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One you add the canonical tag, those URLs will essentially get deindexed and only the canonical version of the URL will get indexed/cached in Google.

I agree with Jarno. I would only like to add 2 points: 1. Do not over do any one kind of links. Mix them up...over a period of time. Think natural links. 2. Do not do the "exact anchor text". Do variants of it, combined with site name, brand name etc. Slow and steady is what I would recommend and again as Jarno recommended, get active on social media unless you already are.

Canonical Tag is the most obvious/optimal solution to get rid of these kinds of pages getting indexed and causing internal duplicate content issues.

You could, but it would be more difficult to rank sub-domains. Search for keywords like nytimes, apple etc since we know these sites do have certain sub-domains, none of them show-up in Google in Top 10. I would concentrate on the social media only.

Is it possible for the CMS to include the canonical tags ? I would suggest you look into it and have www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html contain the canonical tag to www.mydomain.com which should also take care of this issue for the homepage. That way Google will deindex www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html and only index www.mydomain.com

You are definitely on the right track. I would continue to work on quality/quantity of the content/freshness depending upon the niche. At the same time, do an audit of your link profile and compare it to a couple of the competing URLs who are outranking you and see what you notice as the brand links vs anchor text links and so on. Also, make sure you are not doing too many links of any one kind.

Think of link building as conventional brand building / PR and you will have all your answers. If you/your website gets mentioned by New York Times in an article/blog/news vs a small blogger, which one is more important. Simply put, if the website that is linking to you has links to itself, it's an important link. Your best bet is to look at the Domain Authority Score to get a top level view. As for anchor text, I would avoid overdoing anything. Use your brand name to build up the authority and you can outrank a lot more people in the long run, however in the short run, anchor text might work out better. Depends what your goals are. I hope this helps.

The best way to rank for your brand name with other/more URLs that you control to some extent would be the social media ones. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.

Just do site:domain.com search in Google to see if pages from this domain are indexed. If you want to check cache, you can do so by doing a search for cache:domain.com or cache:domain.com/pageurl.html

I hope this helps.

If you do a noindex,follow meta tag, that'll essentially do the same thing as canonicalizing them as far as the effect in the SERPS is concerned. These tag pages will be deindexed.

The noindex tag will just de-index them.

The canonical tag will de-index them as well, but will work more like a 301 redirect for the search engines. So if you think you have link juice to these tag pages that you'd like to redirect to a category page, you can canonicalize them other noindex,follow is fine.

The pages will still work as is in either case.

Sounds like your client clearly needs the SEO / Webmaster Best Practices cleared out and taken care of. Help the Search Engines Rank your website. Provide them enough information that they can rank you. Too little or Too much, both can lead to "no benefits".

So yes, I would optimize those page titles to both SEO and User Friendly. If nobody is able to see those 210 characters, why have them. Also work on a SEO and User Friendly Description as well as H tags if and as needed.

I am guessing you are trying to reorder the sequence of HTML or on-page copy / H1 tags or something like that to essentially get the maximum benefit. If that's the case, then it's absolutely not recommended. Anything you are trying to do that only helps your site rank better, unfortunately is a form of cloaking. It's trying to fool the bot.

If however you are trying to help the user, it makes sense, but the way the question sounds, it is unlikely.

Think from a Search Engine's Perspective. Would you like your bot be fooled/manipulated ? The bots get smarter day by day and this form of cloaking is very old and is definitely track-able. Therefore I would suggest you not to do this.

If it's a sitemap for the users and the page appears under 2 different categories, it's okay. Think usability here.

However, if/when it's the XML sitemap, it should only be there once.

As for the intermediary pages, If I were you, if they offer a good purpose (the reason you have those pages in the 1st place), they should then be listed in both the XML and HTML sitemaps if they help the users.

So to answer your question more directly, if your question is:

Is it bad to have same page listed twice in XML sitemap? Yes, it will generate an error/warning in webmaster console.

Is it bad to have same page listed twice in HTML sitemap? No, if that's what is needed for users, it's okay.

I hope that helps.

Do you have a CMS system that lets you control those pages independently or everything is handled via IT ? Are there architecture level changes that you can do that will help the entire site if made to the "template" / include files ?

I completely agree with Ben and EGOL.

In my opinion, wear the hat of an SEO Evangelist within your organization and do a great job on educating after you have a success story or before if you need to do it on a larger scale. Try and get executive buy-in on things you are trying to do.

