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ha ha... thanks for the story.  Great!

When they call me, I just tell them don't call back.

There are so many things that you want... will be hard to find all of this in a single designer.

I would look for a designer who.......

-- is competent at the technical aspects of SEO (Could save you tons of work and money down the road.  A clueless designer can change all of your URLs for fun, give you a framed site, deoptimize everything, give you the same title tag on all 10,000 pages.  My competitor had a redesign done and they noindexed it.  Man, did we make a lot of money for a few weeks. 

-- can make your site look nice (look at lots of their portfolio sites.  If you don't see things that you like then go to another designer's site)

-- understands the importance of conversion rate / user engagement (You don't want a redesign that will kill your sales on a retail site or kill your pageviews on an info site.  One of my sites was redesigned and it looked great but income fell through the floor.  When you have your site redesigned you want these metrics to go UP.  So, I would try to determine if I am talking with someone who knows about conversion rate and usability.  Some designers can brag that they increase these metrics for site owners.   I would ask what is the plan if the design tanks. If this offends them or if they get defensive then I would get someone else.  You can lose a million dollars in sales this way.)

-- knows who owns the website!  This is your website and you should have every say over the look and the features.   It's not their "work of art".  Instead, it is the "face of your business and brand".   They should make an effort to learn a little about you, your business and your style, then produce a design that matches that.  If they are not looking for input from you then you will get pot luck.  Part of this is your duty but at the same time you should not have to pull their teeth or use a hammer to reshape the design if it is not working for you.

-- works in stages and looks for your feedback.  Before they start coding you should see a graphic of the design and talk about the look and all of the features.  If you can't get to agreement here then you should be able to terminate the job.  Some designers ask for multiple payments... one that takes you through the "look"... and one or two more as the work progresses.

These are just my opinions.  Lots of people do things differently and some designers might not like my attitude but that is something that they should find out up front and is part of my duty to communicate.

I have gotten great work, very nice work, from oDesk.

HOWEVER.... you really need to write very tight specifications, show them samples and look at their portfolio.   Also, check their screenshots to be sure that the job is not jumping off track.

But, I have been very happy with almost all of the work I have gotten there.

The above sounds a bit spammy,

I agree.... I hope that my competitors are signing up for this.  I hope that they all buy six-packs.

however the success they have had with such activity with other websites has been fantastic.

lol.... Right!  The penguins are loving it..  

No link building or much in the way of external promotion either to skew things just 100% content.

This is exactly the case for the content that I described.  This is an informative site but we are clobbering retailers in a very competitive space.

I believe that one strategy to ranking well for a root keyword is to have separate and substantive pages for many different subtopics.  Then the page for the root keyword summarizes each of these and links to the more substantive page for full information.  I have a couple pages like this ranking well for very competitive terms and am surprised at their performance.  These are really big pages with a few thousand words, a dozen images, data tables and more.  However, I believe that the links hitting deeper substantive content are very helpful.  (This is just opinion, based upon observation.  Never heard anything from google to support this or a large text with controls.)

Newspapers operate out of fear.   They want to tell folks about things but they don't want them to leave the news site through a link.

Not linking out could be policy.  Do they link out in other articles.  If they do, then ask if they could help you that way.

I used to have lots of #1 - #2 and even #1 - #2 - #3 - (sometimes #4) listings.

I still have some - but not as many.

Over the past few months Google is still allowing some of these but it is much harder to get two of your pages listed in the top ten positions of the SERPs.

You can really stack them up on the second and third page... but Google seems to be forcing more domain diversity in the top ten positions.

I agree.  Links built with software are manipulative.  If anyone can build these links then why would google count them.

The only software that is indirectly useful for linkbuilding is a spreadsheet with a list of bloggers and other webmasters who publish in your niche.  That will enable you to keep a list of people handy who you can contact when some great new content is published on your site.

I know that this isn't the answer that you want.... but, it is very hard to panda-proof thin content.

I have a website that has lots and lots of images - each on a separate page - that could have very very skimpy page content.  To avoid problems with search engines, we invested a lot to get relevant text onto those pages.

So, here is my advice.

Instead of thinking of this as a "problem".  Think of it as a way to invest in the harvesting of long tail traffic.  When you start adding text to these pages the amount of traffic that they pull from search goes up - often enormously.  And you make some money back.

