Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ben-  Good question. Alot depends on how you are doing it. Couple of important points:

If your main site has already been indexed, you will create a duplicate content issue for the new platform site (test server or other url).  When we have moved a magento or drupal website to wordpress, we have found on a number of occasions that without no follow the test server site that we have temporarily parked on another url will show up in search results.  The BEST way to do it is no follow the pages and then when you upload them to the main URL, remove them. You get no value out of this extra work other than you avoid that issue.

For arguments sake, understand that the duplicate content issue is only an issue for the indexed url where your new platform resides now. If you are converting it back to the original URL then there is no long term value you have lost.  If it is a new URL and you are bringing down the original URL, then make sure you dont have ANY duplicate content issues.

Hope this helps..

Mark

Arpeggio-

No issue. Other than confidentiality and avoiding a conflict of interest with competition, there is no reason that they wouldn't  list the URL's and you will find that a small percentage do list the URL or talk with people about it in follow up private messaging.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark

Steven-Depends on your competitors and if you are focused on local. If you don't have a lot of competition for your keywords, and you aren't focused on local, than it isn't because you an generate the same value doing a variety of things that are less expensive. If you are in competitive situation and need local search, then bite the bullet and spend the money because it will add value.

Out of 100 clients that are focused on local and are in competitive markets, we have tested it on over 70% and it has been worth the investment.

Hope this helps..

Mark

Google take sinto account the entire website. Your pages arent competing against each other for rank, but one page might have a higher quality and relevance score than another page.

If you are focused on crushing your competitor and taking away the number #1 rank then you need to build unique and relevant content around the misnomer keyword. Several product pages around the misnomer is an easy way to start to build your relevancy and quality score for the keyword,

When we try and maximize the value of an e-commerce site, we leverage the specific products and variations of the product. For example if there is widget number 1 in white and widget number 2 in blue, we will create two separate pages working through the description of the product. Because we do not want to be penalized for duplicate content, we make the second page have unique content, rather than copying and pasting the same description and changing the color. We have found that to be safe you need 80% original content. We have gotten it to work with as low as 60% original content in certain situations.

Hope this helps..

Mark

Great question.

A good portion of the SEO value will be created by the format and structure of what the site requires for input and data and the url / sitemap structure. If it is done correctly and the site generates a fair amount of activity and content, then it can be VERY POWERFUL. I have helped several people in the crowdsourcing area and have been amazed at the results. Remember, crowdsourcing by nature is viral, unlike traditional ecommerce, and is providing perceived value for the user so make sure you require participation and content the way you want it to happen.

Here is what you need to focus on:

• Once you target the specific keywords you want to focus on, then you can start to set up the data input/categories that the users have to follow. For example if you are focused on "start up capital" or "investment capital" then make sure you have a section that asks them "Explain what you need start up capital for?" and make sure that the URL structure of that entry (which should become its own page in the crowd sourcing listing uses that keyword when you create it.
• If you want to generate more SEO value, ask several keyword questions in the same entry which auto populate the listing when it is published. For example the first question might be "How much start up capital do you need?" then auto enter "The start up capital I need is....." Then the follow up leading statement would be "I will use the start up capital for the following items....."  And again, you will auto publish the leading statements as well as the users entry, which assures that the keywords are being published and indexed.
• Make sure that you require a minimum number of words for the answers so that you force them to generate content. Remember, you are getting the content for free, so make sure you maximize the opportunity.
• Require them to link the crowdsourcing site to their main URL or to post a link on their main site in their footer, in order to publish the crowdsourcing entry.
• Require them to tweet or pin or publish on their facebook page.
• Encourage comments and participation by the authors/users and the people downloading information that will be indexed by google.

Lots of opportunity. Hope this helps..

Mark

Sam-

Its the plug in. Check the automated settings for the format. You might want to add another sub-keyword that provides some value so it isnt a duplicate of what is already posted on the URL.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Tina-

Couple of things. Lets make sure you understand what "canonicalization" is......when the search engines determine the best version of a single page that can be pulled up using more than one URL. In the process different URL's would be able to display the same identical content.

