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Interesting question.  I've never dealt with a problem like this, so you should probably take my advice with a grain of salt.  The issue has come up in the forum before: http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-from-multiple-sources-cross-domain.   Matt Cutts also posted about this last year.

I imagine that your clients want all of their domains to rank, and to pull in traffic, so using NOINDEX is not an option.  The simplest option would be to find a way to add some unique content to the pages - although again, at scale this might be a significant amount of work. More billable hours, that's all.

So, my plan of action would be to determine if this is really an issue in terms of ranking for the client (it might not be), and if it is, use the backend of their sites to display unique content on each site.  It probably wouldn't hurt if the sites looked a little bit different from each other.

Hope that helps.

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Shawn,

Good question, although to me it seems like there are actually two questions in there.  Social signals and backlinks are not quite the same things.  Social signals arise when a link to your content is tweeted, pinned or shared on Facebook.  These links are all (or nearly all) rel=nofollow, so they don't pass any authority to your site.  Some folks think that social signals will affect your rankings,but earlier this year Matt Cutts made it quite clear that they don't.  The value of social is then as a new source of traffic -  and it can be especially valuable in terms of lead generation and list-building.  Now, a post that does well on social media might attract some traditional backlinks, but it isn't the social sharing itself that will improve rankings.

If you can find the right vibe on Tumblr (and you do, or you will be ignored), the community there is very active.  Just like every other social site, the links are nofollow.  You can hack this by hard coding a link to your site into your Tumblr's template.  I'm not sure how well it works.  I did this as an experiment, and the links don't show up in Moz or Webmaster Tools.

So... after all that.... If the you want to reach the people using Tumblr, go ahead and Tumbl away.  Don't do it for "SEO" though.

Hope that helps.

Michael

It's a great question and as the article Andy mentioned points out, there are benefits to optimizing your titles and metas for mobile.  However if the site is responsive, then there is only one page and therefore only one title and description.  If you serve different versions then you can do it.  You'd need to host the mobile version on something like m.example.com or do what Google calls "Dynamically Serving Different HTML On The Same URL".  You can learn more here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details.

-M

Agreed with Oleg.   On the Time and Quartz pages you are essentially looking at their blog index.  Their CMS (content management system) does some fancy footwork to show the url of the post you happen to be looking at.  It isn't one page with a different URL for each section.

If you are using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, you can create content (posts) for the material, applications and types, and then list them on pages for the customer type.  If not, you can simply make pages like Oleg suggested.

I agree with Andy.  Google is probably aware of this tactic.  Although the links aren't completely "editorial" in the purest sense, if you are chasing links from universities or colleges, many of them won't link to your scholarship page unless the award you are providing is relevant and valuable to their students - eg faculty of medicine linking to an award for med students.  Many of the bigger schools don't even list awards below a certain amount.

This issue has come up for discussion in the Q&A before:

http://moz.com/community/q/creating-a-scholarship-for-seo

http://moz.com/community/q/is-providing-a-paid-scholarship-to-schools-and-receiving-a-back-link-classed-as-a-paid-link-scheme

http://moz.com/community/q/link-building-with-a-scholarship

and on YouMoz (promoted to main page):http://moz.com/blog/5-link-building-tactics-to-improve-your-local-rankings

**Take home message: **Scholarships can be a part of your link building activities but make them legit and make sure that it isn't the only thing that you are doing.

I second the use of Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin.  For google specifically, you can specify which version (www or non-www) you want to use in Webmaster tools.

Reuben,

My biggest reservation is a global one about using off the shelf themes for WordPress (it probably applies to other platforms as well):  All of the options and variables can really slow down the theme.  Sure, you might be able to choose from 5 different headers for each page, but that means not only is there a call to the server to load the header, there is an additional one to check which header needs to be loaded.

Sometimes the issues that cause problems are subtle... what will happen if you have more menu items than in the demo.. stuff like that.

As for the "get what you pay for", I'm not sure that this is always the case. Themeforest sets the price for the theme, not the developer, so they use whatever magical formula they have... maybe it has to do with the number of options available.

On the other hand, it's just $15 and some time to configure the site.  Since the site will move to WP anyway (I assume) the work to transfer the content is not lost.  If it sucks, just buy another one, or get someone to code a custom one for you.  A word of caution though... avoid using any built-in shortcodes that come with a specific theme.  When you changes themes, they don't work, and all the formatting is lost.  Better to use an independent shortcode plugin, or style using CSS directly.

Hope that helps.

I would be sure to share the page on Google plus.  Since you can't otherwise control crawl frequency, make sure your site is well-optimized to ensure that googlebot doesn't have problems crawling it.  Check the page speed, fix and HTML errors, correct any missing URLs and broken links.

I'm having similar problems with a number of my sites.  Some established ones and a new one.  No new data.. my new site has been up for nearly two months, and I know that there are links... but nothing is showing. Very frustrating.  To be fair to the moz team, for my new site, I'm not seeing anything in WMT yet, even though I jumped through all of their hoops.

No problem... I have a new site too, and the wait is agonizing!

I was just about to ask the same question.  There's a thread in the Q & A that deals with this already.  http://moz.com/community/q/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-links-indexed

The consensus seems to be that it can take as long as 6 weeks for links to show up in OSE and WMT for new sites.  Older sites with more authority can see their links show up within hours.  The key then appears to be building authority not only with links, but with content and social at the same time.  Make sure that you've submitted sitemaps to WMT (and Bing WMT - why not?) and that there are no crawl errors or other problems with your site.  Get the message out on FB, Twitter and G+. You also want to make sure that you have solid content -  not spammy, long enough, etc.

I have also seen some people suggest linking out to important sites in your niche or category as a way to improve indexing, although I don't have any data to back that up.  Otherwise, hang in there!

You can get links from many colleges and universities, but the process is time consuming.  Make sure that you (or your client) is administering the scholarship, and not another organization.  Most schools will have an "External Awards" page and you can get links.  Typically the administrators in the Financial Services/Awards are the ones who can get results, but I have found that they need to be approached individually, and the content of the emails tailored to them and their school.

Additionally, if your award is geared toward a certain segment of the student population, look at faculty or department sites as well as clubs or organizations for awards pages or blogs as well.

I completely agree with Remus' suggestion about changing the focus of your site and making it personal about you.  From an inbound marketing perspective, I would work hard at making a site that is visually appealing and engenders trust from the visitors.  While keywords are important, get away from simply listing them on a page.  There are so many people interested in getting help with weight loss, that I would think that you could start engaging on social channels.  The key will be to stand out - like Remus said.  Look for forums or Facebook groups dedicated to weight loss, but be patient, don't go in an start posting links to your site.  Be helpful.  Answer questions.  The kinds of questions people ask in those settings are a great source of potential keywords to build website content and blog posts around.