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Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl

Wondering if I could garner some views on this issue please. I'm about to add an affiliate store to a website I own, the site has a couple of pages of unique content (blogs, articles, advice etc on home improvement - all written by my team). Obviously, the affiliate store will not be unique content, it will be made using the datafeeds from cj.com et al, and so I don't want to get any duplicate content type penalties from Google for this store. Should I add a no index to the pages and allow the bots to still crawl them, or should I add no index and no follow?  Ideally I would like to get the affiliate store category pages indexed as they will be a mixture of lots of different merchants and be fairly unique. Can Google still mark the site down for duplicate content if it can crawl it, even if it is noindex? Thanks, Carl

Wondering if anyone could help me. A client is suffering a Google penalty at the moment which is harming their performance. That said it is properly the best penalty they could have got..the site has a penalty which is stopping them ranking as high on keywords which they have been spamming links for. I say the best penalty they could have got because, other than these keywords, the site is still performing as well as before in the engines. Have been trying to clear up the backlinks for the past couple of months and just when I think im winning I discover some 32,000 blog comments on one domain 6 weeks or so ago!! - [http://www. iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265](http://www.iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265) example url, I broke it on purpose as to not make it a backlink With that many links i will not even try and contact the site, I put in the disavow in google that there is no way I can get these removed and explained it etc, however, they, again, rejected the reconsideration request saying they are still not happy with the links. At a bit of a loss here. It's starting to look that the best approach will be to write off the half a dozen terms and go a little more long tail. The site will not rank for (this is an example as would not want to give the client away) door knockers. They used to be first page but now are page four. However they remain page one for terms such as brass door knockers, cheap door knockers, chrome door knockers etc. In WMT ranking report they have hits from 1200 words ranking in the top 5 in the past 30 days and 3000 in the top ten. Im a considering trying to up the rankings of these words at the expense of the ones which we cannot seem to get the penalty off. Any thoughts please.

Anyone else having issues with Open Site Explorer? Been trying to export a backlink report for a website for the past 2 hours (the grey bar has been going that long). The site only has 1937 backlinks!!

Hi all Wondering if anyone could offer an opinion on this..am talking to a new client who offer kitchen installation and design. They have a central headquarters and cover a 100 mile radius of their location. A lot of search terms they are aiming to target - Kitchen Design, Kitchen Fitters etc offer localised results. This is where my issue lays. I have worked with plenty of clients in the past which have physical presence in multiple locations and have marked up the site so that the site ranks for each of the stores, but trying to make one site appear in many locations where it doesn't have an address is a different issue completely. Not only do they only have one address, they also only have one phone number. We will target, as best we can, the non localised keywords but need to work out what to do to cover the locations 20/30/40 miles from the office which they cover. I welcome any opinions on this please.

Wondering if anyone has done this before,, this so, would they mind sharing the best approach please. To cut a long story short, one of our seo client is a free UK internet safety resource, backed by (but independent from the UK Govt), the site is heavily talked about by sites such as BBC, Guardian and many more newspapers and as a result the domain authority is creeping up to 90 - Oh to be given the chance to monetise a site with DA 90!!! As you can imagine, with the quality of the links the site picks up, the ranking of content on the site can be fairly easy, but the one problem we are facing is that of sites 'borrowing' our content.  These sites tend not to be small bedroom bloggers, but rather all kinds of sites. We have seen our content on UK University websites, Police websites and many more whom should know better. Obviously this is hurting the 'borrower' more than us with regard to duplicate content but it would still be good to get some credit for our work without having to keep hunting the sites down and emailing back and forth. We don't need the credit for backlink purposes but would be nice to have people know we read it incase they want to read more. A solution I have pondered is to create embed options, as per youtube et al. Instead of sites having to copy our content to list it, they can still include our content on their site and avoid any duplicate content issues. As I believe the embedded content will be called from our site (I think that's how a youtube video works) our site would also get the read stats on the content regardless of where is it located. We are hoping that this could become a great content distribution tool, we don't need people to come to our site as the site is non profit, has no advertising but we need to justify the resources we get by showing how many people are reading what we publish. We are never going to be able to stop sites using our content so, like the music industry and itunes, if we can find a legal way to do it then we can all benefit. My main question, yes, I do actually have one!!!, is two fold. Is it possible to create embed for whole articles and am i right in my thinking that if our content is on Jeff's Blog and loaded as an embed then the hit on the content is still reflected in our stats as the content is being pulled from our url? Sorry for the excessively long way of explaining this, any feedback is welcomed, even 'don't do it, it's stupid idea'!!