This could be happening for a number of reasons and might not make a big difference in your SEO or it could be hurting your SERP values. Essentially you want to make sure that your rel=canonical issues are simple redirects that are necessary so that you aren't being penalized for duplicate content. To make sure this is correct work through the errors and make sure that your sitemap is set up correctly and you are effectively using your url descriptions to tell the search engines what the various pages contain. It does make sense to make sure that your URL is as descriptive as possible.

If you want to get the simplest and easiest explanation of rel=canonical issues, read Matt Cutts blog posting from a few years back. We use it in our SEO playbook.    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

I would recommend 2 plugins for you with wordpress (I have done over 30 wordpress sites in the last 6 months and we havetested a bunch of them).

Wordpress SEO by Yoast. This is an all in one SEO plugin which will solve your "description tag" issue and will give you much more flexibility for basic and advanced SEO. Here is the link:  http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#utm_source=wpadmin&utm_medium=plugin&utm_campaign=wpseoplugin

There is another plugin called redirection by John Godly.  It manages your 301 redirects and keeps track of your 404 errors (rel+canonicals) and helps you clean up your site. It is solid and easy to use.

Another issue you might be having with your duplicate content can be avoided by creating original content., if you have  one page with a widget and another with a blue widget and another with a pink widget and all the verbiage is the same, except for the color, then you have duplicate content. Use the rel=canonical to make sure you don't get penalized for duplicate content. Another solution is if on the widget pages you can provide several different descriptions of the widgets that go beyond colors, then you start to create unique content and you get SEO value for each separate widget page without having to do a rel=canonical. We have several ecommerce clients that have 10-15 variations of the same product and we have helped them develop unique content for each one, (hundreds of extra pages of content), which has dramatically increased their relevancy and quality score for their specific keywords....but it has to be unique.

Your last issue is related to Canada and search results. This really relates back to your internal sitemap structure. Remember, Google and other search engines send spiders to your site to crawl. They only know what they can see and what you tell them. if you dont do a good job of sitemap/url structure and definition, they are going to try and figure it out themselves. If I was you, I would create a separate url structure for your canadian group that would be something like....www.dropshippingsupplies.com/specifickeywords_canada_locations   Then all of the SEO value stays with your core site but you designate that those pages and keyword content are related to Canada.  You should also make sure that you have geotargeted keywords in the core content of the page....so that you mention canada or the cities and towns where you aretargeting, within that core content.

Hope this helps..

Mark

Ryan-

Within Adwords you can do a search for traffic on each of those terms. You can also do it within SEOMOZ's keyword research tool. This will give you an exact match figure for monthly search for global and local.

Then when you work through the writing the blog, you can use the item that is most searched as the title and heading and you can use some of the other terms within the article that are searched in 2nd and 3rd place, in the main content of the article, so that the articloe doesn't look like you are keyword stuffing.

Good luck. Hope this helps..

Mark

Ian-   Here is some info from Dr. Pete in SEOMOZ. Dr. Pete is my go to guy when it comes to digging "deep into the weeds" of a particular GOOGLE update. He dissects googles algorithm updates like I eat pop tarts for breakfast. Hopefully some of his findings will help you refine your search for clues.....here is his post on the subject. Make sure you follow him....

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-bigfoot-update-aka-dr-pete-goes-crazySeo

I would make one other suggestion. Remember, Panda is about content.   Instead of only taking a reactive stance to Pandas algorithm updates, start to work through your existing content and new content strategy and make sure that you are generating relevant content that isnt over optimized. With the drop in specific keywords you know where you can start to focus but make sure you stay ahead of the curve and proactively focus on other keywords not effected but where you might have similar content issues.

Good luck. Hope this helps..

Mark

William-

No guarantees in life.  I have helped a bunch of companies with reconsideration. I would recommend the following service to help you identify the most likely unnatural links:  www.linkdelete.com.  Once they generate a report for you, it will rank each link as most likely to be creating problems.  You will then work through the list and figure out which links are more likely to be creating problems. Once you identify the links, they will submit the requests for you and will follow up to notify you which links have been removed and which haven't.

