Welcome to the Q&A Forum

"The question I have is: will including this duplicated content on our domain harm our domains general SERP performance?"

If you have a lot of republished content on the site you could get hit with a panda problem that will reduce the rankings across your domain.   I have a very strong site that had lots of professionally written content being republished with permission.  On one of the Penguin updates the rankings of that site fell a few places almost across the entire domain.  When I "noindex followed" that republished content my rankings came back as normal.

"What is the best way to increase time on site?"

Attempts to improve "time on site" and "pages viewed" are closely associated with the keyword that delivered the visitor.

In general, improving content.  This is not only writing quality but also the visual impact of  landing on a page.  Nice, big, relevant, juicy images (or video) above the fold grab attention and can hold the visitor.

Getting the second (and subsequent) page views depends upon giving the visitor options to additional content pages.  Go to this page on CNN and study it.....

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/01/us/colorado-marijuana-club/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

Look at how they have big video at top.... then several related topic videos immediately below it... the right column generally presents lots of  enticing topics that could be "news pulse", "most popular", CNN on FaceBook, "recommended stories" and more.

If you don't want the visitor to bounce then provide sticky content and sticky options.

I'd move the ecommerce into a folder on the root domain instead of into a subdomain.  Then you get the authority  benefits of the root domain.

"This answer completely eliminates at least 70% of small businesses from creating great content."

I think that if you go out on the web and look at who is producing "best on the web" content.... less than 10% of small businesses are participants.

Loren,

Thank you for this generous sharing of your experience.

I have been contacted by BBB but did not pay for membership.

Did you notice any lift in sales after posting the BBB badge on your website?

Do you have a similar story about D&B listings?

D&B has contacted me several times telling me that people are requesting my report.  I asked them to tell me who is requesting and then I will consider providing my information.  I also told them that they should be paying me since my information is a revenue-producing product for them.    They don't "get" that logic.  

Thanks!

I think that approaching product descriptions with a number in mind is a recipe for poor performance.

Some products are clearly known and understood by most people and require very little explanation.  On my sites these might receive 200 words (but there might be three to six of these products on a single page for comparison).

I have some products that sold slowly with 500 words and four nice images... .but when I added a video, 500 additional words and a link to an article of 2000 words and several images my sales multiplied.  These are products that could be popular but not many people know about them or took them seriously in the past.

Some people would call these "boring" products. 

How do you know that "a ton of link exchanges" are responsible for the ranks?   Just because you see 'em doesn't say that they are doing anything.

I don't think that I would hire a "copywriter" where a "content expert" is needed... and at the same time a "content expert" might not be the best person to write the copy.

I think that a collaboration between them might yield a "start" at a good article if the copywriter is pliable and the content expert has a lot of patience.

The process will take an awful lot more time than a content expert who is able to write effectively.

Missing in the mix still is a source of photos, images, data tables and graphs that clearly illustrate the topic.

A lot of the best content on the web requires several days of work from multiple people - for a couple thousand words with images.

"Hiring an expert to write them from scratch would cost a huge chunk of money."

If you want good stuff you gotta pay the price.

The few people who are willing to pay the price will get the rewards and the people who try to compete on the cheap will squander their money.

This is it.

Why are you asking SEOs?

Go ask someone who sells shoes and clothing what the typical buyer does not understand.  They should be able to rant and preach for days.

The "highly competitive" is google's assessment of the PPC competition.

Organic SERPs could be very different.

Keep in mind that PPC allows broadmatch... but that will not get you ranked in organic.

If you allow the links to be followed the recipient gains benefit and you lose PR through each link.

If you nofollow the links then recipient does not get PR and you still lose it.

What I described above his how Google most recently said they do things.

Are you saying that this is harmful and these links should be converted to a reciprocal do follow and if not, removed altogether?

I can't say anything about reciprocals.

I have pages similar to yours where I simply link to resources.  I don't have any relationship with the websites receiving the links.  This is simply a resource that might be helpful to my visitors.

If I owned your website I would optimize that page to compete for a relevant keyword.   The resources pages that I have hold good google rankings for good keywords and pull in more traffic than they send out..

One thing for sure is that I would not call it a "links" page.

When nofollow was first announced, Google said that it could be used to "sculpt" pagerank.  Then Google changed their mind and allowed pagerank to evaporate - but they didn't tell anybody for a while.

So, just because Google says something today, you can't count on it being true forever, because they can change their mind but keep their mouths shut.

I would simply edit the title tag and the H1.

You hope to get a tiny bump out of changing the URL ?

But, you are going to waste some linkjuice in redirecting....

and create thousands of htaccess lines that must be processed...

and you are worried that tons of redirects are going to cause a problem....

How much do you think an optmized URL is worth in the search engines?

