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I have a number of hyper local directories, where businesses get a page dedicated to them. They can add images and text, plus contact info, etc. Some businesses list on more than one of these directory sites, but use exactly the same description. I've tried asking businesses to use unique text when listing on more than one site to avoid duplication issues, but this is proving to be too much work for the business owner! Can I use a cross-domain canonical and point Google towards the strongest domain from the group of directories? What effects will this have? And is there an alternative way to deal with the duplicate content? Thanks - I look forward to hearing your ideas!

I would like to implement Schema/microdata on a clients website, but the site is currently XHTML. Is html5 required for the micro data tags to be recognised? Will it work if I implement micro data on my XHTML site? Thanks for any advice you can offer.

I'm almost ready to launch a redesign of a client's website. The new site has over 10,000 new product pages, which contain unique product descriptions, but do feature some similar text to other products throughout the site. An example of the page similarities would be the following two products: Brown leather 2 seat sofa Brown leather 4 seat corner sofa Obviously, the products are different, but the pages feature very similar terms and phrases. I'm worried that the Panda update will mean that these pages are sand-boxed and/or penalised. Would you block the new pages? Add them gradually? What would you recommend in this situation?

I'm getting the following error when seomoz tries to spider my site: First Crawl in Progress! Processing Issues for 671 pages Started: Apr. 23rd, 2011 Here is the robots.txt data from the site: Disallow ALL BOTS for image directories and JPEG files. User-agent: * Disallow: /stats/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /newspictures/ Disallow: /pdfs/ Disallow: /propbig/ Disallow: /propsmall/ Disallow: /*.jpg$ Any ideas on how to get around this would be appreciated 🙂

A photographer client has a flash website, purchased as from a (well respected) template company. The main site is at the root domain, and the HTML version is at www.example.com/?load=html If I visit the site on a browser without Flash installed, I am re-directed automatically to the HTML version. I'm concerned as the site has some great links and the HTML version is well optimised, but doesn't appear anywhere in Google for chosen keywords (ranks perfectly for brand related searches). Google is indexing the Flash version of the site, but I would rather it didn't (there's no real content (just Javascript to load the SWF) and all of the pages load under one URL). How can I block the Flash version from Google but still make the incoming links count towards the HTMl version of the site? If I re-direct Google to the HTML version, is this cloaking, and is it frowned upon? Thanks for any advice you can offer.

I've built a couple of small tools that I use personally, maybe 2 or 3 times per day. Both tools scrape the top 10 results from Google and provide more details about each domain (like the SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool). Google seem to have banned my IP address for automated searches... can anyone tell me a safe way of scraping the google results? Is there a suitable API for this? How do SEO Moz do this on such a huge scale?

I have a number of clients that own businesses in 'boring' sectors, such as: Toxic Waste Removal Steel Erecting Household Plumbing (Boilers, etc...) Link building for these sites is quite difficult. Creating compelling content and 'link bait' is particularly tricky. I found a good post from Michael Gray on the subject, but I don't think food (or McDonalds in this case)is a particularly difficult subject to write about. Any more tips on how to approach this would be appreciated. Thanks

In your opinion, is it worth paying for sponsored links in directories like http://www.dmegs.com, rather than the standard free links? I'm also curious about sponsored posts on Blogs (such as http://www.lovemydress.net/blog/sponsors/) where links are dofollowed, but clearly marked as sponsored. Will Google penalise me for purchasing these links? Are the links de-valued in any way?