One helpful hint as you go through the process is identifying which keywords have been affected the most in SERP's. Then cross referencing them with the links that have been built and then cross referencing those results with the ranking from linkdelete.

One last hint....when you file for reconsideration after you have removed the links make sure you understand that Google will be manually reviewing the request. So make sure you do a couple of things before the reconsideration request and in the reconsideration request:

• Make sure your site is on and offpage optimized to the best of its ability. No keyword stuffing.
• Dont be doing alot of SEO right before the reconsideration request.
• In the request, make sure you are as transaprent as possible. if you hired someone to do linkbuilding...tell them.
• Provide them with the data of the links you identified as bad and that they have been removed.
• Make sure you arent writing a novel. be clear and concise and make it easy to read.

Good luck. Hope this helps.. If you need more help let me know.

Mark

If you are focused on generating local results, it is very important to have the geographic location in your keyword content.  In London, you should also look at the impact of neighborhood or "borough" or section of the city....listed with plumbing services.

The Blog provides two opportunities: The first is keyword content. Google looks to your site to establish keyword relevancy. The blog provides you an opportunity to do that on a consistent basis.

The second is related to linkbuilding.  Because relevant content has become so important, the blog can provide frsh content consistently to people that participate in discussions on the web...in the process you can earn links and listings from other blogs. In addition, good content can create some natural linking and viral sharing...this is the "linkbait" that you mention.

Regardless, all of your strategies are sound.

Here is a great article from SEOMOZ on a 6 month plan that is advanced but will give you solid detail on the subject:   http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website

Hope this helps.

Mark

Barret-

Custom total tags are not an issue. With the plug in you can create a custom tag for each page/blog.

They wont make any changes to old posts or require you to go back and make edits of old posts....

We have tried a variety of other options and there is nothing that is easier and more functional than the plug ins.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Enam-

This is happening with alot of businesses throughout the US. Here is what we have been doing to solve the problem....

We are creating another Google+ local listing. We start the process from scratch and ask for the verification code to be sent. We have found on several occasions that with the new listing process, we are able to quickly get the listing up and working correctly. We then go in and eliminate the original listing and page. There have been times where Google asks us during the process, if it is a duplicate listing and then at that point we work through the process of re-claiming the original listing and making SEO adjustments to content. This has been effective.

I would also agree with Rob in that fact that a local phone number will help your cause.

Good luck. Hope this helps..

Mark

dave-

When we are doing a local geo-targeted campaign we find that in an uncompetitive market as little as 3 citations can provide good results with a local google places result. In a more competitive market it really is the more the merrier because remember, every time a competitor gets another citation, the bar goes up....

Our goal for a new client that wants to be relevant is an initial 10 citations to build a solid foundation.

After you have built a solid baseline, figure out how to build a scaleable citation process that encourages individuals to participate with citations and reviews. Contests and the opportunity to be showcased on a website are good starting points to create a culture where it makes sense for additional citations and reviews to be left by customers without alot of work on your part.

Good luck. Hope this helps..

Mark

Alan-

They dont penalize but you aren't generating as much value as you should be......

The most important tags are the title, description, keywords and robot tags. Make sure they are in that order. The spiders read left to right...First words are the most important and the last words are the least important.

Most SEO people will tell you that the title is one of the most important factors for a successful search engine optimization of your website. Make sure it is first.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Mark

Seiyav-

If you are looking for a simple and easy solution to start taking advantage of AB testing and getting landing pages created quickly without waiting for a developer, it is a very cost effective model. You can generate landing pages quickly and easily without developers.....you can set up testing easily and the system will provide you metrics to measure the results without a lot of in-depth thought.

There really are no downsides other than the cost.....

We have found with larger clients as they generate some expertise and some clarity regarding which landing pages are working better, then they start to bring it inside to generate more control, save money and become more knowledgable about AB testing and development of landing pages.  But unbounce is a great step in that process.

Good luck. Hope it helps..

Mark

You should mix it up for the call to actions. Part of the value will be for unique content in seo. part will be for the ability to A/B and multivariate test for results......