Wondering if anyone could help out here please. Cut a long story short, took on a client before Christmas last year and all was going well re seo until about June when the site got hit by a penguin problem. Search traffic went down 60% over night and a warning appeared in WMT saying we have penalised your site for spam links. Not good. Digging about more it appears that the old seo company, during their contract and what appears a few months after we took it, we engaging in some heavy forum spam. When I say heavy forum spam, it was impressively heavy. They had spammed the message board of a country and western singer 17,000 times, for example. We removed as much of the article spam as we could but the blog commenting and the forum spam was too vast to do much about - what are you going to do if someone emails and says can you delete our link from 17,000 pages of your website!! We did a reconsideration request from Google and got denied, that was fine, to be expected. We did some more clearing and got rejected again. Upon the third reconsideration request things changed in our WMT. Google messaged to say that we still have issues with your links, however in the warnings in WMT the message has changed from the one about having an penalty on the site to _'Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.' _ We are reading this one of two ways...google has just changed the way they word the message, OR, they have reviewed our request and accept that we cannot remove all the spam links and so are advising us that they are ignoring the links themselves rather than penalising the site itself. Rankings, of course, still haven't come back, but are going up slowly. This is very much to be expected, without the spam links the site wouldn't have been there in the first place, so we are perhaps back to where we should be. Does this line of thought make sense to anyone else or have I spent too long looking at country and western forums trying to find our backlinks!! Many thanks, Carl

Could anyone help out here please. A client of ours have reveloped their website from HTML to ASP (helpful!). They have 60 odd pages indexed in Google with the .html extension. We need to do a redirect on these pages so that all link juice is passed to the new pages. What would be the best way to do this please?

For various reasons, I have a couple of domains with a couple of hundred subdomains on each. I would love to track how many search impressions they get each day as an overall site in webmaster tools. I have this information for my normal domains and it's a great way to track progress up the rankings (in addition to hits). Anyone know if it's possible to add wildcard subdomains to webmaster tools or any work around? I have tried *.domain.com but it's not accepting it. Thanks

Ok, I accept this one is my fault but wondering on time scales to fix... I have a website and I put an affiliate store on it, using merchant datafeeds in a bid to get revenue from the site. This was all good, however, I forgot to put noindex on the datafeed/duplicate content pages and over a period of a couple of weeks the traffic to the site died. I have since nofollowed or removed the products but some 3 months later my site still will not rank for the keywords it was ranking for previously. It will not even rank if I type in the sites' name (bright tights). I have searched for the name using bright tights, "bright tights" and brighttights but none of them return the site anywhere. I am guessing that I have been hit with a drop x place penalty by Google for the duplicate content. What is the easiest way around this? I have no warning about bad links or the such. Is it worth battling on trying to get the domain back or should I write off the domain, buy a new one and start again but minus the duplicate content? The goal of having the duplicate content store on the site was to be able to rank the category pages in the store which had unique content on so there were no problems with that which I could foresee. Like Amazon et al, the categories would have lists of products (amongst other content) and you would click through to the individual product description - the duplicate page. Thanks for reading

Wondering if I could get some opinions from the fellow moz users' I have a website which I which to rank for the term 'evening dress'.As you can imagine it is a pretty difficult term with a score of 62% (the term gets 301,000 broad matches and 27,000 exact matches a month). As much as I would like to target this term I feel that my domain is not strong enough (DA 39) to match the competition. Therefore, would a better strategy be to target long tail keywords which also contain the primary keyword, ie black evening dress evening dress hire cheap evening dress buy evening dress online please note that these were just examples, I haven't researched a comprehensive long tail list. Would targeting these long tail keywords mean that a) I should be able to rank for them faster and thus receive more traffic, sooner, and b) build up links to the page which I ultimately want to rank for evening dresses with numerous backlinks containing the keyword evening dress. The trade off with doing this is that I would need to seo one page for all the long tail keywords to gain the maximum benefit for the 'money' keyword. Does this sound like a sensible approach to both ranking for big money term and also getting traffic sooner rather than later? Thanks Carl