We have a lot of image pages that originally had 30 words.  When we increased to 200 words the amount of traffic went up nicely, and when some of these have been improved to 1000 word article pages, now their rankings have gone up and their traffic is many times higher than what they pulled in at 30 words.

Pick your best pages for additional content and invest in them.  See what happens.  You might be so surprised that you decide to invest in a lot more pages.

I don't know of one here at SEOmoz.   I use the Google Adwords tool and WordTracker.

Here is what I do if I want to pull in traffic for a ton of long tail queries.

I decide upon the root keyword for the article and do research on that keyword to discover the RELATED topics that  people are googling.

Let's say that my keyword is widgets and I use the google keyword tool and learn that people are searching for...

different types of widgets

who makes them

what they are made from

what color are they

history of widgets
etc. etc. etc.

Then I write an article that addresses everything that everybody everywhere is asking for about widgets IN SUBSTANTIVE CONTENT.

Each of these subtopics for widgets is included on the page as subheadings

or

and described thoroughly with photos, illustrations, tables of data.

That is the start of a potentially killer page.

Google knows what people are asking for and they can recognize when content covers all of those details in a substantive, rich beyond text presentation.

I believe that people who have produced best-on-the web content that is substantive and complete will agree with me.

If you want an example look at a wikipedia page for a topic such as "Philadelphia".

An article like that can pull in fantastic traffic for the topic - even if you don't rank anywhere for "Philadelphia".

Flirting with hidden text penalty at bottom of page... only about 1% color difference.

The site with the most authority will have the advantage.  If google finds the duplicates and recognizes them, one site could be filtered from the SERPs for some queries... or as in the Panda update, there could be a sitewide reduction in rankings.

When you purchased the site, did you obtain a document that gave you exclusive use of the content?

If they are creators of the content they can sell it many times unless the first buyer got an exclusive license to the content.  For all we know they might have stolen the content from someone.

I am not an intellectual property attorney.  You might contact one if you paid a lot for the site and want to get the best information about your options.

** Is it just me or are the Google SERPs showing more duplication of domains since the penguin update.**

I noticed this too.  I believe that Google is making it much more difficult to get two (or more) listings on the first page of the SERPs.  However, the number you can get on other pages has really gone up.

I was reading about a study that looked at the first 1000 places in google.  Usually, only about 200 domains are present in the top 1000.  When I think about that I wonder how a new website in some moderately competitive niche is supposed to break in.

I would assume having the duplicate content, especially if two site owners are in the same town, will ultimately hurt the rankings of at least one site. Is this correct?

Yes.  They will certainly compete against each other in the search results. One of them could be filtered for duplicate content - maybe both if this same design and content is sold to other businesses in other cities (which I bet that it has).

I have seen dental sites that are sold complete with content, photos (awful photos IMO), etc.  A great money maker for the creators but they probably don't tell the dentists the potential problems with duplicate content.

I would not be surprised if the creators of these sites are clueless about SEO.  I know a dentist who bought one of these... and the title tags were awful - misspellings, chop English, etc.   However, he is a smart guy and did some customization and now he is #1 for the good queries in his town.

Not only did the doorway page lose it's ranking for its keyword, but so did the main site.

This sounds like cloaking.

About those doorway domains and microsites.   I used to run a lot of hotdog stand websites.  I thought that was the way to go.  Then I learned that a big kickass site was a lot easier to run, a lot easier to rank and performed better with visitors.  So, now the company that I own works actively on just three websites - each in a different niche.

If I had a company like you describe.  I would start putting all future work into a single site in each topic area.   And work on that site until it defeats all of the doorways.  Stop competing with yourself and diluting your brand.

If they republish your content verbatim then all of these websites will compete against each other (and against you) in the SERPs.  Google will slowly realize that these sites are duplicate and will begin to filter some of them out of the search results.  The ones filtered will generally be the weakest domains (not who published last).

Some people think.... "I'll get 20 retailers to sell my stuff on their websites and I'll get rich."  That can happen if these websites pull traffic from other sources, however, if they pull most of their traffic from search your income might not be significantly higher.