Mark

Huey-

DO NOT USE MULTIPLE SEO PLUGINS FOR WORDPRESS. Pick one and go with it. Yoost all in one is a great plugin. Make sure you use the standard and advanced tabs on it to get the most onpage SEO value.

Istvan is right....the plug in only helps you improve your onpage optimization. You need to focus on offpage optimization or PPC to drive traffic.

THERE IS NO MAGICAL PIXIE DUST. You can't do just one thing to help you generate traffic....if you could, everyone would be doing it. Im not going to disparage senukex and bookmarking demon but we get clients all the time that use these services and are getting penalized by Google and it is killing their SEO value and traffic. if you generate 4-5 links with high page rank/mozrank sites, it could be worth 1,000s of crappy links.   You need to focus on linkbuilding. Here is a solid beginners guide that SEOMOZ provides that is a good starting point if you can't hire soemone to do it for you....

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

And if you have a limited budget I would recommend this article from Craig. He does a solid job of showing you step by step instructions to start to generate some linkbuilding value. We send this to a number of our prospective clients if they don't have the money to hire someone.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-passive-link-building-to-build-links-with-no-budget

Hope this helps..

Mark

Here is my email....send me your contact info and Ill get you in touch with a few people. My email is apsey.mark@gmail.com

Cheers.

At the beginning of this year Google started encrypting searches for google users that were logged into their google account while they were online doing searches.  Because of that change Google says they cant pass the keyword in the referring URL.  Google puts these keywords that aren't defined into a "bucket" which is not provided. It sucks because we all know this is valuable data.

There are some options regarding tracking down and recovering this data because Google doesn't pass the keyword data to the referring URL but it does pass the data to Webmaster Tools...........here is a link to a solid article on it. (see below)

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2158540/Recovering-Not-Provided-Keyword-Data

It seems daunting at first but once you do it, it can be much easier to recover.  And if you have enough traffic it is worth it......

Hope this helps you..

Mark

Shaun-

ABSOLUTELY. For a majority of companies, that is the primary reason for SEO. To Google, lead generation is not a dirty word and isnt spammy. What is spammy is non-original content that isnt relevant to the keywords; duplicate content and sites that provide content aggregation.

If you had 50-60 landing pages with solid and relevant content then you can generate some value. Although its not required, I would recommend 300 or more words...... I would recommend using one main keyword and several subkeywords in the content. For example: automotive repair would be the main keyword and auto tire repair or auto tune up or automotive tuneup or automotive muffler repair would all be good keywords because they are a derivation of the main keyword. I would recommend making sure you use the main keyword in the first and last sentence and use sub keywords a minimum of 2-3 times in the article.

When I work with content writers to provide direction on keywords, sometimes I find they write  sentences that dont make sense but that use the keyowrds. Make sure that you write the content first about the relevant subject and keyword and then add in the subkeywords as they make sense....dont force it.

Also, if you are using some of the same content, you will create problems for yourself. As a rule you should try and have 80% original content on a page. We have done some rewrites for sites with 1,000's of pages and have seen 60% original content rewrite work, but not all the time. S

Hope this helps..

Mark

Chase-

I can make some recommendations of people that can help you out for a smaller budget. A good place to go to find qualified people for smaller jobs is www.odesk.com. You can search for people with SEO/SEM/PPC experience. Make sure you look for people that have 5 stars and have at least 100 hours of work they have performed and make sure you check their customer testimonials to make sure they have delivered the same exact solutions and value that you are looking for.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark

Huey-

"Scrape" has a negative connotation with original and relevant content. In its purest form it is a waste of time and can only generate problems for your site.

But you cant miss the fact that scraping can be an effective way to generate the structure and subject heading for content.........but Donnie is right on the money when it comes to making it relevant to your audience and the visitor. If you arent changing a majority of the content to make it relevant and unique, you are wasting your time. Its like using a set of cliff notes for putting together a paper. Use it as the format and then create unique and relevant content around it.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Webranx-

NO.  It wont affect your SEO as long as your site is crawled properly by the search engines.

Make sure that your sitemap is updated and correct.