A bit of a strange question this one: I have a domain which, when on my Dutch server, can get new blog posts indexed and ranking in less than 10 mins using the pubsubshubbub plugin. However, I moved the blog and domain to a UK dedicated server and continued to post. Days later none of these posts were indexed. I then moved the domain back to the Dutch server to test this, I posted in the blog and once again, indexed and ranking in 20 mins or so. To cut a long and tedious story short; In a bid to be closer to my customers I moved the domain to a UK VPS three days back. I posted but no posts are indexed. Anyone else experienced anything like this? Generally I don't move domains back and forward so much but wanted to test this out. The Ducth server is a 16 core 24gb Direct Admin dedicated, the two UK servers were both running Cpanel. I understand that it would be best to host as close to possible to the customers but the hardship of getting posts indexed in the UK is becoming a problem. Thanks, Carl

Ok, a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string' type question this... Looking for the opinions of wiser users than myself in trying to work out how long is a realistic target for getting my domain authority somewhere near that of my competitors. I have been tracking my domain and three competitors in the campaign tool for a few months and they seem to average about 0.5 increase a month in their DA - they are averaging around 65 DA each. My site is currently DA 32, has increased from 21 in 5 months. Is this a decent rate of increase? How long would people expect it to take to increase a domain by 10, 20 etc? I know there are too many variables in the world of seo for a complete 'do this and this will happen' answer, but it's good to have a DA goal to work to, it acts as a good motivator for staff, especially when you begin to close in on competitors. Thanks, Carl

Sorry, been a long day and wanted a second opinion on this please.... I am developing an affiliate store which will have dozens of products in each category. We will not be indexing the product pages themselves as they are all duplicate content. The plan is to have just the first page of the category results indexed as this will have unique content about the products in that section. The later pagnated pages (ie pages 2,3,4,5 etc) will have 12 products on each but no unique content. Would the best advice be to add a canonical tag to all pages in the 'chairs' category pointing to the page with the first 12 results and the descriptions? This would ensure that the visitors are able to browse many pages of product but google won't index products 13 and onwards. Am I right in my thinkings? A supplemental question. What is the best way to block google from indexing/crawling 90,000 product listings which are pulled direct from the merchant so are not unique in the least. I have previous played with banning google from the product folder but it reports health issues in webmaster tools. Would the best route be a no index tag on all the product pages and to no follow all the products in the category listings? Many thanks Carl

Could anyone help out with a bounce rate query please. A website of mine, an affiliate website offering product reviews, has a bounce rate of 82%. I am puzzled a little as to how this is calculated. Is it only a bounce if the user goes from the search engine to my site and then back to the search engine? Or would search engine to my sites to the affiliates site via the link on my sites also count as a bounce? With a site of this nature the goal would be to get as many people visiting the merchant as possible and so a high level of bounce from me to them would be ideal Thanks, Carl

Hi all Had a look for info on this one but couldn't find much. I know these days that if you have a decent domain good will often automatically put site links on for your home if someone searches for your company name, however has anyone seen these links appear for sub pages? For example, lets say I had a .com domain with /en /fr /de sub folders, each seoed for their location. If I were to then have domain.com/en/ as no1 in Google for my company in the UK would I be able to get site links under this or does it only work on the 'proper' homepage domain.com/ A client of mine wants to reorganise their website so they have different location sections ranking in different markets but they also want to keep having sitewide links as they like the look of it Thanks Carl

Anyone finding Google slow to index new websites at the moment? Made a new site on Thursday and posted a number off high quality, relevant, backlinks to it the same day and now on Monday it is still not indexed. Have see the same with a couple of sub domains I have created off a website with a moz score of 40. Normally can get new sites indexed within hours but this seems super slow.

