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Great news, Joe.

Thanks for the tips and for letting us know you are getting some nice results.

I have lots of double listings... some triple and some quadruple.

I view keyword cannibalization as an opportunity to dominate the SERPs rather than something to be avoided.

Would you like to own the top three positions in google?  Tell the truth!

All of the searchers will click into your site because they see your dominance and say... This guy is The Widget Man!

The way that happens is to have three strong pages for the same keyword.

Let's imagine that you have a website about widgets on the domain of egol.com.

"Brass Widgets" are your favorite.  You have a page about the history of brass widgets, another about brass widgets in the news.  Your title tags might be....

Homepage:  Brass Widgets by EGOL

News Page:  Brass Widgets in the News!

History Page:  Brass Widgets History

There you have it... a strong homepage, strong history page and your homepage all have enough power to rank in the top ten.  Your homepage has enough power to rank #1.  There you have earned #1, #2 and #3 for "brass widgets"..

Nothing wrong with that... a great way to run your competitors out of town.

Now let's say you also have information about "wooden widgets"... and "plastic widgets"... and.... "aluminum widgets...you have the same type of news pages for wooden, plastic and aluminum, the same type of history pages and your homepage title tag says...

EGOL's Widgets:  Wooden, Plastic, Aluminum and Brass

If you have all of this widget MoJo you might rank #1 for "widgets"

A final word on anchor text.....  link to your brass news page with "Brass Widgets News" or "News about Brass Widgets"... similar for history.  This is not duplicate anchor text but the targeted keywords (brass widgets) appear in different context.    Works great. Don't worry about it.  Try it. Dominate your SERPs!

Added later:  This tactic works best for search queries that contain two words.  That allows you to have three word anchor text.  My luck has not been as good for three and four word queries as that is when I believe that cannibalization becomes a problem.

Does Schema.org markup require a HTML 5 doctype?

No.

These are signals/data for search engines, not coding that will be rendered by browsers.

To get links I would share this with bloggers/webmasters who have covered cold weather warfare,  military uniforms, or military history... for commercial items where you say they are "close to military issue"   you might contact the manufacturer or distributor to suggest a link, or a guest blog post.  You also might be able to use Google SERP monitoring tool to watch for new content on military forums and Q&A sites for your items.  Then join the conversation with some expertise.  (I rarely, I never, ever, suggest the use of forums to promote content but in this situation I might give it a try. I hope that none of my friends read this. Geez, they will never let me forget it.)

I would publish ALL of this information on a big single kickass page using your "Seven Signs" as subheadings.  At the top of your page there would be a nice article menu that contains anchor text links that shoot the visitor down to the sections of the article.  These are powerful for optimization.

People who land on this page will faint when they see all of this information in a huge authoritative page.  An impressive presentation like this can attract a lot of links if you do a good job.

Just one concern.... I hope that your article has better punctuation, grammar, capitalization and format than your question here. It would also be a good idea to avoid the etc. etc. stuff - replacing it with clear detailed descriptions.   I am not trying to be  mean with this comment but hoping to kick you up a notch in your asking questions here and in your writing in general.

Good luck!

It can be very difficult to defeat an opponent by mimicking their methods.

Do something superior and blow them out of the water.

Consider preparing a best-on-the-web content page for this topic.  If you sell them you should be able to talk a lot about them to prepare an article that includes:  history of the army fleece jacket, proper military wear, environments of use, colors and styles used in the field, time line, materials and their function, features and their use, how the item has morphed into a broad range of commercial products, which commercial products are closest to military issue, tons of photos showing various styles, close-up photos that show features and materials, cleaning.... (I know nothing about this item so if I can think of all of this stuff you, as an expert, should be able to prepare something that is total kickass).

Attack!   "Best on the web" if you want to win.

You can use the SEOMoz tool named:  Open Site Explorer to check out their links, sniff their anchor text and see an estimate of their authority.

We have many unique domains - websites that we built - that point directly back to our SEO page. Some of these are fairly highly ranked sites....

Just guessing..... these links sound like they are placed in the footers of websites that are topically unrelated to the keywords that you are optimizing for?  If that is the case then these links are not worth as much as links placed with in paragraph text on relevant websites.

If your rankings have dropped from #2 to #8 in just a few weeks it sounds like some of your links have recently been removed, devalued or an algo change has changed something.

then why do other SEOers do it so much?

Just sayin my philosophy... You don't have to agree... and I hope that most people don't agree. 

You will not defeat a competitor by mimicing his strategies.  You defeat them by doing something more effective.  Keep in mind, there are only ten positions on the first page of Google for any given keyword and EVERYONE ELSE ranks lower.