Use the opensite explorer tool in SEOMOZ to crawl your site and make sure you dont have duplicate content, overly dynamic URL's, completed meta tag descriptions, etc.

Good luck.

Mark

Too many variables but it probably will be helpful. Ill send you the link when I publish.....

Some charge by PPC spend; some charge by number of visits; some charge by number of users and amount of modules used; etc....

Mark

Nicolas-

If you truly want a recommendation for an enterprise system then you need to further define what specific things in a system you feel are most important (Price, mobile, PPC, Social media, ease of use, multiple clients or one, etc.) . Let me give you some examples:

Omniture- Irving is right....this system is the most robust enterprise system available today. We were managing $5 million in PPC spend a month and traffic volumes that were significantly larger than what you are talking about, over a number of large clients. Omniture is used by at least 50% of the top ad agencies in the country. It is a MASSIVE system that can do almost everything you need and a bunch of stuff that you haven't even considered. But it will take some time to learn it.....it is very expensive....etc. etc.

Extron: This system is significantly less money and provides solid analytics over the lifecycle of a visitor and customer. Not as robust in some areas as Omniture, but if you are focused on the lifecycle of a customer, it is very solid.

Webtrends: Also affordable, and one of the best if you have a huge focus on mobile and social media monitoring.

Wordstream: Very affordable and focused on keyword research and PPC value with some solid baseline analytics.

ShinyStat: A broad analytics tool that is great with video analytics and serp monitoring and has some other cool trending analytics that can be helpful.

Again, depending on what you are looking for would determine what your recommendation will be. In the next few weeks I will be publishing on SEOMOZ a list of the top 25-30 enterprise analytics solutions and their value, benefits, features and drawbacks.....hopefully you will find it useful.....

Good luck. If this helps please show me the thumbs up.

Mark

Sean-

You are getting no link juice if they click on the PDF but you are getting some link juice if they link to the page......

It would make more sense, for SEO value, if you had the contents of the PDF on a page and then on that page you had the option to link to the PDF. Then people would be linking to the page that would allow you to get the link juice and the SEO value from the content.  More value for your efforts.......more SEO value from the additional content that Google cant index in your PDF.

Hope this helps..

Mark

This happens all the time. We have had 90/10 page view rates with just the addition of a call to action or new graphics or a simpler page. If you really want to define what it is you should do some multivariate testing within the A/B testing situation. So for example, if you added a call to action and a new graphic design, then just add the call to action as A1 and then call to action and graphic as A2 and then call to action and a different graphic as A3. Then a different call to action and same graphic as version 1 as A4.  Then you can start to hone on specifically what is casuing the differences.

Also, please make sure you have enough traffic to be able to get solid data. Sometimes if you are driving a small amount of traffic, you might get spikes of difference in a short period of time, that will level out with more traffic....we like to see a minimum of 1,000 clicks before we start looking at the results.

Hope this helps. If so, please let us know.

Mark

Bob-

Good question.  We have been working with several dentists and have had good luck with the following structure of listings: (I have used 2 of your samples)

Advanced Dental Care of Chicago - Angela Davidson DDS

Davidson, Richardson & Smith - Advanced Dental Care of Chicago

But remember with directory listings you want to make sure you are focused both on the user experience (what makes the most sense to the consumer) and the SEO value. In that case,  more importantly than what other people are doing, it really should relate back to the search results for that localized market and what your overall goals are. If your overall goals are to have someone search for Angela davidson, then there is a high likelihood they are going to be able to find that Doctor.  In that situation, spending time and effort on the SEO related to Angela Davidson isnt generating huge value. If there are 30 Angela Davidsons in the market that come up in search listings, then it is more important to spend time on the SEO for her name.

If people are searching for "Doctor Davidson" more than "Angela Davidson", then including "Doctor" in the directory listing is more important for your SEO.

If people are searching for Davidson and Richardson, then you should focus on that keyword.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Ask the thousands of sites that were content aggregating that got hammered with Pandas content updates. Aggregated content is duplicate content inherently . It isn't unique and original and creates a negative impact to a sites SEO. Now if the value is to not generate SEO but generate traffic that can be monetized in another way, go for it........but if you want to create solid SEO, STAY AWAY.