Looking for a few opinions on this please...Trying to reduce the number of pages I have to seo to rank on my websites and at the same time avoid the google over optimisation issues. Previously on our ecomerce websites we would have a category page for, say, 12 times, we would then seo that page for generic terms related to the page; ie, blue dress, cheap blue dress, blue party dress etc. The individual product pages would then be seoed with the title and h1 tags containing the exact product name and the url containing the product name too. This worked fine but we are suffering from some duplicate content issues of late (the products are mixture of few unique items and probably 95% imported affiliate datafeeds) as we have an average of 80,000 products per store we have neither the time nor the staff to rewrite everything (the products update daily directly from the merchants so would need to be done daily) What we are planning on moving toward is blocking the individual product pages from Google and instead putting all efforts into the category pages. The category page will contain plenty of quality unique content related to the category so the only duplicate content would be a line of the product name and price. Whilst we would still rank the category page for broad keywords we also would like to now rank the category page for 16 individual product names as there is a good profit to make made by the sheer volume of product names we plan on ranking for. Obviously we could not get all the products into the url and the page title as that would be silly but would it be acceptable to have multiple h2 tags on the page, each with a different entry, the product names  (H1 will be saved for the category name). We can easily bold these keywords to help in the optimisation as per the seo moz onsite analysis tool and we can add image text to ensure the product name is featured at least twice on the page. As so few sites actually seo for the long tail product names, most retailers rank by virtue of their domain quality alone, our onsite seo doesn't have to be 100% but getting the best we can out of the page will help the efforts. Many thanks Carl

In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to! Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues). The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain. The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home). Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite. I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously. The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and  more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term! The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for help hehe thanks

For various reasons my client wants their homepage removed from google, no just the content of the page off but the page not to be indexed (yep strange request but we are mere service providers) today I requested in webmaster tool that default.asp was removed. Wht says done but the sites homepage is still listed. The page also has a no index tag on but 24 hours and 18k Google bot hits later it still remains. Anyone got any other suggestions to deindex just the homepage asap please

One of my clients' website is a pr7 domain hosted in the UK on a .org extension and aimed at a UK reader. Checking over the web stats this morning I see the following visits for the past week UK 28k USA 7k Other 12k All is fine there with regards to traffic, however Google analytics then tells me the following reading languages en-us 76% en-gb 14% en 6% Anyone have any ideas as to why it would say that 3/4 our hits are from the UK but then tell me that almost the same % of people browsed in US English. Is it anything I/my client should be concerned about? I'm guessing not but still worth a second opinion. The domain in question is http://getsafeonline.org Many thanks Carl

Have a feeling that the answer will be obvious here but more opinions are always good... I own a number of domains, mainly com, which are targeted at the UK but hosted in the netherlands. I have noticed a very high number of dutch hits to my sites. Lower than UK but takings population into account it works out to be higher. I fear my decision to renew my dutch server instead of going for a UK one is helping me rank in the wrong part of the world. I have paid a couple of months ahead for the dutch server but am wondering if the cost of writing off a couple of hundred pounds will be less than I'm losing due to my location. Should I take the financial hit on the server in the hope that buying a UK one will increase my relevant traffic?

Just finished watching the Microformats & Schema.org webinar (thanks for a good presentation Richard) and picked up some interesting tips. It did get me thinking about ways I could use them with a couple of ecommerce sites I am working on. At present there are no reviews on the page so cannot add that tag, however the product pages have a facebook like and a tweet option so maybe I could add a tag based around that? Another one I am considering is putting the sizes of the items in one 'available in sizes 12-32' for example as women often ponder if a store will have it in their size. I guess my question is, would these ways of using it be considered too spammy. I note the webinar state using microformats can be useful but there is a risk if they are too spammy etc. Any opinions would be most welcome, Carl

I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment.  When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.

If this wasn't so serious an issue it would be funny.... Long store cut short, a client had a penalty on their website so they decided to stop using the .com and use the .co.uk instead. They got the .com removed from Google using webmaster tools (it had to be as it was ranking for a trade mark they didn't own and there are legal arguments about it) They launched a brand new website and placed it on both domains with all seo being done on the .co.uk. The web developer was then meant to put the rel=canonical on the .com pointing to the .co.uk (maybe not needed at all thinking about it, if they had deindexed the site anyway). However he managed to rel=canonical from the good .co.,uk to the ,com domain! Maybe I should have noticed it earlier but you shouldn't have to double check others' work! I noticed it today after a good 6 weeks or so. We are having a nightmare to rank the .co.uk for terms which should be pretty easy to rank for given it's a decent domain. Would people say that the rel=canonical back to the .com has harmed the co.uk and is harming with while the tag remains in place? I'm off the opinion that it's basically telling google that the co.uk domain is a copy of the .com so go rank that instead. If so, how quickly after removing this tag would people expect any issues caused by it's placement to vanish? Thanks for any views on this. I've now the fun job of double checking all the coding done by that web developer on other sites!

