Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You should post it on your site, but there's a caveat.

Your plan shouldn't be to post the same content across multiple sites; this will damage your credibility with search engines and be seen as webspam. Posting your whitepaper on your site, then writing a unique press release that you plan to send to PRWeb is a better plan.

This means that you were basically invisible or non-existent with that keyword prior, but now you have some visibility which is mathematically infinitely greater than zero.

Change your settings to just display teasers or excerpts on the home page.

It depends. If you're getting traffic and links to your tag pages, then it wouldn't be worth it to de-index them. The general rule of thumb that I've followed is if I'm attracting traffic to tags or categories, I leave them in the index while adding canonical tags to individual post pages. But other people have other views and a lot of it is personal preference to how important those other pages are for you.

Infinitely greater than 0. The range is a percentage. Any number greater than 0 is, percentage-wise, infinitely greater than 0.

Forgetting the keyword report for a second, an increase from 1 to 2 is a 100% increase. But an increase from 0 to 1 is an infinite percentage because 0 is nothing where 1 is something. Something is infinitely more than nothing.

If they're just domain names, it doesn't matter one way or the other. If the domain names have penalties, then sure there'd be a risk of passing a penalty on with the redirect.

I worked on a project once where the customer had purchased several hundred domain names. Some were microsites that had little value but a couple of links, some had mask redirects to their main site, others were just empty. I created individual pages on their main website to reflect the microsite content, then redirected the microsite domains there. I 301 redirected every masked and every floating domain name they owned just in case there was type in traffic.

The consolidation was done alongside other SEO efforts and the site in question has been consistently near the top of the SERP's for their target market. You have to look at your motives for doing something... if you're not working to be manipulative and have legitimate business reasons for doing something, then chances are it's ok. A lot of SEO is just about common sense.

It can constitute a link scheme. When a search engine finds out, they could determine that the links you've received aren't legitimate and may subject you and the sites linking to you to a penalty.

It also technically counts as buying a link. You are essentially trading something that has value for a link to your site. Absent following one of these suggestions you run the risk of being flagged for buying links.

You can look at the domain and page authority of individual pages for some idea. Because of some of the delays in how SEOmoz updates its index, you might not get as an accurate picture for newer posts.

Links near the top of the page tend to hold more weight than ones in sidebars, footers, and traditional author bios at the end of posts. Also search engines will only follow the first link to a page that it finds. For instance, if you have three links to example.com/homes, each with different (or the same) anchor texts, the search engine will only follow the first one that has a Do Follow attribute. Though you can have multiple links to different pages on the site - if the first link goes to example.com/home and the second goes to example.com/home2 then the search engine will follow both.

Further, the more posts you have on one site with links pointing to your website, the less power each individual link has. It's not going to hurt you, but the individual gains each link brings will be smaller and smaller.

So the short answer is, no there's no real way to see which sites pass "the most" link juice to your site. You can get an idea for which ones might be helping more, but it's only going to be an estimate.

I'm of the opinion that No Follow links help show that you have a natural link portfolio since having none implies that you could be spamming, but by themselves they won't do anything to influence your rankings.

Agree with the suggestion about doing keyword research. Assuming that checks out for you, why not categorize according to both ideas? Have the largest volume categories at the top, say thought A, and do the thought B categories in a sidebar?

Is the directory related to the theme of the site? So for instance, if you have a site that covers Facebook business marketing and you add a directory of consultants who offer Facebook marketing help, then you're sticking to the overall theme.

Likewise if the theme of the site is community journalism, separate subdomains that cover (or are directories) a variety of topics stick to the overall theme.

So assuming your idea is a benefit to your site users, a directory will help your SEO because inbound links will contribute to the overall root domain authority and outbound links will establish yourself as a trusted hub of information.

To add, is the link in the first couple of paragraphs, the middle, or the end of a document? Or is it in the sidebar, footer, or top menu bar of a site? Common sense can tell you which of these have more impact.

The slash is minor, but it can create some issues... Search engines can figure out pretty easily which URL you mean but users can't. If users come to the site and decide to link back to you, the link can point to either mysite.com or mysite.com/. The PageRank is essentially split to what really amounts to two separate pages.

You should redirect one to the other. It isn't a huge deal and won't cause too many problems, but why leave something to chance with the algorithm?

If your site runs Drupal, I suggest downloading the Global Redirect plugin for easy across the board decisions about trailing slashes and other duplicate content URL issues.

I saw it this morning. Sometimes they will split test some users in order to get fresh data on how certain product features work/don't work. This could be what you're experiencing.