Hope this helps.

Mark

No direct SEO value.

The only value is if you can leverage the Facebook connection by creating more traffic to your site and you take advantage of social bookmarking with links back to your site on relevant keywords and topics.

Good luck. Hope this helps. if so please show me the awesome.

Mark

Ashkan-     This is a good long term strategy if you are going to develop strong and relevant content related to the keywords, but it dilutes your overall link juice/seo value as you are building the first few pages because you aren't leveraging all of the sites together.

A better strategy is to keep the main site and develop unique connected and relevant content in the other international areas and continue to connect the additional international areas to the main site...... For example: coca cola will have their english, french, spanish and italian sites connected with specific info in each international market. All link juice goes to coca cola and they score well for each individual international area with specific keywords related to those areas only.  Then you keep building the site SEO value and you focus on additional content keyword quality score and relevancy and unique keywords for each international marketplace and those related pages.

Hope this helps. If it does please show your approval.

Mark

Lindsay-

On your attachment I didnt see where there was duplicate content....

There are several ways you can fix it, depending on what the issue is.

The most common issue we see is the title and/or meta tag description. Alot of times with wordpress and some of the seo plug ins, these are auto filled in and it could be filled in with exactly the same information.

Another thing we see is it is the same content. We see people that manage a blog and will double post the same article by accident. make sure it isnt that.

Another thing is it could be someone that posted the blog in multiple blogs or someone "scraped" the blog and published it somewhere else and it is being picked up by google as duplicate content.

Hope this helps. If so, let us know...

Mark

There is no simple answer but I can provide you some clarity.

Domain authority is always more important and provides more value more than Page Authority...Page authority is one of the attributes of a sites domain authority.

To say that they are "ranking for the keywords because of their strong DA rather than any seo work" doesnt make sense. The reason their domain authority is high is because of the SEO.

A good strategy to generate higher rankings on keywords is to focus on lower competitive keywords. Targeting a lower page authority page for a competitor isnt where you should be focused. Focus instead on the keywords and building solid and relevant content with those keywords.

Hope this helps. If so, let us know....

Mark

Patrick-

Problematic and not normal.  Is this set up as a campaign or did you use the research analysis crawl test? If you have done one and not the other, then do the other also and see if there is a change.

We have several sites in the 10,000+ page content and it doesnt take but a couple of days.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark

Sara-

Ditto. If you absolutely 100% know the link is bad and it is causing you issues then go for it but a much better and more affordable strategy is building solid links to dilute its impact.

I would tell you we have recently been focused on removing links for several clients and even when we focus on getting the links removed, its not magic pixie dust when they go away. We get significant improvements but we find that it is usually multiple links.....

Hope this helps. Thanks.

Mark

You cant entice them.....you can make sure they get indexed properly.

Make sure they are being crawled and their are no errors on the page. (no duplicate title tags, etc.) You can do this with the campaign tool in SEOMOZ.

Make sure you build your site with a logical link structure as each page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Make sure that your sitemap has them listed correctly.

Make sure they are original content and not duplicated somewhere else on the internet or on another of your sites.

This should get you in good shape. Hope this helps.

Mark

Scott-

No brainer. Yes. Content is king in the new generation of SEO. With the ability to generate additional pages indexed with your keywords and solid content you are going to get value. YES.

Make it happen. Good luck.

Mark

Not sure if you are missing the point but I think its worth revisiting the basics related to keyword research and what is important to understand.

First, when you talk about the Google Panda "abyss", I dont think that is the issue. The issue is kayak fishing is a highly competitive keyword ranked at 52% (using the keyword difficulty tool on seomoz). So you are competing with alot of other people to rank with that keyword. When I am building a basic keyword strategy for a company that is trying to generate some momentum, with a limited budget, then the first thing I do is focus on battles that we can win. Battles you can win are typically related to lower traffic and lower competitive keywords. Once you identify thos keywords you can rank them based on the value of traffic coming from those keyword searches and the competitive ranking (lowest is better than highest), then you start to build solid content around those keywords that will increase your keyword relevance and ranking.