To keep these sites from damaging your rankings you could ask them to include the rel=canonical on their pages to point to your site as the source of the content.  This would work fine for you if you can get them to do it... and eventually one of them will realize what the canonical does and they will not like it.

I think my competitor is using Black Hat SEO.

Those links could have been placed without an actions done by your competitor.

Wow EGOL - Thanks for that insight - You successfully read the title of the page!

Yes, see how easy your question was? 

I have a homepage with a PA of 52 that is outranked by an ebay page with a PA of 1 and an amazon.com page with a PA of 1.  These ebay and amazon pages have zero links from other domains.  My page has 45 linking root domains.

Amazon and Ebay win because GOOGLE awards high rankings to pages on authoritative domains.  SEOmoz PA is irrelevant because Google determines the rankings using a different set of factors - especially "onpage" factors.

SEOmoz PA and DA are great for tracking your progress over time but they are very imperfect for predicting google rankings.   If you don't believe that just watch Q&A and see how many people make a post like yours.... "WTF, my PA is higher and they are beating me"

These folks think one of these things:

1. Google is screwing them

2. SEOmoz metrics are bogus

The real answer is:  3) These folks don't  understand PA and DA or they have a site with some penalty or throttle.

I would like to see SEOmoz explain these numbers and how they should be used with greater clarity and post obvious links to that content  where the results of the tool is displayed.

They are listed in the order of their google ranking.

I know a guy who had a PR7 site on AOL's hometown.  When they closed, they gave him 30 days notice to move his files then locked him out.

Don't build your house on other people's turf.

No.  If it is a newly registered domain the only benefit you will receive is type-in traffic.

If the domain has a website on it with rankings and links you  might get some benefit from them if you play your cards right.

Would actual descriptions of a location around 250 words long be seen and penalised as duplicate content?

Yes.  If that is the majority of page content.

Also is there a possible way to canonicalise this content so that Google can see it relates back to our original site?

Yes, if the duplicate pages had rel="canonical" applied as described here...

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

The problem with that is the webmasters who own the partner sites would have to apply this to their pages (if you don't have control) and some of them will realize that your goal is to discredit their pages.

A friend of mine wanted to buy likes and I'd like to give him an alternative.

Glad you are looking for an alternative.

Suggest that your friend make a very visible place to display AddThis.com buttons or some similar service.  Make it very easy for your visitors to "like" things.

Then, if it isn't happening that says something.... but, don't expect every visitor to "like" even the best content.  If you get a few out of a thousand that is a pretty good rate if your site is visited by people who are not the types to be using social sites.

They are being weasels.

They are willing to link to you but they don't want to help power your site.

The last public statement on how pagerank works on nofollowed links from Matt Cutts is....

"Pagerank on a nofollowed link does not pass to the target site, instead it simply evaporates.  So, if you nofollow the link, your site will gain nothing and the target site will gain nothing."   What you really communicate is.... "they paid us!".... or ... "we don't trust them".

Of course google could change their mind about how they do this and they could have changed it already and not told anybody.

let's say you have a site loaded with pages with 2k+ word articles.

This describes my  site.

Would a lightly-populated index page (less LA Times, more Big Background) have a negative impact, beyond the obvious missed opportunity for having that page have more content as well?

If I reduced my homepage to minimalist content I would miss at minimum, 50,000 visitors per month.  The diverse words on that homepage pull in nearly 1/2 of its traffic and they also enable it to rank better in many SERP.

This homepage also holds lots of #2 rankings, where one of my article pages holds #1.  That occurs because the homepage is made relevant by the diverse words.

We can assume the minimalist index page would have appropriate page optimization, including some content (just not lots).

To me this means that you will get "some" traffic rather than "lots".

Many websites have more search traffic entering through their homepage than any other page on the site.  And it is usually the strongest page to use in battle for difficult keywords.

We seem to be from different perspectives.  I sense that you are married to a visual effect... and I am married to using my homepage as a traffic-pulling machine.

There are design features that allow a page to contain a lot of spiderable text that is revealed with a click and pages that rotate visible content one cell at a time but hold lots of total text.  Perhaps one of those would be a way for you to have both.

are there any SEO downsides to not having any substantive content on the home page

These are not thoughts.  They are facts.  If you have a homepage with just a few words you will get a certain level of traffic.  However, for almost every relevant word that you add to the page you will probably get more traffic as those new words combine with existing words to create many more combinations of new queries for which you are relevant.