I don't think that it's worth a whole lot.

"in my article section I have a HUGE article about Samsung Laptops"

Nice work!

"The category page shows lots of laptops and a small section of text."

OK... this is good... more text might be helpful

So, what's the problem?

Here is my opinion and you know that they say about opinions.  

I think that Google is going to rank the page that Google thinks is best for the searcher.  Some types of queries are made mostly by buyers.  Some types are made by people looking for information.

I have pairs of pages on my site just as you do.  I link between them just like you do.  My article pages are usually much stronger than my product pages but I usually see the product pages higher in the SERPs for product queries and the article pages for information queries.

Even if someone lands on an article page I still have an opportunity to route them to the product page with house ads and other types of obvious links.  Maybe my article will impress them and they will decide to buy from me because they read part or all of the article and decided to buy from me because I know enough to write helpful information.  I know for a fact that this happens because customers tell me.

So, if you see your article page ranking high be sure to make it very clear to people who land on that page that you are in the business of selling Samsung Laptops.   Most people would by happy to get any page to visible rankings in those SERPs.

Something else that I noticed is that if I place a link to one of my pages in the persistent navigation that is on every page of the site - that page often moves up nicely in the rankings.   You might consider doing that with your Samsung product page if you want to increase its strength in the SERPs.

Glad your sites are moving up.

I am seeing lots of movement in some of my search results.   But, in my opinion, author rank is not helpful for increasing your rankings in the Google SERPs.  I don't know what is causing current rankings flux.

Do you have an explict answer to those questions that will avoid a Penguin problem?

I think that they can be harmful to your site - especially if you use keyword anchor text.

If these are the only types of links that you have, I think that your site will be hit by Penguin.

If you do one or two per day... it will be enough to get you in trouble by the end of next year.

For the last eight years I have not accepted clients - I only work on my own sites.  Before that I used to accept clients but was really picky about who I would help.  Lots of people asked me to build a website or get their existing website up in the rankings.

I showed them how to do a little keyword research and we determined some of the important keywords that they would want to rank for.  Then we discussed what type of content would be needed to create a great landing page experience for those keywords.

Then I said...  I'll help you with your website when you bring me that content.  Most of them left and never came back.  But some of them did.  The ones who did were successful then, and today - many years later - all of them are still running their sites and producing their content.  They depend on others to do much of the technical work for their websites... but they are still making new, original, high-quality content for every additional page that they add to their website.

So, if you are wasting time because clients can't come up with content then start telling them right from the first meeting that content creation is going to be their job.   Explain why it should be their job and why they should not want anyone else doing it for them.

They really don't want you or some absolute noob who knows nothing about hydraulic jacks or spectropotometers, Irish fiddles or knitting supplies writing their content for them.  They really don't.

Before your "new world order" arrived, quality sites with lots of content were earning their SERPs.  They earned their SERPs while lots of SEOed sites were pushing thin content to the top with paid links, forum posts and cheap directories.

The content sites took the long, expensive route.  They went to their office and worked on content.  Every day they asked... "what can we produce that our visitors will like?".  Then they delivered.  They were not complaining.  They were simply working on their passions.

They only worked on one or two or maybe three sites. They worked on those same sites every day, every day for years and years.  They communicated with their visitors.  They become experts in their content area.  From that they learned about their visitors, learned what they consumed and used that knowledge to deliver value.

The question that you are asking is.... "How can I beat these fanatics who know their content and know their sites and know their traffic and know their niche?"

I think that you understand that "content" is the part of your service that is missing... as well as an understanding of the customer.

So, if you can convince clients that they will be responsible for content and show them who in their industry has the content that they will have to beat to succeed.  Then you can do the technical work of their website.  Do the analytics work needed to help them understand their visitors and teach them how to target their content creation to achive the goals of their business.  You might also add conversion rate optimization.

Some companies already offer this type of service although much of it is done by an in-house team who works closely with many other people involved in the business.

That depends upon why the page stopped ranking.  If it was being filtered for duplicate content then rewriting might bring it back if your new content is unique.

If it stopped ranking because you have an overabundance of exact match anchor text links pointing at the page then rewriting will probably not work.

IMO this domain and its content is screwed.  Worthless.

I would start fresh on a new domain.

Dont reuse content from the original site.  Don't redirect anything from the original site.

I would start on a new domain and not syndicate anything or republish anything.

That's what I would do.... others might do different.

When other people start grabbing your content or you start grabbing their content then the sites that will survive filters and panda are usually the most powerful sites with the most domain authority.

I had a couple hundred pages on one of my sites that appeared verbatim on many other sites and it got hit with a panda problem... and this is a PR7 domain and the panda problem pages were PR4 and PR5.

