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I'd go with option 1 personally and look to leverage the content another way...

I love the "Pay with a tweet" idea, there are services which require you to Pay for a download with a tweet. http://www.paywithatweet.com/

This is a great way to get some credit for your work, spread the word socially and attract some links/authority from relevant sites and its all perfectly natural!

Option 2 sounds a little shoddy and difficult to manage.

Option 3 could prove to be dangerous with hundred/thousands of ;links with same anchor text

Option 4 Woah there buddy, this sounds a litle 'grey'.

If you want to be 'Completely clean' go with option 1, ask people to share socially or link to you in return for the content.

Hope thats of some help.

Aran

I use http://www.dreamstime.com/ its cheap and cheerful and does the job.

I personally like the 'Find out why' bit, adds a bit of intrigue and makes me want to click through.

Not sure if its just me but when I scan through the SERPs I generally only read the first sentence or less of the description. With this in mind I would want to put my best statements first to ensure I grasp the audience and lue them in without them reading the whole description.

Hi All,

Just wondering out of the SEOmoz community who has come out on top after Penguin and who has been hit and why.

Personally my site has come out on top. I started workig on the site back in December and NOTHING had been done, no link development, no onpage, nothing, a virginal website.

The site was chock-a-block with issues both technically and in content. After 4 months of hard work, we have climbed from 100+ to top ten on most of our phrases and post Penguin we have climbed even higher as some of our competitors were dragged down into the murky depths. So I think thats a win (for now).

My focus has been on Guest posting, social outreach, reviews and getting my on page right (still a ways to go, but our CMS is clunky to say the least).

A little humour attached (Why has no one yet stuck Matt Cutts head on a Penguin?)

Are you a Penguin Winner or have you experienced the wrath of the penguin.

keep-calm-and-deoptimise.jpg

Thats down to a inherent limitation of our CMS, and a massive pai i the backside.

if I had a choice it would be /Category/Product. Other sites which I have worked on over the years I've always used Category/product to great effect

it doesn't!

but i had no where better to put it!

I very much doubt you'll get and problems with that, though i would possible look at revising your H1 content, reads kind of like a keword list.

"Suppliers of Wholesale Coffee from our Online Coffee Shop and London Based Roastery"?

Think usability, if Im browsing the category, /Buttons/BlueButtonsadBuckles and I get redirected to /Buckles/BlueButtonandBuckles, all of a sudden I'm not where I am and I didnt ask to be moved.

See my point?

Another one for a case study?

http://www.hangerworld.co.uk/blog/keep-calm-and-de-optimise/

Don't think SEO, think User Experience...

My personal preference is for /category/product for the simple reason that the URL looks better and a visitor can establish their position within the site just by glancing at the URL.

get round the dupe product issue by being able to specify which Category is to be the primary category for a product and then set a canonical tag to reflect this.

Info on canonicals here http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Regards

Aran

Agreed with everything said above.

Google are trying to make the web a better place. By occupying the top 5 SERPs your attempting to reduce the options available to consumers which ruins the customer experience and as such i think Google would take a dim view on it.

Although, my company sells on ebay and amazon, aswell as our own website. For many of our key terms we occupy 3 of the top 10 listings, one for our website, one for our ebay store/product page and again for amazon listings.

Our review centre lising is not far from top 10 when searching for a particular phrase too.

The change you made to the robots should be sufficient. You can also add the meta tag in there to be doubly sure, but its not needed

Though, your social buttons has the Email A Friend option built in so you are replicating the same functionality with the Email a Friend button.

No problem, happy to help.

Aran

• if your problem is solved, dont forget the Answered, and Good answer buttons

Twitter

FB

Pinterest

Looking at your site I see that your Email a friend script is opening a brand new page and passing through the product ID. To stop the page being indexed you can add the following line to the robots.txt

Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp

afte the line that looks something like

User-Agent: *

Heres some light reading on the robots.txt file

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

BE CAUTIOUS! if you dont know what your doing seek further assistance as you could do some bad things in the robots.txt.

Whilst the solution above will probably solve your duplicate page issue. I think there is room for improvement here.

Email a friend scripts needn't take the user away from the product they are viewing. You could open the email a friend script in a new window, or even better get rid of the Email a friend button altogether and make your social sharing buttons bigger and more prominent. Also, consider giving the users a Call to Action to sharing the product via the social buttons.

Hope this helps.

Aran

Heres another, I'm pretty sure i heard of a company in the UK (might have been US) that recycles shipping containers and uses them as pre-fabricated building blocks.

ooo...I found something similar on wiki..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_container_architecture

Have you done any social sharing of the website?