Could i get a little domain advice please. Launching a new website project and want to put it on a domain we already own (both domains are in the same niche as the larger project).  The new project will be aimed at the UK market. The choice is: .co.uk we own with a good name, however it's Domain Authority rank is 7 and it's only about 8 months old. .com domain which is 6 years old, has a Domain Authority rank of 33 but is not as good a domain name. The Competitive Link Analysis tells me that the rivals for the keywords we would be targeting are between 24 and 42. Which domain would people go with? All things equal it would be a fair guess that the older, higher Domain Authority ranked .com will require less work to rank in the engines, however it's not as good brand wise. Thanks Carl

Little bit of an odd question this, but how would one go about getting Google to not index certain content on a page? I'm developing an online store for a client and for a few of the products they will be stocking they will be using the manufacturers specs and descriptions. These descriptions and specs, therefore, will not be unique as they will be also used by a number of other websites. The title tag, onpage h1 etc will be fine for the seo of the actual pages (with backlinks, of course) so the impact of google not counting the description should be slight. I'm sure this can be done but for the life of me I cannot remember how. Thanks Carl

sorry if this has been asked/been written about previously, I had a search but couldn't find anything. I am using the keyword difficulty tool to narrow down on some keywords and whilst the % score for each keyword is being displayed, the Google Adwords data is blank. It just shows the animation as if it was pulling the data but after some ten mins or so not data is pulled, just the animation still running. Is there a problem with the tool or does the problem lay at my end? Thanks, Carl

Sorry if asked in the wrong section (or indeed if this is even a relevant question), but couldn't find an off topic section Am considering buying a Kindle ebook reader for various reasons, one of which would be to read the QandA and the community posts without being stuck at my desk all the time. Does anyone use a kindle to browse these sections? Does it work ok? I don't want to get a full tablet as I have no need for all the functions on it. Thanks, Carl

Hi But stuck on growing the community aspect of a fashion website i am developing. The site already has a comprehensive shop with 200,000 products in, a large article and video section in but it is lacking a little in fresh, up to date content. The long term plan is to create a large forum and have a good level of interaction there but that will take a while as the site grows. To get the site growing I want to bring in columnist and bloggers to write about what they are liking in fashion, which famous people are wearing what and so forth. The trouble is I am having issues finding people. There are tons of people running their own wordpress sub domains with similar sites but not sure where I would find these kind of people. I would be looking to reward them with their labour by either paying per post or allowing them to put adsense etc on their pages. Anyone else grown a community from the start, where did you find bloggers etc? thanks. Carl

Probably the complete opposite to all the questions asked on here before hehe One of my online stores is ranking in Google at no2 for a service we used to offer but no longer do as we do not have the contract anymore.We need to derank the listing as fast as we can we do not offer this service now. Normally we could just get google to deindex the page but it's the homepage we are ranking. It is ranking due to a good collection of exact match backlinks on. Have been trying to get our page off the first page for a couple of months but it appears that we did too good a job of getting it up there...it's not moving! Anyone have a suggestion please on how we can get off page one asap for this keyword without deindexing the homepage for our store? note: the keyword in question has not appeared on the site for a couple of months, removing that has had no impact on the ranking Thanks

Just logged into one of my profiles to review my traffic data and the last traffic is for 9th Jan. Given it is now 22 this is far far from acceptable. Given the high monthly fee charged by this service why is the traffic data so far behind. If other services (cheaper services) can update their traffic data daily or even weekly why should I continue to use SEOMOZ. The rankings, errors etc are all updated for the 21st of Jan so why not the traffic. Your's An unhappy custimer

my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead.  I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these. Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9.  This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site. Any feedback would be gratefully received.