I actually spent quite a bit of time last night looking this up because I thought I had read about this happening. To be honest, I can't find anything. I have found some posts, such as this one, where canonical errors were picked up and adversely affected a site's results. But I can't find a specific example of a site that copied something like manufacturer descriptions and referenced the original source in a canonical tag, then being deindexed. Perhaps I mispoke.

That said, you're right, things are pretty confusing sometimes. A lot of people are in positions like Paul and rewriting product pages to be entirely unique is very costly. If I were Paul, I'd eat the costs of hiring a copywriter to push out new product descriptions rather than take a chance with the algorithm. It would be painful, but if e-commerce revenue is a significant portion of his business it might be worth it in the long run.

What do you mean? There are a few possible responses...

1. If you mean how long until a search engine sees, that depends on when the spider returns. Could be an hour, a few days, or a few weeks depending on how often your site is updated and what it's authority is.

2. If you mean how long until SEOmoz does the on-page ranking again, it will be about a week.

3, If you mean how long until you can run the report card manually, it can be right away if you're a PRO member or at the latest tomorrow if you've used your three daily credits as a free member.

Hope that helps.

Could be a few things.

1. The scoring is different between the two tools. I looked and couldn't find any specifics on their API's, but they could place weight on different factors. In the second tool, it looks like the first tab is from Google's page speed tool since the second is Yahoo's. The scores between the two were different.

2. The location where the test is done can impact speed. The closer the testing server is to the server that the website is hosted on, the faster the load time will be.

3. Could be a difference in caching? If your site has flushed its cache, the load time can be slower while the server re-caches things, then it will be faster later. This usually isn't the case, but I've seen it happen.

As for your second question, I'm not sure of a definite way. If your caching is working properly, it should just happen... Hope that helps.

I would add a slight caveat and say that if the copied content is a majority of what appears on those pages, you might be fine.

Your meta description isn't really a factor in ranking and more of a call to action for a user to click the search result. That said, putting too much there is probably a spam signal.

My suggestion would be to either leave it blank or put the first words of the content. Google will replace the snippet based on user query no matter what your decision.

I think a few factors will be at play. First, how prominent is the customer quote compared to the rest of the content on the page? If it's the dominant piece then it might get flagged. Second, where on the page is the quote? Most sites have some text that's repeated across all pages in sidebars, footers, headers, etc. Third, as raised above, how much other content is on the page? If none or very little, it might be an issue.

A good rule of thumb is, if the different pages on your site say different things, you're fine. If all your pages say the same thing, none of them can be saying it any better than the others.

You might avoid penalties, but you risk getting the page de-indexed altogether because Google thinks that the "canonical" page is on the manufacturer's site. Assuming this is a product page, de-indexation would probably suck.

I always point people to Yahoo's style guide at http://styleguide.yahoo.com. It gives great advice for writing online and includes some pointers about good SEO that sounds natural and helps users.

Force7,

You may be able to get free help from folks in the Q&A section. The community is awesome like that.

If you find that you need something a little more detailed, you might try the SEOmoz group on LinkedIn. SEOmoz used to run a marketplace where contracts were posted, but they migrated that aspect over to LinkedIn. Great benefit for someone like you is that you can view profiles of people who are offering their help. Knowledge is power, and LinkedIn will help make sure you find someone who will be of real benefit.

I was going to suggest CallRail.

Might also look at these folks: https://www.plivo.com/voice/ . I think they count CallRail as a customer. Not sure about NAP though.

If you use Apache, reference the SEOmoz article cited above.

If you use Nginx, reference this article.

Another "fix" is to use a canonical tag to suggest to search engines which version to index. SEOmoz will still detect a problem, but you'll be fine from a search engine perspective.

Slightly. Like any redirect, you lose some of the link value. However, Google has said that PageRank does flow through shortened URL's. It just might only be 99% of the rank instead of the full value.

Hmm... I think you can have an inbound link report run at certain intervals and emailed out. Then you can do a comparison over time. You might also look into something like MajesticSEO which has a historic backlink tool. Very helpful and very credible.

Link exchanges are ok as long as there's a legitimate reason why the link would be on that particular page. No-following the links isn't all that important, but making sure that the links are relevant to your users (they might not be relevant to your "sector" but could be useful to your audience) is important.

If the link page that they want to place you on, or that you want to place them on are a list of valuable resources, the page itself could carry a lot of weight as a reference point for other sites. If the page just exists for search engines, you may as well forget it.