I would guess that you would be analyzing 500-1000 keywords to come up with your master list. A couple of tools you might use are googles keyword tool...but instead of just entering a few of your primary words, take a different approach and find some sites that you think are doing a great job of seo for kayak and kayak fishing and enter their url in the keyword tool and see what types of keywords come up. Pull all of these words out into excel and rank them by level of competitiveness (lowest to highest ) and then go through and lookmat the corresponding search volume. Byu focusing on 20 keywords that have 50-100 monthly search volume, but are low competitive , where you can be ranked top 3 in all of them, will be easier than going after kayak fishing with 8,100 exact match traffic and a highly competitive 52% difficulty.

Finally, I would tell you to make sure you measure everyhting. "What you cant measure you cant manage."  SEOMOZ is a perfect tool to track weekly activity on your keyword rankings. As you publish new content, focus on one keyword and see what type of effect a couple of posts, blogs or articles have on your ranking.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark

Howard-

Do not maintain 2 sitemaps. But make sure you are optimizing your existing sitemap with all of the SEO value. Make sure with the ecommerce portion, that you arent losing any value by making sure you are properly indexing all of your ecommerce products in the "for google" sitemap. remember, the only thing that produces SEO value for you is the indexed sitemap.....

Cheers. Hope this helps. If so let us know.

Mark

Gareth-

redirects can decrease your rankings but if done correctly it will be a minimal amount. Typically a 301 redirect will pass between 90-99% of the link juice of a page to the new page. Pretty good...not great. Shouldnt create a huge difference in rankings for your site if it is one page.

What I find is people lose ranking when they do redirects incorrectly. One of the best posts I have read on this is in SEOMOZ. Here is the link:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Redirect wisely and correctly and you will be in good shape. Happy SEO'ing....

If this helps, please let us know.

Mark

Abdel-

As a common rule, we assign all of our content (posts) to categories that are unique. In this case you would want to index/follow. We expect that within the categories we have some relevant keywords.

If the categories are not important or you have posts that are unimportant or have duplicate content, then check the box noindex/follow.

One other thing that is important. Noindex/follow author and tag archives. You want google to look and see the links but not to index them.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Mark

Doug-

Two options.

Option #1: "No follow" the one page. Then no duplicate content.

Option #2: You can put the content(one of the agreements) inside an image (like a PDF) and then build a meta tag description around it with different content. Googles spiders wont be able to crawl the agreement content...

Hope this helps.

Mark

Obviously Video SEO is changing, Google is figuring out how to do it themselves. We are left wondering… Below we have tried to explain what we have learned and how the different sites work and their characteristics (links to graphics provided)

Our problem is: We are not getting congruent Google site:apalytics.tv Video filter results. We are wondering how duplicate content may be affecting our results… and if so, why will Youtube not be duplicate and prevent your own site SEO efforts from working.  Is Youtube special?  Does that include Vimeo too? We see our own duplicate videos on multiple sites in Google results, so it seems it is not duplicate related…?

We’d appreciate your experience or add to our questions and work as a community to get this figured out more definitively.  Thanks!

We’ve tried four video hosting solutions at quite a cost monetarily and in time.

1.)    Youtube, which gets all the SEO Juice and gets our clients on to other subjects or potentially competitive content.  Iframes just don’t get the results we are looking for.

2.)   See Vimeo Image: Vimeo PRO, a $200 year plus solution that allows us to do many video carousels on our own domains hosted on Vimeo, but are very limited in HTML as only CSS content changes are allowed.  While we were using Vimeo we allowed the Vimeo.com community to SEO our content directly and they come up often in search results. Due to duplicate content concerns we have disallowed Vimeo.com from using our content and SEOing our content to their domain. However, we have many “portfolios” (micro limited carousal sites on our domains) that continue to carry the content.  The Vimeo hosted micro site shows only three videos on Google:  site:apalytics.tv  During our testing we are concerned that duplicate content is causing issues too, so we are getting ready to shut off the many microsite domains hosted at Vimeo. (Vimeo has an old embed code that allows a NON-iframe embed – but has discontinued it recently)  That makes it difficult if not impossible to retain SEO juice for anything other than their simple micro sites that are very limited!