Getting your followers to RT links and the like is another great way to get noticed.

Thanks Marisa, nice cool to get good feedback fom other SEOs, after all we can be a very critical bunch

I'm going to do another you moz post soon as a follow up as I'm still getting some great traffic from my efforts. Though, I haven't yet heeded my own advice and put an hour aside to jump on another meme.

Great news. A win for the Good Guys.

This may help you tell your boss...

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_say_i_told_you_so_in_20_languages

First of all, welcome aboard. I always love to here of peoples first steps into SEO and the results they get.

My site has around 450 pages, thus its would be a major job for me to amend my page titles. Sites like SEOmoz have thousands of pages, and the vast majority of them are available in SERPs. Now as far as I know SEOmoz do not change their titles, again because it would be a massive job.

Saying that, if I run an offer or a sale on my website I will generally change my homepage title to reflect the fact I have a sale on, in the hope that the Sale text will be updated promptly in the SERPs and attarct a few extra click throughs.

In summary, no I dont think the freshness of your page titles has any positive effect on your SEO. But, It may impact your Click through rate (which I guess in turn could effect your SEO...now were going full circle).

Clear as mud?

Im with Goldilocks on this one. A blog post should not be too long, nor too short. It should be just right.

And as Moosa says, it should contain images and a touch of humour always breaks the monotony too.

You link profile contains alot of 'Catering Glasgow' anchor text also your homepage title , perhaps you have received a slap for 'over optimisation'.

Can the SEO company in question produce any testimonials or can you speak with one of their existing customers?

Hi Rasmus,

I don't see how creating a new domain with a blog/forwarding traffic will benefit your visitors.

If you want to produce a blog, host it on your main site and spend the money on cool content to help draw in the crowds.

I don't think that owning a keyword rich domain nam is going to help you. Also, you may wish to vary your anchor texts too.

As the guys above have stated. Cards on the table and tell your potential clients what will happen if they switch and how you can help remedy the situation. Also its worth noting that in the long term they will be better off optimising their own sites.

if you do use one of the services mentioned, be sure to come back and let us know the impact!

I've used submit edge.com in the past, in particular one of their article submission tpe services, I forget which exactly. I used the service to help promote some PA and traffic to a guest blog post I had done.

I wasn't exactly impressed with the result. Most of the links came from completely unrelated niches, blog comments, spammy twitter accounts and really bad directories. I haven't been near a service like it since. Though my blog post did eventually gain some PA and my website got some traffic from the entry. Would it have got traffic and authority without the submit edge service? probably.

I won't be using the service again.

Hi Brad,

Ask not what you can do to maximise your SEO, but what can you do to make your user experience better.

In other words ensure that your visitor gets all the info he/she needs.

1. Make sure you link to products in the Video Description so anyone watching can easy find and purchase.

2. Have you considered creating a transcript to go along with the video?

3. Are the videos embedded on your product pages?

4. Have you shared the videos with your social circles?

5. Are the videos correctly branded with your website logo and URL? alot can change in a few years is the branding the same as it was when the videos were produced?

6. Have you considered creating some new videos? You channel may or may not have subscribers who could come back and view your new videos and maybe purchase a product or two.

These are just my initial thoughs on what I would consider doing, I'm sure you have already touched upon these.

Cheers

Aran

On reflection, this is the kind of story that is going to gain some momentum in the business/marketing world and will probably generate a bucket load of nice authority links for the site...could this be a double bluff?

either way mr negativeseo might have undone all his hard work simply by boasting about his exploits! I hope so.

Agreed Matt, that is scarey. though a years worth of work to deindex one competitor seems like a lot of hard work for little gain.

I'd rather spend the year doing something positive and not being a complete git.

After looking over the site in question, it may not be down to the negative SEO, theres an awful lot that could be improved on that site.

Hi Simon,

Check ou this thread from January, http://www.seomoz.org/q/best-geotargeting-strategy-subdomains-or-subfolders-or-country-specific-domain

Theres some Good and Endorsed Answers in there.

Also check out Rand Fishkins post from late 2010, a little dated but the essence remains the same. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies

Hopefully these should set you in the right path.

One additional point to note is to make sure you setup Google places correctly, I feel that will benefit your site greatly.

Cheers

Aran

How do you propose to encourage your users to like or +1 your pages?

I've seen many companies encourage tahier website visitors to Like their pages by making the social share a requirement for entry into a competition. Ive also seen the same with tweets and getting people to retweet a URL for entry.

I suppose as long as your not forcing the user to so it, no click jacking and not buying the likes, you should be ok. Depends on your strategy.