Hi Just done a 250 crawl on a new site I am working on (still under development), all 250 pages seem to have too many on page links, however they do not have any links I can take away This page, for example, http://empleous.com/gb/store/category/398743/shoes?price=20-50 has (according to moz crawl) 252 links on. Seems a little high. What would be the best way to correct this please? I cannot find that many links. I know there are about 85 links in the menu bar but they are all needed and none of the others can really be replaced either. Thanks Carl

I would be interested in hearing the views of other seomozers on this issue please. I have a web server hosted in The Netherlands which I currently host my sites on, it is super fast (16core 24gb ram) and in 8 months has had 4 mins of downtime! On this server I wish to build a couple of ecommerce stores. However this is where my issue lays The first store I launch will be targeted at the UK market, however the domain I wish to use for it is a .com domain which has a moz ranting of about 36 (better than most of my competitors, worse than a few so it's a good headstart). The problem I would then have is a .com domain hosted on a Dutch server targeting UK people. Even if I was to set the webmaster tools location to UK it would not be ideal. Also, when it comes to launching the US site I would then be looking at using a .us domain which is far from ideal The other option I have is to use the .co.uk domain for the UK site but this is new and lack any decent moz score. Given this I am now pondering the following set up....using the .com domain on the Dutch server but putting the UK store in domain.com/UK and the future usa store in domain.com/usa. Would this be the best work around? I could then set the location of folders in the webmaster tools? Also, I plan on using geo redirecting on the domain so if a uk page happens to rank in the USA listings the user gets automatically redirected to the nearest matching product available in their country in the /us/ folder. Would this be easiest to work with on just one domain as it wouldn't technically be redirecting people to another site as per using two domains. Any thoughts would be good. Not even sure I have managed to explain it very clearly hehe

The latest traffic I see is from week ending 2nd Jan 2011, this seems an overally long time to wait for a traffic update, given that tools such as Raven can provide live stats.

Hi Are there any plans to include the Tiwtter and Facebook information in the SEO reports tool? I find the information in this very useful and it would be great to be able to share it with client as part of their weekly/montly reports thanks carl

HI I know that having a strong domain can help when creating sub domains, but can it also work the other way round? Can having a number of strong sub domains help the top level domain's quality and history? My reason for asking is that I have half a dozen domains which have been used for various projects, and still are, which have involved having a landing page on the root domain and running dozens of sub domains.  These subdomains, across 6 root domains, have about 500,000 pages indexed. I have now decided I should do something with the root domain so am wondering if there are any benefits I would have gained from my initial approach. Thanks

Been playing with the historical linking data (nice feature, by the way) and I see a graph which shows the increase in my, and my competitors', domain authority in the previous month. My competitors have averaged a growth of about 1.6 and I have gone up by 2 in this period which is good, however is 2 really that good for a month? What would other members' consider to be a decent growth? To add context, the domain I have in this report went from 26 to 28. Obviously going from 90 to 92 will be difficult but I have a feeling I should be doing more to grow faster at the lower levels.

Can I ask how long after changing the Title and Description tags on a website do people have to wait to see these changes reflected in Google? I changed a site of mine a couple of weeks back, pinged the site to google and had well over 5,000 googlebots to the page (not a result of pinging, I get that anyway), yet Google continues to display the old listing. Any secret techniques to speeding this up? Thanks

Hi I am building a new shop with unique products but I also want to offer tips and articles on the same topic as the products (fishing). I think if was to add the articles and advice one piece at a time it would look very empty and give little reason to come back very often. The plan, therefore, is to launch the site pulling articles from a number of article websites - with the site's permission.  Obviously this would be 100% duplicate content but it would make the user experience much better and offer added value to my site as people are likely to keep returning even when not in the mood to purchase anything; it also offers the potential for people to email links to friends etc. note: over time we will be adding more unique content and slowly turning off the pulled articled. Anyway, from an seo point of view I know the duplicate content would harm the site but if I was to tell google not to index the directory and block it from even crawling the directory would it still know there is duplicate content on the site and apply the penalty to the non duplicate pages? I'm guessing no but always worth a second opinion. Thanks Carl

Hi I have a couple of ecommerce websites which have both a UK and USA store. At the moment I have both the UK and the USA domains sending me traffic from UK and USA search engines which means that a number of users are clicking a Google page for the store not in their location, ie UK people are clicking on a .com listing and ending up on the USA website. What is the best way to automatically redirect people to the correct store for their region? If I use an IP based auto redirect system would Google see some of the pages are doorway pages? Thanks

