Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for taking the time to come up with a 'solution' to the problem

---> SEO's often say "build a blog" blah, blah, blah. If you believe you'll have a 'following' with your blog, or if you believe you can create 'compelling' content on an ongoing basis that is related to what your site is about, and if you can create unique (no duplicate) content on a regular basis... go for it. If not; don't waste your time.

Recently I heard an SEO 'Content Representative' for an SEO company advise a small local oil pipe fabrication company to build a blog... Well, I could have advised 10+ considerably more important things they should have been doing that would have been much more important at bringing in targeted traffic than starting a blog, for almost no one who could care less

"If they are good sites I don’t see why Google should penalize them just because of their domain name"
"If they made a really good site, would the domain name still be a problem? "
---> Google has done this to a good number of 'good sites'.

"a blog would make more sense on their main site because it would attract links."
---> that would not be the reason I'd create a blog. 
---> I wouldn't bother using the kw rich domain name if you choose to go with a brand name domain name.

• my name is Andy Kuiper, andykuiper.com ranks #1 for most (and in the top 4 for the rest) SEO related search terms in Edmonton 'and' Calgary Canada. (each city is 1 million+ population). "andykuiper" clearly isn't a commercial kw... I think you might be putting too much emphasis on the kw

* and - just reading the comment posted above, if you add a geo modifier to the KW, you're "unlikely" to have an issue with Google It wouldn't be an EMD, and Google (so far) has been pretty good about not giving a hard time to domain names that contain KW's and 'city name' (as an example) URL's

---> ..."dynamically generated string of random characters" instead of targeted kw's in URL's

ack! - I definitely wouldn't do that

yes you do

The 2 answers you have received are dead on - whatever you do, I wouldn't create an exact match domain name period. You're likely asking for trouble down the road if you do that. Partial match domain names are much safer. As for the company name - I wouldn't bother trying to create a company name with the intention of making it 'work'; as a domain name

Andy

---> build landing pages targeting the states you are after - as for other countries... that's a whole different topic, and requires considerable planning and implementation.

---> give it some time, moz will update your DA soon enough

"...duplicate content and penalize my website"
---> duplicate content is not penalized, it's often just deemed somewhat irrelevant as Google has seen the content before and has an 'older' or in some few cases, 'considerably stronger' version of the content in its Index.

..."about 301 redirection from non WWW to WWW using htaccess ..."
---> perfect solution (this is the correct thing to do), and if anything, your site will be stronger. While 301's do lose a teeny bit of link equity, any links to the non-www version of your site will now be making the www page that much stronger.

"I don’t want to lose my current rankings or organic traffic"
---> this is highly unlikely

*you may want to set your webmaster tools setting to "www "as well

All the best - Andy

It's not just PR that you have misunderstood, it's that, as I pointed out, everything your last post posited was incorrect.

As for your link to how PR works... a lot has changed since this article was published in ---> 2007 <--- no-follows weren't even a figment of anyone's imagination back then, let alone a reality.

The article closed out by saying, "__Rand and I both tend to believe that it is likely Google has changed and refined the PageRank algorithm many times."

I'm done spending time on this.

---> give it some time, moz will update your DA soon enough

Hi Kyle Yes, you can block an entire subdomain via robots.txt, however you'll need to create a robots.txt file and place it in the root of the subdomain, then add the code to direct the bots to stay away from the entire subdomain's content.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

hope this helps

Google sees the addition of a trademark symbol in a meta title tag as a separate keyword; I've never heard anything about how Google see's its use in content. I'd avoid doing this in cases where SEO is more important than usability (or legality).

Hope this helps Mike

In my opinion, and it's just an opinion - clearly not gospel ;-), hosting images on the site is better. You may also post the images on sites like Flickr for the traffic. Flickr links do not pass link equity and you will lose link equity by having the external links on your page/s. The Flickr domain may be strong, but the page/s you host your photos on may not be strong (re: social signals). However I would agree with having photos (tagged) on as many good sites as possible for traffic, links & signals. In the past Rand has suggested hosting images on Flickr... not sure what he thinks nowadays.

Ryan; there are some who believe in hosting images off-site, and some who favour hosting images on-site. There's a lot of discussion around the topic; I haven't seen anything definitive one way or the other.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Andy

---> SEO's often say "build a blog" blah, blah, blah. If you believe you'll have a 'following' with your blog, or if you believe you can create 'compelling' content on an ongoing basis that is related to what your site is about, and if you can create unique (no duplicate) content on a regular basis... go for it. If not; don't waste your time.

Recently I heard an SEO 'Content Representative' for an SEO company advise a small local oil pipe fabrication company to build a blog... Well, I could have advised 10+ considerably more important things they should have been doing that would have been much more important at bringing in targeted traffic than starting a blog, for almost no one who could care less

---> build landing pages targeting the states you are after - as for other countries... that's a whole different topic, and requires considerable planning and implementation.

I agree with Miriam, who btw, has an excellent reputation in the SEO community. You're on the right track with URL's something like:

website.com/butcher-mytown
and for deeper pages: 
website.com/butcher-mytown/suasages
website.com/butcher-mytown/pork-chops

Andy

Correct Kimberly, "just totally ignore the fact that Webmaster Tools is showing the most unimportant pages (rankwise) as the highest linked internally"

You'll be just fine the way you have it now. Google may deem the contact info (the duplicate content) more relevant on one of your pages over the same info on some of your other pages...  but that won't diminish the relevance of the content on any of your other pages. I hope that makes sense