On my sites this type of content is in a folder on the primary domain. Look at the location of the blog and forum on SEOMoz - they are in folders on the primary domain.

I would get a new host.

I don't do it.

Many of these links are nofollowed.

Many of them that are followed have very few (if any) links into them if you are not an active participant in the site, making posts and comments.

I believe that search engines can recognize these types of links if they want to and a backlink profile filled with them would look like a desperate manipulation attempt instead of a worthwhile site.

I think that my time is better spent on content.  One genuine link into an article would be worth a ton of profile links on the rear ends of forums.

If the wordpress site is going to be used for low-value content then a subdomain is probably OK.  However, if the wordpress site will contain high value content that has the potential of attracting links then I would not place it in a subdomain.  The reason:  if the high value content is in a folder then the links into it will give strong benefit to the entire site, but if it is on a subdomain then those links will be of very little benefit to the main site.

If this was my site I would try two things.... First, I would place the WP blog in a folder and see exactly how it performs.  You might be surprised.  Second, if that does not work I would look for higher quality hosting.

Another thought... if the wordpress blog is not performing well there might be problems with the code or problems with the amount of processing that the host will allow.  Wordpress blogs generally work well. Hosts are sometimes known to throttle processing.

I have a wordpress blog in a folder of my site.  It is a very busy blog with thousands of posts and lots of traffic.  Thousands of visitors per day.  No issues in five years.

**...we capitulated, and finally moved the blog onto the main domain. **

In my opinion, this was a good decision.  Now all of the links that hit the blog are directly hitting your important website.

Given that blogs are notoriously for high bounce rates (ours is), low time on site, depth of visit, seems logical that it adversely affects our site averages for the main domain).

Before I move the blog from the main domain I would attack this problem with....

1. Improved content that grabs and engages the visitor

2. Improved design that lures the visitor to explore other content on your site.  Text links in the blog posts to related content on your site, seductive "related boxes" full of thumbnail images and links to more, "most popular" boxes to market your best content to the visitor.  Visit a popular news site because many of them are experts at getting more engagement from their visitors.

Finally, look at where does SEOmoz have their blog?  In a folder on their own domain.  Look at the content on that blog... those articles blow your socks off with their depth, detail, illustrations, expertise and community engagement.  What type of content can you generate related to your industry that is similar?  I don't know what you have on your blog but maybe you should post less often but with greater quality?

Prepare original, high quality content and claim it with rel="author".

Your rankings are mainly supported by title tag, keywords in on-page text and inbound links. If you do not change these you should be able to make page modifications with little risk of rankings loss. If you work to improve your site in a way that attracts relevant links that should strengthen your position.

I think that personalized search is making it much more difficult to get sales from customers who have an established history with your competitor.  The introduction of Google+ will most likely increase the number of searches that are personalized.

I would not hide the H1 on any of my sites.

If you have a great site with sitelinks adding the +1 will more likely reinforce your position than detract from it.

Imagine what might happen if your competitor has a lot of +1 signals showing and you don't.

I think that this is all part of the SERPs "arms race".

I strongly support all of Ryan's comments.  He gave great advice.

I notice your other questions about getting visibility for other sites.  If you can deliver on the Ryan's content suggestions you might consider getting an experienced SEO to do a "study and recommend" for the site where you believe that you can produce the best content.  This will help you set your SEO straight and advance your new content more competitively.

In a "study are recommend" the SEO learns about your site from a phone call with you and exploring it for assessment.  Then you spend an hour on the phone discussing how the site can be improved with both on-page and offpage methods.

This is can be a relatively low cost way to kick up your SEO and learn at the same time. Most importantly it can get you up to speed quickly.

If you are interested just check out the profile pages of people who you see giving generous and competent advice to see if they offer SEO services.

If the local hospitals are to have their own sites then I believe that an important part of those websites is the profiles of important physicians who serve there and the services that they deliver.  These physicians and service staffs are the intellectual assets of  each hospital.  Their personalities and expertise these professionals are really what is being sold and thus what is marketable.

Patients really don't want a "hospital" they really want a medical team that can make them well.

In the small communities where I have lived anyone searching Google for a physician by name will very frequently encounter the large database publishing sites rather than the website of that physician's practice or the institution where he/she serves.

These database sites rank well because they have professional SEO yet some of them are close to professional spam.

That does not serve the searcher well at all, they don't need his/her name and address.  Instead what they would hope to find is a page about this person and learn about his/her education, experience, expertise and personality - along with the connection to the hospital where service is rendered.  If people are doing comparison shopping for a physician this is the information that they need to find.

But should I suggest that they combine all the sites into one domain, providing individual category pages for each hosptial, or am I really going to suggest that each of the 30 sites, create unique content of their own.