I escaped panda in a few months by deleting some of the problem content and noindexing the rest.  I was lucky to have thousands of pages of original content left after getting rid of the dupes.

If you have a juvenile site and the scrapers get you or you syndicate or republish... then you have gotten the kiss of death.

That's my opinion.  Others might believe different.

I searched Google for sentences from your content between quotes.   Like this....

"It’s finally done! Our official review of DVD to iPod Converting Software for 2013."

I saw your site in those SERPs but I also saw lots of other sites with the same content.  I saw this for six or seven sentences from various parts of your site.

IMO this site with this content is screwed.

I would start working on another project.  This one might come back in a couple of years after other sites that have your content die off or your content rolls so deep into their site that it is not getting any more linkjuice.

I don't think that social shares are worth very much.

However, if the content of those shares on the SM site includes your domain name or brand AND can be crawled by Google then there might be a tiny bit of value.

If you use "nofollow" you might be safe from a link penalty....  But it would not surprise me if these sites had Panda problems because of all of the very similar pages - that could be considered doorway pages on doorway domains - and when you link them together you paint a target on them.

Then there is the low-quality EMD problem.

You seem to be expending a lot of time, thought and money into trying to rank a bunch of hotdog stand websites.  (The links between them are more dangerous than helpful.)   I think that it would just be better to work on producing high quality content on the main site and allow the hotdog stands to expire.

If I was your competitor I would be amused watching you playing around with 28 hotdog stands while I was building quality.

In my opinion, this is not a good project.  I would find something else.

If lots of other websites display the same content then some of them will be filtered from the search results.  Some of them might also receive a Panda penalty and have their rankings reduced site-wide.

In my opinion, sites that do nothing but duplicate manufacturer's material are a waste of time.

I have not had clients  for a long time... but if you want to get them in a small community build a small local website that achieves top rankings for some of the queries where you might obtain clients. Then you have something to point at when you call on them.

If you go see the autoglass guy, show him that you already have top rankings for "smalltown autoglass" and offer to give him an ad there.... rent him the page.... or help his website get ranked in the local map listings (if they appear for your community).  In a small community a site that focuses on small service or retail business is still a viable way to do this.  When you build that site and get it ranked you will get the experience and relationships needed to help your clients to success.

I would not offer to sell my services unless I already had some experience getting websites ranked in similar SERPs.

It's really easy for a person who knows a little about the web to get small business owners excited about tossing up a website and hauling in buckets of money on a tiny budget.  Lots of the business owners think that all you need to do to make money from a website is toss something up and have somebody who knows the secrets about tweaking the code.

That might be possible for some local businesses like "smalltown auto glass" where potential competition is naive and limited to your immediate community...

However, if your potential small town client wants to expand his business by 50% selling in gift basket, digital camera, jewelry, coffee or many other niches which are highly competitive the story will be very different.   Here  competition is a "battle of resources" where impressive content libraries or enormous existing brand equity  is needed - but does not guarantee success.

In that situation it is possible that the SEO will know exactly what to do to score high rankings but be far short of  the resources needed to do it.

Even in the PPC niche, the small merchant may not have the wholesale price advantage, the shipping volume advantage, the conversion optimized website and PPC skills needed to compete with the big guns.  It is awfully easy to lose a lot of money trying to win at PPC.

IMO the place where there is still hope for the small business on the web is niches like....

"smalltown auto glass" where potential competition is naive and limited to your immediate community..."

Cookie cutter pages like these stopped working in Google about ten years ago.

If you toss them up I think that your entire site will tank.

I would go back to focusing on quality pages.

I have found that folders perform better than subdomains.

I have done 301 redirects of subdomains into folders and the rankings went up strongly.  I attribute this to combining the link popularity.

If all three sites have the same article, one or two of the sites could be filtered from the Google SERPs because of duplicate content.  This is much more likely to happen if these sites link to one another.

If there are only a couple of these articles there should not be much of a problem beyond filtering.

However, if they have many articles published this way then they could be hit with a Panda problem.  To avoid that they could use a cross domain canonical to attribute the articles to a single site. To learn about that read these...

http://searchengineland.com/google-supports-cross-domain-canonical-tag-32044

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1716747

You can attribute all of the articles to a single site to give that site maximum value or distribute the attributions to give each site a little value.

I think that what most people view as a "ranking delay" is actually the "barrier to entry" of a competitive niche.

For some people the ranking delay is forever because they don't have the resources needed to compete.

Entry into a highly competitive niche requires some type of resource.

I generally advocate for consolidating a group of sites.... but... are some of these sites penalized?  Might be a good idea to understand why and the impact of merging them with unpenalized sites.

Also, if you are going to consolidate, combing the site into folders instead of subdomains can merge the domain authority.  Do some research on this before move forward.

Bosses can be really good at seeing some things and missing others.