Again, it depends on what the Business Goals and Needs are and what's the short term and long term SEO Strategy. Think of the low hanging fruits as well as long term goals.

I agree with Takeshi. You also have to factor in age. The domain has a Creation date of 09 Feb 1998 and I see based on Archive.org, the site has been up for at-least 6 years now.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060615203637/http://www.otr.net/

Great responses from Eppie and Anthony. The only thing that I'd like to add (or repeat) is that look at the link profile and the history/age of the site you are getting these links for. If it's a very brand new kind of site (in terms of backlinks), launch the widget still, but promote it slowly and steadily and also continue to work on other kinds of links and lots and lots of great content on the site if possible...as in grow the site from both On-page as well as Off-page at the same time so that there is some sort of a co-relation to new content / new links.

I hope this helps.

I see the page was there on 4th May, 2012. See Google Cache (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tRCWWnSe7AAJ:www.ultimatebasictraining.com/workbook.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox-a)

However, today, it looks like there's a 302 / Temporary Redirect in Place on http://www.ultimatebasictraining.com/workbook.html

HTTP/1.1 302 Found => Date => Fri, 01 Jun 2012 21:05:18 GMT Server => Apache Location => http://ultimatebasictraining.com Content-Length => 295 Connection => close Content-Type => text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Have your webmaster look at your .htaccess file and find out and remove the redirects or find why they were added in the 1st place.

I hope this helps.

I have been attending Pubcon in Las Vegas every year since 2003. I have only missed 1 or 2. Also, Pubcon is the only conference I have attended.

What I'd say about Pubcon is that I look forward to it every year, year after year. It's a busy 3-4 days conference. Usually 6-10 sessions running concurrently and the topics vary from On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Paid Search, Affiliate, Conversion Optimization, Social Media and so on. There are usually around 100+ sessions in total to choose from.

Overall a great event to attend.

What will you learn ? Well, that's a tough one to answer. Usually I don't go to conferences and expect something to learn other then meet a lot of nice people in different industries. Sometimes you talk to people, hear out speakers and see them talk about specific strategies they use or specially the tools. I love the tools part. There's always something new to learn in the SEO Tools area. Other then that, talking with people and attending sessions kind of gives you a very broad/but in-depth overview of where the industry is moving, whats going on in the world of search.

I also have Mozcon/Distilled/SMX Advanced/SES to the list of conferences I would consider attending based on timing and budget.

I hope this helps.

Great answers by Justin and Aran. One thing that I'd like to add is make sure that guest posting or any other specific kind of link building is not a major portion of your links. A decent mix aka Natural Links. In simple words, don't over do any one kind/technique of links and you should be good. And as Justin and Aran said, the intent behind guest posting should be to get branding and exposure. Getting your brand in front of the readers of that website. As far as the DA/PA and other metrics are concerned, they would come with it. I would look at what brings you more readers, maybe some traffic. You would want to try and engage with the community. So if you look at Guest Posts in terms of exposure instead of PA/DA, you tend to get better results long term in my opinion.

I am a huge fan of ASO - A Small Orange - Their support is awesome. Apart from that Hostgator, HostMonster, JustHost are some decent hosts.

Search for your Brand at Knowem.com

They should be able to show you all kinds of social sites where your brand/username is still available. I recommend it.

As Phil and Blu42Media said, Screaming Frog is such a terrific tool. Love it. Can't beat the ability of that tool. It's terrific.

Looks like you are a Pro member, in which case I also recommend using the Crawl Test tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Domain Authority is definitely going to matter here, but honestly not that much. Your strength is that you can work a lot more for your local area / niche and can have a lot more local links compared to the national sites. I would find out ways to get links from local businesses, non profits and other communities and organizations.

I would also suggest looking into doing some sorts of small events / meetups for potential clients to come and ask questions. You could also organize some activities / contests for kids.

I would also look at opportunities to work with specific real estate communities and sponsor some of their events with gifts. You could also setup a photo booth there for people to take pictures and then provide them a digital or paper copy of their picture towards the end of the day (Print them at a local Walgreens and have somebody pick them up or if it's cost effective to have a decent quality photo printer that can handle volume). The photo op could have your URL / Brand in the background in a creative way along with the year and name of the event.

Again, I think the intent is to think of this as a Brand Building Technique. Links, Mentions and Citations will come along with them.

