Hi Ash,

It's really a preference. The great thing about signing the blogs (rel=author) is you get the fancy picture in any results which can help you stand out a bit in the SERPs

I suppose you need to ask yourself what you want from Google+ you may find it easier to use the business account for brand announcements but the personal account for e.g blog posts. This may help you build up authority in your niche whilst keeping any +1 on your business page engaged. You can write (well comment) on your business page with your personal page to help reinforce. it's all far too overly complex if you ask me!

If I'm honest I'm not too familiar with duplicate content on social media but lets assume by duplicating it we lessen the value (and the impact). You could look on "sharing" the business post (or visa vesa I suppose) so the value all goes back to the same place.

In short if you work out what you think would benefit your brand you can then fit in the rest around it. I hope some of that helps anyway. Lets not forget Christy and her great suggestions you using your personal account to really contact with your niche.

Good Luck.

You can manually do it but its long and pointless as it's not really very usable as you're only getting names.

Hi Ash,

I did write a lovely long response unfortunately Moz decided that it was going to remove it so here goes attempt two!

Let me start by a comparison to Facebook. On Facebook you have your personal page which you interact with etc. and you have a business page which people "like" etc. and find info. The same is essentially true for Google+

G+ you have your personal account which can be set up to contribute to websites ( rel=author ) telling people you've done stuff on that site. You have your business page (rel=publisher) which people +1 and talk about the business. The publisher page also can interact a bit more with the SERP. Unfortunately publisher is not as easy as author but they do act differently.

Now you don't really want to have a business set as a "personal" page as it doesn't have some of the features and also doesn't look as professional.

In short:

Use your personal account for rel=author on your site telling Google what you've made on the site (E.g a Blog)

Use a business account for people to +1 and recommend your site as well as interact with your customers

I hope that helps anything else you need to know I'll do my best to help.

More info :

http://www.google.com/+/business/

http://www.google.com/+/business/brands/get-started.html

Have you looked in webmaster tools as it may tell you in there under crawl errors ?

Hello and welcome!

You will need to log into your moz analytics (top right over there). Then select your campaign from the drop down menu in the top right corner. You should then see the dashboard. There is lots of cool data there but what you want to look at is the Search tab specifically "Keyword rankings" Here you can see your position in the SERP.

There are a few other cool options here too which are :

Overview
    Rankings
    Performance
    Competition
    Opportunities

And if you wanted to in the top right you can create a neat report to share the data if you want.

Hope that helps.

As far as I'm aware and webmaster guide lines are the following is true :

"Can rel="canonical" be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

canonical is for on page more than off site.

Supporting this Matt Cutts mentions that they prefer 301

So bit of truth in it

Hi,

You may want to read the following :

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Technically you should be fine though I never recommend duplicate content across sites  It reduced the quality across both sites. As long as there is a link back to original source you should be ok.

Easy fix -  don't use duplicate content!

You will still receive a penalty it's better to take the time to rewrite or get fresh content.

They can link to your site if they want to use the content as the user would still see the content but just putting a duplicate of the content on their site will result in a drop for the both of you although it may not happen right away it will over time

Hope this help, and good luck!

Hi Jeff,

I'll take a snippit from the webmaster tools

"In addition to returning a 404 code in response to a request for a page that doesn’t exist, the server will also display a 404 page. This may be a standard "File Not Found" message, or it could be a custom page designed to provide the user with additional information. The content of the page is entirely unrelated to the HTTP response returned by the server. Just because a page displays a 404 File Not Found message doesn’t mean that it’s a 404 page. It's like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says "dog." Just because it says it's a dog, doesn't mean it's actually a dog. Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesn't mean it's returning a 404. You can use Fetch as Google (or other tools available on the web) to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code."

and to help here is another link

http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/diff-between-404-soft-404-error-467526.html

"The error 404 "page not found" means that the page you are finding server can't find he page.
Soft 404 means page not found and user will move to either home page or custom page."

Hope it helps.