I think that you should tell them the advantages and disadvantages of each of these two options.

Every answer has two sides.  The SEO perspective and the business perspective.  Maybe there are good reasons why they want each hospital to own a website to have its own identity. Some large companies want the individual hospitals to each have a very strong brand.  Others want the main company to be the brand and the hospitals to be its points of local service.  One of those profiles would want a single big site the other would want individual hospital sites.

I think that you need to gain an understanding of the client's philosophy.

There is another option... and that option is to have very deep and broad content on the main site with referral links out to appropriate hospitals.  You also have the incomplete overlap of medical procedures with the geographic area served by these hospitals.

From a patient's perspective I could imagine these hospitals competing with one another for my business.  If I need a knee replacement I might want to go to the closest or I might want to go to "the best".  Are these hospitals so geographically close to one another that they are competitors?

I think that this is a good example of an SEO job where an understanding of the client is very important.

If you have 301 redirects of every page in place as the new design is uploaded then the traffic that comes in through the old URLs will be moved by your server to the new URLs.  Also, search engines will follow links to the old URLs and give the new URLs most of the linkvalue.

If you don't use 301s on a page then any person who clicks a link to your site on another domain or in a search engine will not see the new page.  They could see the old page if you did not remove it or an error if you removed it.

If you have been dropped by google news it is possible that you were not a qualified news site publishing in their recommended format.  You need to...

• be a "news organization"

• have multiple authors

• be the original source for any images, text, videos, etc. displayed on your site

• have URLs in their recommended format

You say that you changed your page URLs.  Did you do 301 redirects for every page that has links or was generating valuable traffic?

The best way to get links is by producing content that is so interesting, informative, useful, funny, beautiful, etc. That other webmasters will be so impressed that they will share it with their visitors. This is not easy to do, but if you can do it you will receive the most valuable types of links with a minimum of effort.

I am seeing a new SERP format from Google. (new for me at least)

In the past the title tag would display as the first line of a listing, followed by description and domain / URL.

Today I see the domain / URL as the second line.

This is placing an emphasis on "Who".  If you have a big brand or a great URL this might be helpful to your CTR.

Are you seeing this?  What do you think of it?

The first thing to do is claim the site at Google Webmaster Tools.  Google often communicates to webmasters with problem sites there.  You could have a malware problem, hidden text or other problems.

Thank you for all of these replies.  I was curious to hear experiences from others.  We have displayed +1 logos on every page of a site for several days now, about a million pageviews, and are getting an average of one +1 action per day - that compares with a few hundred addthis actions per day.  Addthis and +1 are displayed together in the top banner of the site.

I wonder if use will improve a lot over time?

I agree.... I would go to these high-falutin' folks and tell them that a little text on the page is a good thing.

As Chris suggests I would name the images and create alt attributes for appropriate keywords.

I would just give it a little time, and see what happens when you get a few links.

First... new sites often go in and out of the SERPs for a few days to a couple of weeks.  Hang in there you might be fine.

Second.. if you have very few links and especially if they are weak links you might need more power to stay in the SERPs.

Finally... is anyone republishing your feed or scraping your content?  Search for a unique sentence or two from your site between quotation marks.  A few years ago a powerful news site was republishing my feed and BAM.. my blog fell out of the SERPs like a ton of bricks.  Almost completely gone but my content on that news site was up in the SERPs.  I wrote to them and asked them to remove my feed and they were good guys about it.  A couple weeks later I was back in the SERPs at full strength.  I honestly believe that what people call "the sandbox" is often a duplicate content problem caused by feed republishing or scraper sites.

I am planning on finding out what these colleges link to and create great information on pages on my site....

That sounds perfect except for one thing.... you will need better than "great"... you will need "best-on-the-web".  Music professors are really picky about what they link to and there is already a lot of great stuff out there.... so you better sing with enthusiasm and verve.

**... that the high page rank college websites will link to thereby boosting my trust and authority. **

People with A Message have a much higher level of success than people who are fishing for high pagerank links.

What's your Message?  Better yet... What's your Mission?

How much will the trust and authority boost my site in the search engines?

The boost will be proportional to the enthusiasm and verve of your performance.

Does this sound like a good strategy?

It sounds like a great strategy.  Find out what they are already linking to and produce something that blows it away.  Can you pull it off?

Professors are sometimes more academic than practical.  Perhaps some interviews with some people who have made a long-time living from their music sharing their experience and offering advice.  If the right questions are asked and answered that might work well.  Maybe, I'd call a couple professors who are already linking out to a lot of music resources and see what they think of the idea.

Data is always better than opinions.

