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I have spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning up sites with templated pages and duplicate content. I can tell you that the potential gains are real, and the potential risks of inaction are often large.

Some text is better than no text. Google prefers a solid base of text-based content, period. It's their bread and butter and it helps them figure out what your page is about. Some time spent discussing with your team/writers how to best differentiate each page could be time very well spent. I don't know that it needs to be a solid block of prose; categories like manufacturer, machine type, year, etc. could be used in list or paragraph form (perhaps you already do this?)

You could look at other ecommerce sites that are ranking in your niche, and in others, to see what they do.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "The text would have to come before the products for SEO." What I will say is the position of the text on the page should probably be dictated by whatever is best for the user. Test it in different positions on the page (even the left or right sidebar) and see what converts better. I doubt if the text's position on the page will affect your rankings a great deal. As for the "boilerplate-ness," the crawlers can see if its unique or not.

Ian,

Is it feasible to write unique text for the machine pages? I.e., are they in the hundreds or thousands? Do you have a budget to hire a writer(s)?

No worries. What I mean by "naked URL" is a link with no anchor text, just the URL.

As in:

http://www.example.com/

as opposed to

examples

Obviously, there is no 100% right answer.

Google's bias toward brands and larger, more powerful websites appears to only be getting stronger. Having one strong domain can often be of greater benefit than having two, weaker domains. I have personally had success with merging pages and domains to consolidate authority and link equity. If the primary site is the one that converts and brings in money, you could strengthen it in the way you suggested.

On the other hand, it can (sometimes) be easier to build links to a domain that is focused around one subject rather than a subpage. Depending on how you are working on your linkbuilding efforts, this could factor into your decision. Additionally, If the secondary domain is performing well, you might want to let sleeping dogs lie and potentially focus more of your efforts on promoting that site. This is a business decision only you can make.

Is your primary site still penalized? Do you have reason to think the secondary site is at risk for a penalty? The mere act of merging domains carries no risk of penalties that i know of (anyone is free to correct me here), but there is the potential for one site to "infect" the other. [Side note: you may want a few more naked URL anchors pointing at your sites, especially arenalvolcanotours.com.]

All in all, if someone you trust conducted a thorough audit and this was his/her advice, I would consider it.

I agree with Takeshi, but would also like to add that so-called "Google on/off tags" are a myth. What you have typed out would be an HTML comment (they begin with

If the two guides are going to be written from scratch and have different information, then I don't think you have anything to worry about. If sections of them are the same, that's fine.

Did you not add these yourself? It is a single line of code on the pages of your site:

If the rel=canonical is exactly the same as the URL of the page it is one then don't panic everything is fine :). If the URL in the rel=canonical tag is different than the URL of the page it is on, you may need to change it. Rel=canonical means, in as simple language as I can put it:

Google, Bing, or Whoever shows up to your page. Rel=canonical says,"Hey! Google, Bing, or Whoever! I'd prefer it if you would look at this other page as the "definitive" version of this content." And then rel=canonical points the search engine to the other page. After this, the non-"canonical" page should drop out of the search results.

This is useful when:

1. You have two pages with very similar or duplicate content that you want users to be able to navigate to, but that you don't want Google to see as duplicate (they get very angry about that now). These could be on one domain, or on two different website that you run.

2. You have URLs that are dynamically generated, or have a lot of query strings (e.g., ?shoes=red), and you don't want Google to think that you are duplicating content.

3. Someone else takes your content and tries to pass it off as their own.

Many people (myself included) feel that you should have "self-serving" rel=canonical on every page of your site, where the URL is the same as the page it is on. This helps with number 3, since you are automatically telling Google "Hey, THIS is the definitive version" before anyone else has the chance to.

If the rel=canonical tags are pointing to pages that they shouldn't be pointing to, you just need to delete that one line of code.

Re: your first question, you can hire freelance writers through any number of channels (e.g., Craigslist, Guru, etc.) If you are looking for one in a specific industry that requires expert knowledge, this may mean you have to look harder, or post a job offering yourself. Any writer worth his/her salt can do a blog post.

As for your second question, the method with which pages are archived and linked to on a blog depends entirely on the blog. Perhaps one the following points relates to what you read:

1. Older posts may no longer be linked to directly from the homepage/main blog page, and may therefore seem not be getting as much PageRank/Authority/whatever flowing to them. However, a blog with a smart site architecture and internal linking should be relatively well-protected against this (and hopefully the posts have some external links as well!).

2. Some blogs that accept masses of guest posts shuffle them to an archived netherworld, because they simply can't handle the glut of "content" they are posting. If this is the case, the link may not be worth the time and money you are putting into getting it anyway.

A little detective work could tell you how well-linked those older posts are, and whether they are getting any juice from the main site. Focus on blogs that seem like they get some actual traffic (from people other than people looking to guest post) and you should be fine.

So, at best what you've read is a gross over-generalization. While it is important to diversify your link portfolio beyond solely guest blogging for a number of reasons (looks more natural, scalability, diminishing returns, the possible eventuality of Google devaluing byline links), it can still be a worthwhile tactic for link/brand/whatever building.

Thanks for the endorsement! What a warm and fuzzy feeling

Good points in that 2nd link, especially.

