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Thanks for the response, Francisco.  The homepage wouldn't be Flash, just an image a short menu for navigation and then some footer info.  The new design isn't live yet.  It's just a concept.  I wanted to run the idea by the experts before I let her know what was best.

My hunch is that it's not a great idea but thought there might be ways to deal with it and not take a big hit.

She'll be changing her domain name at the same time as she's changing her design, too.  So, it's all up in the air at the moment and I want to give her the best advice I can before she heads in a direction she'll regret later.

I've included a mockup of the homepage in this reply.  The graphic would change since this one is just a concept/placeholder graphic but the concept is of a neighborhood with streets and paths all around.

UIqXt.jpg

I have a new customer that is redesigning her website.  The graphic designer has designed a lovely homepage that is mostly an image with some navigation and footer area for text information.

My concern is that there isn't any real call to action or anything on the homepage design other than an interesting and fun graphic.  It seems like years ago this was a common practice and then later it was looked down on as not good for the user experience or SEO.

What is the latest thinking on this type of design?  Should the homepage (www.mysite.com) be allowed to be mostly images? Or should we focus on the optimizing the internal pages and let the homepage be more creative?

Hello and thank you for your quick response!  She'll be happy to hear it and I'll be sure to 301 each page from the migrated site to the new one.

I appreciate your help!

I have a customer who has many domain names and assets but she's wanting to consolidate some of them to help her simplify things for her customers but mostly she wants to build up her website through which she sells products.

Grief Reflection - www.griefreflection.com is a personal journal that she's keeping to process the impending death of her husband and it's also linked to her business website which sells healing from grief types of products.

Storybooks for Healing - www.storybooksforhealing.com is the website through which she sells workbooks and memory books for people who want to keep the memory of their loved one alive after they've gone.

I've setup both of these domains as campaigns and have been looking at the metrics for both.  The grief reflection blog out performs the storybooks for healing website.

If we merge the two then the Grief Reflection blog would likely become a subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com and be more fully integrated which she thinks will help her visitors not get confused while navigating her website.

www.griefreflection.com has 12,637 links while www.storybooksforhealing.com has 1,462.  Also, Google has indexed 380 pages of Grief Reflection and only 100 pages for Storybooks for Healing, though that may be because there are fewer pages to index. Grief reflection also has a 4.36 mozRank and 5.30 mozTrust, where Storybooks has 4.13 mozRank and 5.15 mozTrust.

Should I counsel her to keep these domains separate?  If not, would simply setting up 301 redirects from the www.griefreflection.com domain name to the new subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com be the way to go?

Thank you ever so much for any wisdom anyone can provide.

Robert, thanks again for your patience and expertise.  I think I'm clearer now.  As long as these aren't considered duplicates, I'm happy.  Thanks for the tip on All In One SEO plugin to not index the archive pages.  I'll certainly get in there and do that.

Right now, I"m just trying to identify the issues my client needs to address and not make too many changes to things until we've had the opportunity to go over them together.

Your insight and instructions have been most helpful.

Thank you!!!!

Robert, thank you for responding so thoroughly.  I'll definitely look into each of the items you wrote about.  I still have my lingering question that I started with, however.

Is what I'm seeing when I do this Google search:

site:storybooksforhealing.com "Some of the most quiet moments are often the most difficult after a loss. Mornings, late nights, time alone."

The resulting list has 7 entries.  Aren't these duplicates?  Shouldn't I get rid of them somehow?  Or are you saying the issues that the meta descriptions are the problem?  I don't understand why the meta descriptions you refer to in your post above would be causing the duplicates to appear in the SERP.

Some of the pages listed are category pages or tag pages that are just listing all posts related to a category or tag.  There is still only one unique post but it's getting replicated on the category or tag archive pages.  Should these be considered duplicate pages?

I'm sorry for the confusion.  I wish I could be clearer in how I'm presenting the problem to you.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.  I think the problem is that Wordpress (in this case) is taking the excerpt from the main page /publish-cup-of-joy/ and presenting it on other pages along with many other excerpts from other pages on the site.  I think the content really only exists on that one page but is being presented in different ways and with different URLs depending on whether you select a category to show all related posts for a category or if you select a tag to show all posts with a certain tag, etc.

It may be that I just need to point all archive pages to one specific page on the website instead of letting the search engine index every archive page.

I'm just not confident about that approach so am looking for direction in that regard.

Thanks again for responding!

Good news!  I have my first real SEO gig and now I have to be able to actually deliver. I'm up for it but I want to be sure I'm seeing what I think I am before suggesting any changes.  I'm working my way throught Danny Dover's excellent book SEO Secrets and learning tons!

To see if there is duplicate content on the site, I've taken a sentence from one of the pages on the site and searched for it:  i.e., site:storybooksforhealing.com "Some of the most quiet moments are often the most difficult after a loss. Mornings, late nights, time alone."

The SERPs show 7 pages that have this text on it.  It seems like this is duplicate content, right?

This is a Wordpress website so what's happening is the actual page is here: www.storybooksforhealing.com/publish-cup-of-joy/ but there are several archive pages that show excerpts of this text, too.

If this is duplicate content (first question) then how would I go about remedying it? Should I set the canonical reference to /publish-cup-of-joy page?

Thank you for being patient with my NOOB questions.