What dave is saying is it's better to have unique content for each language because it gets crawled.

Well you can do a 301 but also be sure to 301 all the deep links...

So 301 junkthecars.com to sellthecars.com/about-us and also junkthecars.com/about-us to sellthecars.com/about-us

Be sure to also do this in your webmaster tools. You will need to have both versions verified in this account.

Ideally you want to keep the number of 404 pages low because it tells the search engine that the page is a dead end, ask any SEO, it's best to keep the number of 404's as low as possible.

Link equity tells Google why to rank a page or give the root domain more authority. However, Google does not want users to end up on dead pages. So it will not help the site, rather hurt it. My recommendation is to create a sitemap and submit to Google WMT with the pages you want the spiders to index.

Limit the 404's as much as possible and try to 301 them if possible to a relevant page (from a user perspective).

No they don't. Search engine spiders follow the link as a user, if the pages no longer exist and you cannot forward the user to a better page then create a good 404 page that will keep the users intrigued.

"Google trends" should give you an idea of what people are searching for and if the terms are moving up/down etc...

If you want to know volumes of terms searched within Google you can use "Google adwords keyword tool".

A mat release is still going to get indexed and counted for. The first page it gets indexed on gets all the credit. Anything after that is duplicate if it does not trackback to the first piece of content.

Unless I am mistaken, I don't think the search engines are able to differentiate this type of content.

As long as the syndicated articles are tracking back (linking back) to the original version it will not count a duplicate.

The first page to get indexed will not suffer from syndication regardless of track backs. Only the site that syndicates needs to track back or it wil look like duplicate text.

Based on the situation, I would only disavow the ones that are indexed and be sure to keep track of your work. The Read More link I posted above explains everything you need to know. You should also check both versions (www and non) of the back links to your site.

another quote from that page:

'Note: When looking at the links to your site in Webmaster Tools, you may want to verify both the www and the non-vww version of your domain in your Webmaster Tools account. To Google, these are entirely different sites. Take a look at the data for both sites.'

Hi Carlos,

Remove both Google looks at them as two separate sites. However, I would not recommend using Google disavow tool unless the linking page is not accessible, or the webmaster of the linking site will not take it down after a couple attempts.

"This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool." Read More

This should help.

I would use Google to do a search for the content to see what comes up. Also Google gives all the credit to the first content indexed. So you will not be punished as long as your content was indexed before the syndications.

The fact that you went from generating 35 impressions per day to 2000 impressions per day, could mean that one of your pages is on the first page of a SERP that has high traffic. However, that can also mean that it is in the last spot and not driving any conversion.

To find out the keyword go to secondary dimension and select: Traffic sources > Keywords