Not quite.

There are two types of pages we're talking about here. That's because Google+ functions as two things for business owners: it is a local business directory and it is a social network.

Google+ Local listings: These are like your Google yellow pages listings. You should have one for each location (i.e., one for Dan's Pizza in Newark, one for Dan's Pizza in Jersey City, etc.) These have phone numbers, address, some photos, etc. This is where customers leave reviews as well.

Google+ Business (Brand) Pages: There should only be one Dan's Pizza Google+ Business page. It is for the brand as a whole.

This page is where you can post "as" the business, interact with followers, etc. It's a lot like what Facebook business pages are like. This is a more robust page than the ones above and is more or less the face of your business in Google+ as a social network (rather than Google+ the local business directory).

As of now, you can link your Brand Page (the social media page) with only one of your listings. If you choose to do this, it should probably be your flagship location, or your most popular. At some point in the future, you should be able to link your brand page with all of your listings.

Do you mean for a Google+ Local Page, or for Google+ Local Listings?

I'm assuming you actually have multiple brick-and-mortar, IRL store locations. In this case (but only in this case), you should have a  Google+ Local listing (formerly Google Places) for each one.

As for the business pages (the more robust ones that are like Facebook business pages), you should have one for your business as an entity, and you can connect it with one of your store locations. For now. Supposedly, they are working on the functionality with this so that businesses with multiple locations can connect them all to one business page.

Does that make sense?

They've really simplified all this lately, huh?

Either by looking at the source on the page (right click in most browsers) or right-click an example of the link you want and "Inspect element." In the <a>tag, you will see "rel=nofollow."</a>

<a>Inspect element is great for looking at the source code of only the section of a page you want (instead of scrolling and scanning forever). It is helpful with de-bugging code (for on-page SEO).

If you are prospecting links en masse (like through OSE or another backlink research tool) there is usually a field to tell you what links are nofollowed.

Does that make sense?</a>

Google is able to crawl a lot of javascript these days. If you are seeing the text in their index when you search for it, then its indexed!

As far as I know, the text-only cache leaves out javascript. This was especially useful before Googlebot was able to crawl that stuff, so you could see if parts of your content were hidden from view.

I say, trust the SERPs! Text-only is probably leaving out all your (still crawlable) content wrapped in js.

I tweaked the title tags and internal anchors to reflect the difference in content between the pages. They are about different things, they were just optimized for the same thing. Plus, I doubt either of them have any external links, so I don't ahve to worry about those anchors.

I'm hoping this helps. If not, canonical is certainly something I'll take under consideration.

Thanks!

Higher-level page with more power getting pushed out by weaker page in the SERPs for an important keyword. I don't care about losing the weaker page.

Should I:

404 the weaker page and wait for Google to (hopefully) replace it with the stronger page?

301 the weaker page to the stronger page?

NOTE: Due to poor communication between content team and myself, the weak and strong pages have similar title tags (i.e, "lawsuits" and "litigation")

Do javascript void links to on-page elements (not to a new page) consume PageRank?

I'm paring down links on a client's homepage, and we have javascript void links (wrapped in <a href="">) that load videos, elements of a slider, etc. on the page itself.</a>

<a href="">Basically, if I have a bunch of these, is it going to weaken the power of the other links on the page?</a>

If you are auto-generating multiple pages with news stories scraped from other sources, you are auto-generating duplicate, or at least "thin" content. I know, because I've been cleaning this up on a few clients' sites.

If you think that your news section adds value to the end user, but are worried about a dupe content issue, add to the head of the news page template, or disallow that folder in robots.txt (I prefer the former, but I'm no expert). This will tell the engines that you don't want them to index these pages. Careful that you only add it to the news pages, though.

Another solution would be to do a brief write up on each story with the link, thereby generating new, quality content for the site that isn't duplicate.

Yet another solution would be to have a single news page that aggregates the links to the stories themselves through an RSS feed, but that doesn't create multiple, thin pages.

If the news pages send you a lot of traffic, you may want to weigh your options. I know that I recently de-indexed a boatload of scraped content and our site's traffic increased sevenfold because of the boost in rankings sitewide, but that's between you and your client. I don't know Django, so I'm sorry I can't help on that front.

Hope that helps?

Thanks Alan!

Hey all,

Just double-checking something. Here's the issue, briefly.

One of my clients is a large law firm. The firm has a main site, and an additional site for an office in Atlanta.

On the main site, there is a list of all attorneys and links to their profiles (that they wrote themselves). The Atlanta site has this as well, but lists only the attorneys located in that office.

I would like to have the profiles for the Atlanta lawyers on both sites. Would rel=canonical work to avoid a dupe-content smackdown? The profiles should rank for Atlanta over the main site. This just means that G will drop the main site's profiles (for those attorneys) from their index, correct? No other weird side effects?

I hope I worded all that clearly!

I am currently involved in a smaller-scale email campaign, promoing some new content we put up. I have received emails back within 1-2 days, if they were going to come.

However, I am very new at this still. You might chalk that response time up to the quality (or lack thereof) of my emails or the fact that this campaign hasn't lasted very long. If someone emails me back in two weeks, I'll be glad!

Hope that helps!