HI Anyone know the difference between selecting UK or GB when choosing your engines to track keyword rankings? Is it that one of the options only includes pages from the UK while the other tracks all pages, but from a UK rankings point of view - ie pages hosted overseas will still rank. - if so, which is which? Or, and this is very unlikely, is it simply that the GB data does not include Northern  Ireland as the UK is technically the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. NI is in UK but not in GB. Nice and confusing! Thanks

Bit of a strange question here that would be keen on getting the opinions of others on. Let's say we have a web page which is 1000 lines line, pulling content from 5 websites (the content itself is duplicate, say rss headlines, for example). Obviously any content on it's own will be viewed by Google as being duplicate and so will suffer for it. However, given one of the ways duplicate content is considered is a page being x% the same as another page, be it your own site or someone elses. In the case of our duplicate page, while 100% of the content is duplicate, the page is no more than 20% identical to another page so would it technically be picked up as duplicate. Hope that makes sense? My reason for asking is I want to pull latest tweets, news and rss from leading sites onto a site I am developing. Obviously the site will have it's own content too but also want to pull in external.

We know that google now gives a penalty to a whole duplicate if it finds content it doesn't like or is duplicate content, but has anyone experienced a penalty from having duplicate content on their site which they have added noindex to? Would google still apply the penalty to the overall quality of the site even though they have been told to basically ignore the duplicate bit. Reason for asking is that I am looking to add a forum to one of my websites and no one likes a new forum. I have a script which can populate it with thousands of questions and answers pulled direct from Yahoo Answers. Obviously the forum wil be 100% duplicate content but I do not want it to rank for anyway anyway so if I noindex  the forum pages hopefully it will not damage the rest of the site. In time, as the forum grows, all the duplicate posts will be deleted but it's hard to get people to use an empty forum so need to 'trick' them into thinking the section is very busy.

Hi all Mind it I pick some of your brains for a second opinion on something.... The current situation is thus: I have a fashion website which has over 10,000 free articles and videos, support forums with thousands of posts and user blogs. Also on the site is an affiliate store which is built using datafeedr. The store has about 90,000 products from hundreds of retailers. The goal of the site being a one stop fashion community site where people can get information, chat with other fashion fans and then use the store to search all the fashion sites at once. The problem I am having is despite endless seo work it is proving very difficult to rank the domain for even terms with low competition (We are used to ranking our clients for very competitive terms, often with several hundred million competitors including government websites, bbc, wiki etc). After testing we have come to the conclusion that it's the duplicate content in the store which is hindering our progress. Despite the exact layout of the store being unique, there is no original content on the product pages. There, we have decided to remove the store from the current url and on to it's own site. The question we have is would putting it on store.domain.com still hinder the main site? I recall reading that google are considering the subdomains and root domain as one these days, or if we were to put it on samedomainname.net would google then consider us to be sending users to another website? From a branding point of view I would favour the store.domain.com approach but the .net approach could be easier. Finally, if we were to move the store we have about 45,000 pages indexed which would all return 404's so I guess it would be best to set up 301 redirects from the old url to the new? Many thanks

Hi, first post here so hope i have posted this in the right place. From reading the forums a number of people have asked for site reviews and received some very good feedback so I thought I would jump aboard too. One of my companies, Digital Cow, is based around the world of affiliate marketing and had been doing very well until recent Google changes killed the whole process of making sites based around other people's datafeeds. Through considerable testing we have countered this by increasing the blend of duplicate content and unique, niche related, content. As a result a website we launched about 2 months ago is currently getting around 350 unique hits a day but seems to have stagnated. We know the potential is there for thousands of daily hits on this site and well over 20,000 hits a day on all our websites, but we are having issues with Google at the moment. One week we could be position 10 for a keyword, next position 90, then back to position 10 again and so on. In the last week some 95 keywords moved up the ranking and 62 moved down - we are seoing for a couple of hundred keywords. A small sample of some of these words and our ranking for them are listed below bodysuits women 13
tumbum 14
bright leggings 18
bright tights 18
bridal hold ups 19
opaque hold ups 20
girls in leggings 21
pretty polly hold up 21
fish net hold ups 22
slimming tights 22
tum bum 26
magic knickers 27
toeless tights 28 and there are many more. The website in question is www.brighttights.com. If anyone could spare a moment to offer their opinion on what they think of the site re seo that would be most welcome. Given it's an ecommerce site there are limits to the content we can add on the homepage. Many thanks Carl