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We have a client that we are rebuilding their website and they are thinking about dropping one word from the current base URL. That particular word is one of the keywords we are trying to rank for. Do you think that because one of our keywords is in the current domain name that it would be a mistake to change it to just the brand name without the extra keyword added on?

In doing competitor research, there's a specific competitor that has fewer linking domains, but dramatically more inbound links. How do these two relate to each other? I do have a higher domain authority and more internal followed links with them having more internal nofollow and external (both follow and nofollow) links. I'm trying to understand how they can have 3.7k linking domains and 4.8 million inbound links while I have 4.1k linking domains and only 601k inbound links. What really defines an inbound link and what's there relationship between inbound links and linking domains?

Thank you for the response.

We do have user agent detection going, and users are redirected appropriately.  It's just that I have to redirect them to a non-SEO friendly URL for the mobile store.  There's nothing I can do about that.  I'm thinking I just need a canonical URL tag on the mobile store pages so that Google credits the right link and not the ugly link.

I would love to be able to try something like using the same page with CSS friendly design for mobile devices, but I don't have that option in any way using this 3rd party solution.

I'm trying to determine the best way to handle my mobile commerce site.

I have a desktop version and a mobile version using a 3rd party product called CS-Cart.

Let's say I have a product page.  The URLs are...

mobile:
store.domain.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog#products.view&product_id=857

desktop:
store.domain.com/two-toned-tee.html

I've been trying to get information regarding how to handle mobile sites with different URLs in regards to duplicate content.  However, most of these results have the assumption that the different URL means m.domain.com rather than the same subdomain with a different address.

I am leaning towards using a canonical URL, if possible, on the mobile store pages.  I see quite a few suggesting to not do this, but again, I believe it's because they assume we are just talking about m.domain.com vs www.domain.com.

Any additional thoughts on this would be great!

So we have already built a site under a parent company's URL: parentcompany.com

And now we have their branded product lines in directories: parentcompany.com/brand-name1, and parentcompany.com/brand-name2

We also own the actual URL Brand Name 1 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname1.com

We do not yet own the URL for Brand Name 2 (which is also the exact description of the product): brandname2.com. This is because a squatter is sitting on it and is asking $10,000+ for it.

What we are trying to determine is how valuable these brand name URLs are since they will be redirecting and not the actual site's primary domain name. Anybody know how much of an effect owning those and redirecting has on ranking for those brand names that are also very descriptive of the products?

Would we be smarter to spend $10,000 on adwords or 10,000 on the domain?

Thanks!

We are an agency that builds and hosts websites for several companies (some of which happen to be in the same industry - and therefore naturally link to each other - we do not dictate).  In regards to handling their domain registrations, webmaster tools account, google analytics account, and servers, what is the best practice to avoid Google thinking that these companies are affilliated? Even though they aren't affiliated, we are afraid that us being the "webmaster" of these sites and having shared servers for them that we may be affecting them.

We are still looking for some insight. Since the answers we got weren't from SEOMoz staff, we just took them as more opinions.

We are trying to decide whether a password protected site, that we will noindex, should be set up as a subdomain or if it should be its own domain. The determining factor here is whether or not having that noindexed subdomain will increase domain authority since its noindexed. Any ideas???

I have a blog I'm setting up.  I would like to have a mini-about block set up on every page that gives very brief information about me and my blog, as well as a few links to the rest of the site and some social sharing options.

I worry that this will get flagged as duplicate content because a significant amount of my pages will contain the same information at the top of the page, front and center.

Is there anything I can do to address this?  Is it as much of a concern as I am making it?  Should I work on finding some javascript/ajax method for loading that content into the page dynamically only for normal browser pageviews?

Any thoughts or help would be great.

Thank you for that response.  I wanted to follow up a little on it.

The article you link to sounds good.  My concern, however, is that if I were to have a "view all" page then we could be talking about 1,000+ nodes on a single page.  This page would take much longer to load, which itself would become an SEO hit.  Though I do get why that's a suggestion, I have to wonder if that's the best solution for sites with large directories.

The other article/post seems to mention both the "view all" method and the "noindex, follow" method which gives a little more validity to that option in my opinion.  I'm still trying to discern what the "best" method is, and it's starting to become clear that maybe there isn't exactly one industry standard for this.

We have a site that consists almost entirely as a directory of videos.

Example here: http://realtree.tv/channels/realtreeoutdoorsclassics

We're trying to figure out the best way to handle pagination and utility features such as sort for most recent, most viewed, etc.  We've been reading countless articles on this topic, but so far have been unable to determine what might be considered the industry standard.

Two solutions seem to stand out...

Using the canonical url on all the sorted and paginated pages.  However, after reading many blog posts, it seems that you should NEVER use the canonical url to solve the issue of paginated, and thus duplicated content because the search bots will never crawl past the first page leaving many results not in the index.  (We are considering ruling this method out.)

Another solution seems to be using the meta tag for noindex, follow so that a search engine like Google will crawl your directory pages but not add them to the index themselves.  All links are followed so content is crawled and any passing link juice remains unchanged.  However, I did see a few articles skeptical of this solution as well saying that there are always better alternatives, or that there is no verification that search engines obey this meta tag.  This has placed some doubt in our minds.

I was hoping to get some expert advice on these methods as it would pertain to our site.

Thank you.

Our client has a site, we'll say it's delicious-lemonade.com (That's an example.)

Their brand name, however, is PowerSky. (That's an example, but the point is that it's the name of a technology, and has NOTHING to do whatsoever with being a drink. Someone would never guess what the product was, by the brand name.)

The client has this domain name for a long time. The domain name itself is a top keyword for their product.

We are building a new site for the client and have planned to use the brand name (PowerSky) as the primary domain, so PowerSky.com, with the product page being PowerSky.com/Delicious-Lemonade. And we are planning to redirect Delicious-Lemonade.com to PowerSky.com.

However, we are concerned about the SEO hit the site is going to take.

What recommendations can you make in this situation?

The question is a great one, and the responses to it are also great, but they directly contradict each other! Could the SEOMoz staff weigh in on this one?