3.)  See Wistia Image:  Wistia, a $2000 year plus solution that only provides private video site hosting embedding various types of video content on one’s site/s.  Wistia has a free account now for three videos and limited plays – it’s a nice interface for SEO but is still different than BOTR.  We opted for BOTR because of many other advertising related options, but are again trying Wistia with the free version to see if we can figure out why our BOTR videos are not showing up as hoped.  We know that Google does not promise to index and feature every video on a sitemap, but why some are there and others are not and when remains a mystery that we are hoping to get some answers about.

4.)   See Longtail Image: Longtail, Bits On The Run, (JW Player author) a $1,000 year plus like Wistia provides private hosting, but it allows a one button YouTube upload for the same SEO meta data and content – isn’t that duplicate content? BOTR creates and submits video sitemaps for your content, but it has not been working for us and it has been impossible to get a definitive answer as I think they too are learning or are not wanting the expose their proprietary methods (which are not yet working for us!)

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Contests can and should be a  big part of your social media strategy....especially if it is working well....

There are a few things you want to make sure you are aware of..... For example with facebook you arent allowed to notify winners of your contest through Facebook. You also arent allowed to use Facebook features as a voting mechanism.  And you arent suppose to use liking or commenting on a post or uploading a photo to your Timeline as a entry to a contest.  To read the full list of rules and regulations on facebook, see the details here....  http://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php

Twitter rules are a little less restrictive. Here they are.....  https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311-the-twitter-rules.

Pinterest has nor rules...   but they do have an etiquette guide. here it is.... http://pinterest.com/about/etiquette/

What we do to get around some of facebooks rules and to provide an easy way to handle and track the contest is use third party apps.  We use woobox and shortstack.......

Hope this helps.

Mark

Oliver-

Keeping the original site has its advantages for additional SEO and the ability to effectively create a defensive URL which could show up with the new site in search results.

Definitely a NO for copying and pasting the product descriptions. There are a lot of very informative posts on this issue.  Some SEO folks say that you have to change over 50% of the content on the new descriptions to register as original content. We have done some work in this area and have found that rewriting all of the descriptions to some extent, is the only way to generate additional SEO value. (Obviously skus will probably stay the same). Another easy thing to do is to be able to change the meta tag descriptions for the photos. That will count towards the original content "meter".

You will get some short and long term value if you take the time to rewrite the product descriptions.

Hope this helps. If so, let me know....

Mark

Jay-

Title tags need to be concise but need to do a good job of defining what the page is about. The best title tag in your example is:

Acura car keys | Acura Ignition Switch Repair | Acura Key Duplication  Make sure there is a pace after the last word in each kewyrod.

To localize and geo-target the same listing you could use Dallas acura car keys / dallas acura ignition switch repis.....or   Acura car keys in dallas /  Acura ignition switch in Dallas........

Localizing and geo-targeting the title makes sense and will help you in local results.

The meta tage description should be more huiman readbale and should add some additional detail. make sure mutliple pages are not the same exact meta descritpion with the exception of the car type. Mix them up in content but make them applicable to the subject.

For example: "We are the best locksmith in Dallas. We provide Car keys, Ignition switch repair and key duplication for all acura makes and models in the dallas area."

This is Googles webmaster tools description of what you should do with the meta tag:

The description attribute within the  tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description.

The url is http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

Dont worry about cannibalizing if you follow these rules.You will be in good shape.

Good luck.

Mark

Panda 2.2 was released around June 16th....another release around June 20th.

We had several new prospects that asked for our help. here is a great article on the subject and what specifically got impacted.....  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-panda-update-changed-seo-best-practices-forever-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps.

Mark

We use studiopress themes and themeforest for specialty themes. Studiopress provides us the best value for clients as we got 50 themes fir $350...themeforest has been the best for specialty themes.....

Hope this helps.

Mark