Hi,

I found this problem on my blog yesterday, dupe content found through tag, author and date archives.

Installed Yoast SEO for Wordpress plug in, its awesome and free.

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

Theres some guides on the canonical and dup content issues on the link above.

Enjoy

Aran

Hi,

There are plug ins which handle 301 redirects so I'd start by checking your plugs section and seeing what is active.

Wordpress uses a HTAccess file to store its 301's and such. However if you are inexperienced with handling a HTAccess file, I'd leave it be ad ask a expert to have a look at it as you can seriously mess up your site.

Check out SEO powersuite, that has a tool which will pull out quite an indepth seo report, it will also brand it with your logo aswell ready to send to clients.It doesn't export a spreadsheet though.

I don't use it anymore, however I did like its ability to create reports for clients.

yes its better than useful, its awesome.

SEOmoz whiteboard friday do it, thus its good.

Plus, I don't have speakers on my work PC and if I've left my headphones at home, I'm scuppered!

the dreaded call to the client, I dont envy you, but be open and honest and all will work out for the best.

Aas SEOs were supposed to notice the finer details, but were only human.

In the past I've put these 'issues' down to 'communication problems with the clients outsourced develeopers', perhaps they should cosider moving development to you guys

If you had 1000 links coming from a russian porn site, then you may get penalised as it doesn't appear to be a natural link profile.

However one or two links from foreign sites is not a bad thing. If your site is being discussed/linked too in other countries then it should be a sign that its good if not great!

I Agree with EGOL, however to answer our point on Articles Good or Bad. They're most definitely a good thing.

Attracting clicks, links, likes and bookmarks are great for your seo and attracting mor visitors in. I find for every 100 visitors that visit  my article pages around 6% will share the content one way or another and thus drag in more visitors.

If nothing else it builds a bit of brand recognition in my niche and build my SEO.

Hi MisterG,

I feel your pain and learnt the same lesson a few years back. Now i double check everything our devs do.

I agree with you that the canonical is tell Google to go rank the .com as its the authorative owner of the co.uk's content.

How log its going to take to remedy after sortig out the canonical is anyones guess. I suppose it depends on how often you get crawled (deeply).

Be patient and cross your fingers! (oh and dont be too harsh on the devs, they are simple logical creatures!)

Hi Cameron,

Your idea wih the logs may not be so great. I would consider the usefulness fo the logs to your users will they help your users? Probably, but not by having to rifle through hundreds of lines of logs.

Why not use the logs to find out your most common tech support issues and make a really good FAQ area?

This way you can preiodically review the logs and keep adding ew items to the FAQ and its going to help our visitors whilst adding great new content.

Regards

Aran

Build some industry specific info graphics or jump on a meme that you could tailor to your industry.

A good post on creating info graphics

A great post on utilising memes

Have you considered Social networks as a way to get your content out there and build links, whilst also engaging your target audience?

Share links to your great content on twitter with relevant hashtags, check out http://hashtags.org and build a following. Though its not enough to simply blast out links to your followers, you'll need to engage them too.

Check out the white board friday video on building links with twitter

Also, theres facebook which you could use to grab your audience and potentially build links

Linked in if your industry isn't facebook prone.

Flickr and deviantart if your idustry is so inclined.

Create a tumblr blog to highlight your content (one of my favourites)

Pinterest,oh what did I do without it? yes pin some relevant, cool images of stuff you may sell or relevant to your industry and if its good enough people will share it.

There are other ways too but, I could literally go on all day.

Check this out http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics

Theres a lot to digest, but its not rocket science.

Best of luck and if you get stuck, come back and ask some more

Regards

Aran

You may want to mix up you anchor text a bit and maybe throw in some longer tail phrases. Having too many exact keyword phrases may do you some harm.

I think the service your really looking for it content creation to bait backlinks.

You essentially want someone to create awesome content and share it through social channels/blogs etc to encourage inbound links, no?

Or do you want someone to scour the web for mediocre links to build to your site?

Hi Tom, Im in the same boat, we have glorious feedback on both Ebay and Amazon and would love to show that on our website (without diverting people to our ebay or amazon stores).

Unfortunately ebay user agreement states  "you will not take any action that may undermine the feedback or ratings systems (such as displaying, importing or exporting feedback information off of the sites or using it for purposes unrelated to eBay).

Source: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/user-agreement.html

Agreed.

Hi Jarno,

You Say "there are some factors that SEO's use that can be an issue", what do you image these could be?

Cheers

Aran

Your kind of right, but DA/PA are only guestimates, they don't hold and actual bearing on rank as each niche can vary wildly.

I'd focus on my actual SERPs and number of visitors.