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Charles, thanks for the reply. One of my concerns is whether legitimate press releases, ones that actually have something to say (not spammy) are harmful SEO wise.

Mozers,

A few questions for the community:

1. Distributing a press release through a service like 24-7pressrelease.com - is it a serious duplicate content issue when an identical press release is distributed to multiple sites with no canonical markup (as far as I can tell)?

2. All of the backlinks in the press release are either nofollow or redirects. If there IS a duplicate content issue, will the website be affected negatively given the numerous Panda and Penguin refreshes?

3. Why SHOULDN'T a company issue a press release to multiple sites if it actually has something legitimate to announce and the readership of a given site is the target demographic? For example, why shouldn't a company that manufactures nutritional health supplements issue the same press release to Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Health News, etc _with a link to the site?_I understand it's a method that can be exploited for SEO purposes, but can't all SEO methods be taken to an extreme? Seems to me that if this press release scenario triggers the duplicate content and/or link spam penalty(ies), I'd consider it a slight deficiency of Google's search algorithm.

Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Let's have a real discussion about content marketing for B2B and B2C e-commerce sites.

As an SEO/inbound marketer (these days, I'm not sure what to call myself other than my first name), it's part of my job to keep a pulse on what's going on in the online marketing community. My daily routine starts with checking several sites for news/discussion (Moz, Inbound.org, SearchEngineLand, etc). Anyone actively involved in the community knows the word "content" appears in more articles than any other word (ok, maybe there a few others). Want to increase brand awareness? Generate content. Want to drive more traffic to your site? Generate content. Want to build quality links? Generate content. Want to discover the Higgs particle before the physicists? Generate content (and distribute to the right audience, so not to the chemists - ok maybe to the chemists, they're a related audience). Content, content, content, we're told! Yes I did see the Rand's WBF from a couple months back about content-less marketing, but frankly his suggestions fall under the traditional model of advertising and word-of-mouth. We're online marketers baby, we're expanding and changing the traditional model - with content!

Enough of content marketing about content marketing. Let's see some content marketing for the small B2C, mom n' pop client who sells gardening tools. Let's see the amazing infographic you made for your local pizzeria client that drove traffic to their site. Let's see the Q+A discussion thread you identified and contributed to as means to display 'market leadership' in your niche of home air purifiers.

Look, I love the idea of content marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic. Displaying market leadership by answering questions and offering something beneficial to your target audience should be the way to grow business (along with having a good product/service, I guess). But it's much easier said than done. And to be clear, I never expected otherwise. The motivation for this post was to start a discussion about real-world, applied content marketing, not content marketing about content marketing.

Let the conversation begin.

I'm  having the same issue too with one of my sites. I just noticed this yesterday. Any insight would be appreciated. I've never known Google to change the title of web page. Am I mistaken? Have they done this for a while?

What do you mean by page names? Titles of pages? And yes I'll make sure the robots.txt file is on the new host after we point the domain. Thanks Sean.

We're about to change web hosting providers and I'm wondering whether there's an "optimal" way to do this without losing any SEO value. Is it as simple as changing hosts without SEO in mind - point the domain to the new host?

Brad,

Thanks for the response. I sell an animal baby bottle cover that comes in six variations (six animals). They're all priced equally.

I personally like final price when I'm shopping online, so that's why I'm inclined to include the price w/ S&H. But I'm wondering if there's any research on this topic.

A few questions:

1. From a conversion standpoint, is it better to include S&H costs into the listed price or not? Example: I have a product with an MSRP of $9.99, but we sell directly from our site at "$11.99 with free shipping". Would it be better to list it at "$9.99 + $2.00 S&H"? Or maybe not even include the S&H cost? Any insight is much appreciated.

2. Should price be directly on the homepage? A user must go to our products page to find the price, but I'm thinking maybe it's best to be explicit on the homepage. However, as I am not well versed in all facets of CRO, I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance for any help.

As part of my daily routine, I checked out inbound.org and stumbled upon an article about Grey Hat SEO techniques. One of the techniques mentioned was sending product to a blogger for review. My question is whether these types of links are really considered paid links. Why shouldn't an e-commerce company evangelize its product by sending to bloggers whose readership is the demographic the company is trying to target? In pre e-commerce marketing, it was very typical for a start-up company to send samples for review. Additionally, as far as flow of commerce is concerned, it makes sense for a product review to direct the reader to the company, whether by including a contact phone number, a mailing address, or in today's e-commerce world, a link to their website. I understand the gaming potential here (as with most SEO techniques, black-hat is usually an extreme implementation), but backlinks from honest product reviews shouldn't have a tinge of black, thus keeping it white-hat. Am I wrong here? Are these types of links really grey? Any help or insight is much appreciated!

The quest for the "accurate" backlink profile never ends. We now have Webmaster Tools to help us with this search. My question is whether the backlink profile according to WT is the backlink profile according to Google. Do Google's search algorithms and WT synch up? If this is the case, forget OSE and MajesticSEO, WT will be the main backlink analysis tool I use going forward. Thanks for any insight.

Right on. I'll take the additional wait for increased accuracy any day.

Domenic,

Sounds like you've figured out the issue. I recently had to request removal from several blogs because of undifferentiated, site-wide links in their blogroll to our site. Very tiresome and required lots of followup emails. Good luck!

On a side note, how do you like SEO PowerSuite? Lately I've been frustrated by the disparity between MajesticSEO and OSE for backlink analysis. I'm looking for another tool and would like to hear what you have to say about PowerSuite.

Thanks