SEOs can be really good at seeing some things and missing others.

I assume that you were hired for your expertise and that your bosses don't know much about SEO.  So, if you do not agree with them you can show your value to the company by letting them know why you think that these sites should remain separate.

If you decide to do this do it in a very nice and business like way.  Don't rant, just present data - and sometimes that data will be what you "think" will happen which could be wrong.

If my company bought a website we would not merge it immediately even if we wanted to.  Instead we would run it for a while and get to know where its traffic comes from, how much money it makes, where its power flows from, etc.

We might decide to merge it or we might run it separately.

One advantage that I see for merging the new site into the original is to bring that traffic and power to the corporate site.  There the visitor gets a much wider selection of products and the company has a better ability to market their brand to these visitors. And, if the original site is not dominant in your niche this extra power might push it there.  But, if the original site is already dominant then the acquired site displaces a competitor.

If the acquired site outranks the original site maybe adding other products to that site would supercharge its revenue.

To determine if the hardcore traffic of the acquired site is receptive to the brand of the original site you might run some ads on that site to see if they are ignored or if they are clicked through.  If you get lots of clickthroughs and those visitors engage the site and purchase then merging the site might work well.  But if they ignore the ads or bounce that says something too.

I would be running some tests and getting some data before I do anything.  And, anybody who says do this, or do that, is guessing.   Add testing to your proposal to the bosses.  Tell them that there are ways of measuring the value of this acquisition and if the traffic of the site is valuable to your brand.

I have never used blogspot. Maybe someone who has used it can answer. It might not be possible.

Nobody ever knows for sure what their competitors are doing.... so take this comment as a "suspicion" rather than a fact.......

I have a site that sells items that are really popular at Christmas.  It usually ranks really well from about February through October... then the same few competitors jump above me for the Christmas season then drop several places in the SERPs shortly after New Year.

I believe that they buy a big load of temporary links that are displayed starting about September 1 and are taken down at the end of December.   This gives them the big boost in the SERPs for Christmas but does not have those links in their profile all year long which could flag them for manipulation.

Just sayin' what I think.

Irving... what do you think about these lines of code?

Do you think that the rel="canonical" could kill value of the second page?

I don't know the answer to this...

  <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/](view-source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/)">  <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">next</a>" href="[http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/2/](view-source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2012/08/22/kanban-for-customers-how-to-increase-transparency-in-your-business/2/)">

I see this same article has been published on a few other websites.  Could that damage value of the links?

Again, I don't know the answer.  But it would not surprise me if google filters value from syndicated articles.

This type of problem is really hard to fix unless you know how to do the deep scrubbing needed to get rid of the problem.  If you don't scrub it properly the problem will recur over and over.

I would hire a pro ASAP.

We did rel=canonical on a few hundred pages and it took google months to follow the instruction.  These were not trivial pages buried deep in a website.  They were PR4 pages with lots of traffic.  The results in the end were as expected but it took a few months to happen.

This isn't the answer that you were looking for.... but if I purchased your company I would probably combine all of those blogs into a single kickass site.

You then would have an awesome powerful blog that will probably outperform your entire collection of blogs.

......................................................

Now to your question..

You can use the same article twice and use a cross domain canonical.

See these articles....

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1716747

http://searchengineland.com/google-supports-cross-domain-canonical-tag-32044

If the domain still has an active site on it with content that merits the links it has received it might be worth the money - if it is still in the Google index and ranking well for its content.

Keep in mind that lots of domains that are offered for sale have temporary links into them to give them PR and other metrics that buyers are interested in.

I would not buy it unless I had plans for a site that perfectly matches the domain.  However, some people buy them because they think that they can get value by redirecting it to a different domain.

Are you asking a question or trying to attract interest?

Somebody might grab it if you leave the domain name in your post.

If you see a good domain that is not being used by a viable company don't hesitate to write to the registrant to see if you can buy it.

This frequently works and you might get a perfect domain for $500 to a few thousand.

I am not an expert on forums.

In general, you can noindex/follow the individual threads if they are causing a problem.

The category pages might be SEOed to pull traffic and they could be planned to pull traffic on valuable topics.

But, before those things are done you should get an assessment from someone who has watched and experimented with forums to get best results.

That's about all I can say on this topic.

"Should I hide the whole forum from Google's robots?"

Heavens, NO.

If you want good, reliable, actionable advice a lot more information will be needed.

Anybody who tosses out ideas based upon what you shared is shooting at a blurry target.

Also, this type of problem is not one that can be diagnosed by a person who spends 20 minutes surfing  through your website and 20 minutes typing you an answer.  They will probably need to get under the hood.

Consider hiring someone who has experience with the forum software that you are using and knows how to structure them for optimum treatment by google.