Here is a short story....

We had a lot of pages that had one sentence descriptions of photos.  They got a little traffic.  When we increased the text content on those pages to a couple hundred words the rankings increased and the traffic went up by 10x.... When we upgraded those pages to 2000 word articles with several photos the rankings went up again and the number of visitors went up significantly - some to thousands of visitors per month.  Now some of these pages get more visitors in ten minutes than the one-sentence pages received in a day.

Our guess is that if the home page doesn't have much copy, that odds are that other specific pages will tend to perform better for non-brand search terms, which seems OK.

I think that your guessing is harmful to your wallet

If people DO find the homepage, it would likely be a brand search or an ad referral, in which case the minimalist, non-copy design would be conversion-friendly. Does that theory hold any water?

Most of the visitors who enter my site by the homepage are coming from queries that have nothing to do with my brand.  My homepage looks closer to the LA Times than to what you are describing.  I want my visitors to say DAMN!  Look at all of this stuff!

The retail sites where I have this convert really well.  I would be very hesitant to use your proposed homepage unless I was selling just one item on that website.

You might check to be sure that their content isn't being scraped and republished.  Some really aggressive scrapers grab the content of sites in these difficult and valuable niches and republish it on their own domain.  I know of cases where sites are crawled many times per day looking for that new page of content.

Grab a unique sentences from a couple of pages, put it between quotes and see if dupes are out there.

This question is asked over and over again in the SEOmoz Q&A.

"Wah! My DA is the best but my site isn't #1. WTF?"

This question rarely gets a satisfying answer and when it is answered well the person who asked the question is usually not happy to hear the truth.

This is one of the most widely used SEO tools on the internet and people don't know what it means.

Since these same questions recur so often and with such passion SEOmoz should address it with a detailed article that is obviously posted where the people who use this tool will clearly find it.

That will ensure that a good tool is used properly and so many people are not going around with their panties in a wad.

Thank you!

For internal anchors, I can't see how Google would consider wikipedia's practice to be manipulative.   It is simply providing easy connects for any visitor who wants them.

5 Original Articles (500 words each) on 125 different article sites (with keyword links back to your website)

This is like painting a target on your back !

Alan,

Thank you for answering Samuel's question.

I have been wondering about internal anchor text too.  I understand your example about wedding bands and agree.

What do you think about the practice of Wikipedia to hyperlink the first occurrence of EVERY topic name in an article to the Wikipedia article page for that topic?   I don't find that offensive as a reader of their site, in fact, I think that it is very helpful.

What do you think of that practice being applied to a retail or informative site?

Thanks

It is a good thing to ask questions when you are uncertain about something that can be as important as a corporate website.

A website has content assets, link assets, ranking assets, traffic assets, branding assets that can be lost when a site is left go.  Each one of these should be evaluated before moving away from a domain.  Simply doing a 302 redirect abandons almost all of them.  This can be an enormous financial loss.

A 301 redirect is the best way to go if you simply want to transfer link equity and type in traffic to the new domain.  My question is... Has this been done correctly?

Also, do you have server logs or analytics from the old domain?  If you do you can use them to figure out which pages on the old domain were pulling traffic and for what keywords.  If there is nice traffic coming into the site for them then it would be a good idea to consider getting the original content from the old site and moving it to the new site.  It might not be too late to redirect the URLs on the old site directly to the new URLs on the new site that hold this content.

If I was you I would consider getting a paid consultation from someone experienced in SEO and moving domains in specific who can look deeply into the data from the old site and recommend how to best capitalize it on a new site.  You could be walking away from thousands to millions of future dollars in revenue.

I was suspicious that it might cause a rankings problem.  Thanks for sharing what you read.

I would like to read an evaluation of the service done by a top SEO with deep technical knowledge.  What happens when you start bouncing every visitor from a high traffic country?  Will I lose image search traffic when my files are modified out to their service?  What else do they add to my site or change?  Sucking any linkjuice?

I was looking at CloudFlare.

I wanted to speed up the site, limit access to certain countries, and get some of their security enhancements.

