include it, though the longer a title tag the less emphasis is given to each keyword in the SERPs - so that's a small reason not to include it. If you go back to what I said about thinking about the user, then you'd have the brand name on the homepage and about page for definite, but other pages - it probably doesn't matter so much. As you noticed on another thread, sometimes Google will add your brand name anyway! You could also consider how people's bookmarks display, but again I'll say - don't worry about this too much!

In terms of your question about speed, there are a few resources you can put your URLs into that will give  you feedback and recommendations. Here are 2:
tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

You can optimise titles for both. It's best to have your prime keyphrase near the beginning of the title - and make sure the title is not too long.

The way you suggested does make it look like you're just stuffing the keywords in for the sake of it though...again it depends on your keywords but something like this would look more natural with the downside of not having one of the phrases nearer the start:

"Green Apple seller: the best Green Apples"

I don't have time to write out an answer but here's a useful link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

Google have recently introduced support of rel="next" and rel="prev" too: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

It depends how often the website is crawled and how deep the pages are within the site. A site I work on with a Domain Authority of about 60 took less than two days. Another one with a DA of 20ish was changed almost two weeks ago and still hasn't updated.

It's good to see this is sorted - another option is to check Google's cache for anything else that's missing. It's saved me on a couple of occasions!

[payday loans] is probably one of the most competitive, spammy keywords there is. Page 1 probably often has significant changes, there are loads of black hats who set up a new site and spam it to hell to the top of Google, only for them to disappear a few weeks later when Google catches up with them, with the same process repeated again. Hopefully Google will get better at combating this. SEOmoz has a tool for checking SERP stability for a particular keyword, though I'm not sure if it is public?

The [it services] one is crazy. I even get the same problem if I search [it helpdesk services] and [it helpdesk] - though not all are universities. Something to point out to Google I think!

"If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point."

That's not always true, but I see you question it later on - I have seen a few examples where people have used long meta descriptions with the intention of the SERPs displaying something different depending on the search made. Here's one I've just found: http://sharkseo.com/whitehat/meta-descriptions/ - though I've just done a search and I got the same meta description ("Dave is a freelance SEO consultant...") for both suggested searches.

If Google doesn't think your meta description is appropriate there's always a chance they'll replace it with something else on your page or the description from DMOZ.

You should definitely not add the ellipsis yourself, what if the length displayed is changed for example? I'd just ensure your first 155ish characters are well-written in a way that entices users to want to click through.

This is something a lot of websites do and something the crawlers can recognise. If you have say, a 150 word block that's the same on every page, and 400+ words of unique content elsewhere, you won't have any problems at all. There's no particular science to those numbers by the way, I'm just pulling them out of the air - but there's a helpful quote below from here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda

Here at SEOmoz, our PRO platform uses a 95% threshold to judge duplicate content. This means if 95% of all the code on your page matches another page, then it’s flagged as a duplicate. To check your own ratios, try this nifty duplicate content tool.

What you suggest in the last paragraph is cloaking. You need to be very careful when you're serving different versions of the same page to crawlers and users.