Create a drill down structure with category pages and test your conversion rate against the big navigation.

If the big navigation works I would keep the 125 links.  It's not that much more than the suggested 100 and you know that you are serving your visitors well (and your bottom line too).

Apart from Title and Description, what are the other areas need improvement to increase Organic CTR?

There are a lot of improvements that you can make beyond title and description.

• domain name

• file name

• +1 action

• schema.org data

• review/rating stars

• site links

• number of pages displayed

• apparent content quality in page preview

• breadcrumb sublinks

If you have added google plus one to your website you can check on the impact by visiting your webmaster tools account.

In your GWT account you will see a left menu item for "+1 Metrics".  If you click on "Search Impact" you can see the CTR change attributed to +1.

Anybody seeing anything there yet?

If search engines are using this data they are certainly only using it for sites competing for the same or similar keywords.

A high bounce rate can be bad or it can be "normal".  It would be bad if your site is offensive (and people run away), it can be bad if your site has irrelevant content for the query, it can be bad if your site has thin content, you can probably think of more.

It can be normal if you have a dictionary site and the searcher finds the word, gets the definition and leaves happily.

THE IMPORTANT THING TO DO..... I believe that everyone should be working to reduce their bounce rate and any webmaster should be able to find improvements.

The best way to do it is to have relevant  links, obviously placed on every page.  For example in the dictionary site your goal should be have linked words within the definition, links to related words adjacent to the definition and links to a few enticing articles along the side.

On an article site you can links within the text to related articles, a "recommended" box of links beside the article and even a few enticing links to "popular" or "related" articles where every one will see them.

Try to reduce your bounce rate by improving your site and making your relevant content visible on every page.

MozRank and PageRank are metrics based upon connectivity.

Neither of them tell you if a link passes value.... Panda is all about content and visitor satisfaction.

So, taking MozRank to task isn't going to be a good use of your time.

Is it still a good metric on valuable links?  In my opinion it is as good as it was at any other time... but Google is the one who decides the real value or if there is any value.

If you have been penalized you will know right away.  Your traffic will TANK and so will your income.

... btw... I am seeing PR8 on your homepage here in USA.

Traffic is showing a slight drop off. On a week to week basis we are down 10% but today is the lowest thursday in two months (in google referrers).

My traffic is showing the same thing.... if your site is like mine and pulls global traffic... you probably see a traffic drop  in June each year because of lower academic search in the Northern Hemisphere.  (I know you are in NZ)

Rankings? Do you mean keywod rankings?

Yes

This is it.... channel the energy into planning and development.

Also, the pagerank that you see on the toolbar is at least a month and a half old... the most recent pages that have pagerank are from early may.  So, if this pagerank was a problem for you you would have seen the symptoms a while ago.

My guess is that you were barely an 8... then your site lost a few links, got bigger or didn't gain as fast as the rest of the web.... and now you are a very high 6.

There was an update of the toolbar pagerank over the weekend.  Lots of sites up, lots down.  Just because your visible PR dropped does not say you are in trouble.

Here is the important question.... How are your traffic and rankings?

I've seen a lot of debate regarding subdomains and folders and it seems the folder structure may be the best long term course of action but I'm still a bit unclear on this.

I agree with folders.  Lots of discussion on that in the Q&A.  Search to find more.

What is the best approach to ensure that all SEO addressed on the site has the most impact and moving forward, what is the best method to scaling the SEO for franchisee owners.

Do a great job researching the typcial keywords for your niche and apply cookie cutter optimization for each city where you have a franchisee.  Such as "Scranton Auto Glass".

What is the best practice to help each location be best positioned in search in the future.

Produce lots of interesting and informative content about your niche.  Don't thump your chest.  People don't want that. Write exciting content that anybody who needs your service and product would want to hear. Zero promotion.  All informative. Best on the web content that will rank and attract links that will benefit your entire site.

How much should the corporate franchise site typically provide in terms of SEO services to franchisees.

It sounds like the leadership understands SEO.  So set up a good model with templates for content production by franchisees and help them as much as you can.  Set them up to succeed.  It benefits the entire company.

How does the lead SEO consultant scale those services to franchisees?

Produce a web form that makes it easy for all franchisees to provide unique informative content that will populate their webpages.  When they press the submit button, a program on your server converts this input into drafts of their folder files.  Figure out a way to make existing franchisees compete this information.  Make it a requirement for new franchisees that must be completed before their franchise is awarded.

I have an active blog getting hundreds of posts per month with most posts going into two categories (one by topic and one by geography).  It has nearly 200 categories.  We don't use tags.  What we have is wild enough - but those categories pull in an awful lot of traffic and on average get a couple of posts each per week.