The cost can be free if you use minimal services or $20/month if you want a lot more.

I didn't do it because I had some concerns about their use of my data, how they might rewrite URLs on my site with affiliate codes, how blocking certain countries might impact search rankings, and more.

I really like their services but have research to do before I decide that it is a good thing for me.

I always ask my visitors what works best.

I create multiple designs and run each of them, collecting data from services like google analytics and crazyegg.  This allows you to observe visitor activity, sales and ad income, then use that data to inform the design process.

Some of my pages have been through 15 or more different formats.  And, the income difference between what I started with and what I settled with has been as high as 10X.

If you have a lot of traffic you can toss a design up and know how its working within a few hours.  If you don't get much traffic it might take a few weeks to get enough information to take action.

I have learned so much from doing this and my income is much higher.

I am surprised that lots of designers are not offering "optimization" services to improve the effectiveness of their clients' websites.  So many of them think that "what I produce is golden".  Or, maybe they are afraid to admit that their designs are based only upon their personal visual preference and that they don't have any idea of how effective they are going to be with visitors.  I got started on this when a professional designer redid one of my sites and visitor actions and income fell through the floor.

....and wrote the content from scratch.

Nice work!

Even so, a duplicate content reader is saying there's 30% duplicate.

I would not worry about that at all.

Good luck with the site and the new biz.

continue with a redesign of his site and have 2 sites out there.

I would take this route.  Fantastic URL.... long reputation.... ranks pretty well... you are doing a DBA.... No brainer to me.... allow it to stand with upgraded design, better optimization.

If so, what's the minimum % of duplicate content I should shoot for?

huh?  minimum?

Both of these sites should be absolutely 100% unique.

Lots of designers and developers believe that they are entitled to these attribution links and insist upon them being on the sites that they produce.

I think that this is something that should be discussed in advance with the client.  I believe that it is the client's call because it is his website.  In fact, there are some sites that are important enough or have enough traffic (or linkjuice) that the designer should pay huge money to have those links appear on the client site.

I know that plenty of designers will disagree strongly with this.

When I see an SEO's links in the footer of a client site I really shake my head.  I think that it is pretty sleezy to be sucking the linkjuice from client sites when instead they should be trying to get linkjuice flowing INTO those site.

Lots of visitors dislike ads, especially if you are popping them up, playing distracting animation or slapping their face hard with huge ads.

Google says that visitors should not have to "look" for your content.  So you ads better not be pushing it down or hogging the top space on the page where content is expected.

However, people who spend a lot of money creating content and a lot of money on bandwidth have to recover those costs, pay the rent, pay the staff and make a profit.  So, ads will be present on even the highest quality of websites.

The visitors who really hate ads are probably blocking them with browser add-ons.  However, I think that most   people are smart enough to know that ads pay the bills and will tolerate them as long as they are not offensive in content, placement or action.

I run ads on my sites and they earn links just fine.  On my site I link out to about ten articles per day and I will sometimes not link to a site if they are slapping face, popping up, animating or serving raunchy ads.

It is very very hard to convince people that the easy methods for getting links are going down the drain.  Look at how your traffic is falling and they are ignoring it.

If I was the boss at your office I would make you the new "Chief of SEO" and tell you to hire new staff.

What will it take to educate them?  Maybe showing them articles by Matt Cutts, Rand, Danny Sullivan and other influenctials will help.

I want to tive you encouraging words like "Hang in there!"... but if new job opportunities arise where a more enlightened culture is present you might want to consider it.

Google DOES allow ads above the fold.   As long as your are not slapping the visitors face with your ads and the visitor has zero problems finding your page content without scrolling then ads are allowed.

If Google did not allow ads above the fold then most of the content providers on the web would go bankrupt.

My best is that you have a duplicate content, a skimpy content, a thin affiliate or links problem.

One of the easiest ways for you to rank higher than those sites would be to setup author profiles and claim yourself as the author of the original content.

I believe that this is a very good idea.  However, I am confident that it will not solve the problem.  Google is not giving strong weight to claimed authorship at this time.

Your strongest weapon is DMCA actions and to stop giving others permission to use your content.

Your site could be suffering from Panda ranking reductions as a result of your own content being wild on the web.