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An old answer to an old question, but one which has just helped me out tremendously. A true credit to the Q&A system!

I was under the impression that Open Graph data is completely separate from structured data, at least in the way Google is talking about.

There are quite a few examples of websites using both without any issue, for example:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/9257722/Dark-Shadows-review.html

This review features extensive Open Graph data, in addition to plenty of additional markup data, and this does not affect the rich snippets data which can be found by searching under the keywords "dark shadows review".

I too would like to know this, because I've been doing it for months now. I haven't noticed any rankings issues, mind you, so perhaps it isn't really a big deal?

Providing the data is the same, I can't see it hurting. I will be following this topic with much interest.

Step 0: Have good content.

But seriously, this is a great list and mirrors my sentiments exactly. I just recently developed a website following these exact guidelines to the letter, also adding in Schema.org & other such data like Facebook's Open Graph.

Content is flowing, so now it's a waiting game

Nobody has any input on this?

I've done this exact thing before, and overall it was a breeze. I used the following code in my HTACCESS file, and assuming you're using a standard Apache install this should work for this task nicely:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

As far as SEO is concerned, this of course means that any existing links will be redirected to the HTTP version, but in my case the knock in rankings was minor at best.

Of course, make sure to update your internal links to make sure you're not redirecting unnecessarily.

So as of late I have been on something of a mission to mark up my news website with as much accurate and detailed Schema and Open Graph data as possible, in order to not only allow the search engines to understand my content properly, but also to ensure everything appears in the most ideal fashion when linked to from Facebook, Google+, etc.

Here is an example of a typical article page: http://www.nerdscoop.net/technology/video-games-459

As you'll see I currently have news posts marked up as article because that is essentially exactly what they are, but is there a better way to emphasise that they are news rather than just generic articles?

My second question is regarding the category pages and the home page. How would be best to mark these up? With OG the task is fairly simple, because I can specify the homepage as being a website, but not so with Schema from what I can see.

Either way, this is an interesting subject to me and I look forward to any discussion as a result. Thanks for looking.

I would agree with Marcus' answer on this one.

Another question as an off-shoot from this one would be: What is the performance loss in checking each request against your htaccess rules?

If the answer is none, or very little, then perhaps keeping the 301 forever isn't a bad idea at all. You never know how long people will be linking towards those 301'd pages. I personally have some pages just like this which have been redirecting visitors for as many as 5 years, because it's better to keep the link juice than to end up as 404s.

I am wondering, what effect does geo-targeted "cookie cutter" content have on SEO.

For example, one might have a list of "Top US Comedians", which appears as "Top UK Comedians" for users from the United Kingdom.

The data would be populated with information from a database in both cases, but would be completely different for each region, with the exception of a few words. Is this essentially giving Google's (US-based) crawler different content to users?

I know that plenty of sites do it, but is it legitimate? Would it be better to redirect to a unique page, based on location, rather than change the content of one static page? I know what the logical SEO answer is here, but even some of the big players use the "wrong" tactic.

I am very interested to hear your thoughts.

I don't think there is anyone who can tell you a straight up answer to this question, not without guessing at least. Whether +1 has any effect on standard results pages is not known, and to be honest is unlikely purely because it is so easy to manipulate.

What I can confirm from my own testing is that the real ranking benefit is one as a result of personalized search. For example, you +1 an article on example.com about bananas. The next time you search for bananas, that site is more likely to appear higher in the search results for you (and possibly friends of yours).

Doug's comment above is correct. In general, if a page doesn't have any links to it then OSE won't know that it even exists. This was the case for my Twitter profile until I pointed a couple of links to it, not that having it indexed is of much use anyway.