Slowly and steadily build your links. Are you already on the top social networking sites ? If yes, then I would also suggest looking at something like Knowem.com to see if those fit your link profile. I would also look into vendors/clients/business partners and others who can link to you. Press Releases, mentions in local business directories, chamber of commerce and other local chapters.

I hope that ignites some ideas. Think of Domain Authority building as Brand Building and it would be a lot easier.

Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider and use the custom filter in there and use your GA tracking ID in there to see if that ID is present on every page. If your site is less then 500 pages, the free version would do it. If it's more then 500 pages, then you might have to buy a copy of that software/license.

I hope that helps.

I would suggest you look at www.semrush.com

You can find all keywords (or most keywords) that a particular website is ranking for in Natural/Organic Search and also look at what they are doing in terms of PPC and so on.

I am sure you'll love this tool

So simply put based on the amazing responses here, I would suggest to build your site (whatever your niche is) with long tail keywords, continue to build great content, and then over a certain period of time, once you have established a certain trust and domain authority, you could start ranking for a little bit better keywords and the cycle continues. It's simply a continuous process building a site and it's rankings. You would not want a brand new site with 5/10/50 articles ranking for Mortgage or Lamps or Cars or Loans.

I hope that helps and makes sense.

If you do not have any paid links / unnatural links, then there's nothing you need to do except file a reconsideration request to Google and explain.Let me go back one step and ask you, did you actually get a unnatural links profile message from Google ? If not, then are you saying you got hit by Panda/Penguin, based on dip in rankings ?

I also would not worry about Shareasale / Affiliate Links, they do not influence directly towards SEO.

I completely understand and agree. I think it's a constant cat and mouse game.

I don't know if you have read this post by Will or not, but if you haven't do read it: How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO

I would suggest using combinations of option #2 and #3. Basically using keyword variations as well as secondary phrases. You should never be dependent on 1 phrase, because not everybody searches like that and every person searching using a variant keyword is still a potential client.

Also, surrounding text helps as well. So if your links (internal and external) are like:

"PPC Management Services by XYZ in London" where XYZ is the anchor/brand name.

Varying anchor texts, not just 10/20/50 links for your primary phrase. That's not natural links.

Makes sense ?

You should also look into getting listed in niche lawyer sites, does not matter if they are follow or nofollow links. Look for links, citations of URL, phone number and so on.

I just responded to this exact question. Here's my answer and a link to that question:

Honestly, my advice would be to grab a list of your backlinks using both Google Webmaster Console as well as the OpenSiteExplorer and merge them into a spreadsheet and get rid of all the duplicates.

Next step would be to identify which of those links are spammy and you'd be better of having them removed. This is in my opinion the hardest part depending upon the volume of sites/links.

Then hire somebody to find email addresses of the websites where you want links removed. Finding something on the page and if nothing else, using whois. I would then send an email to each one of those contacts and in a quick short email, tell me the URL where the link is located and your site URL. Tell them to remove the link right away since you have received a Google Warning. I would imagine this taking care of a good portion of those links. I would send another email in a week and then again for a total of 2-4 times to see if you get a response and get the link removed. When nothing else worked, offer then $10 for the link removal and that should gain their attention. If that does not work either, I would suggest you move on.

I hope this helps. You could get somebody on odesk.com or a similar site to get all the labor intensive work done.

It looks like your server is Linux possibly..Apache..running PHP.

If that's the case, you can build a page that you'd like to display for all pages that do not exist and upload it on the server as 404.php or whatever you might want to call it.

Then, add the following line in your .htaccess file.

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

You are all set.

To me i looks like you are already set or doing this in some fashion. I checked to see if I visit http://www.visitdevonandcornwall.com/test and see what happens.

It gives me a friendly 404 and the HTTP Header is correct.

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found => Server => cloudflare-nginx Date => Fri, 11 May 2012 17:17:51 GMT Content-Type => text/html Connection => close X-Powered-By => PHP/5.3.6 Expires => Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control => no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma => no-cache Set-Cookie => __cfduid=d1b9e2169ed78a6697f752eef1c0a5ee01336756670; expires=Mon, 23-Dec-2019 23:50:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.www.visitdevonandcornwall.com

Think of building site authority very similar to brand building. How did "Coke" or "Pepsi" become a brand ? Then think about Online Only companies, how did they become a brand ? Essentially take all sorts of things in the offline world to the online world and that's essentially Brand/Authority building online.

Anything and everything that spikes discussion around your domain name, brand and your website contributes towards Site Authority. Facebook Links, Pinterest Pins, Mentions/Cittations in online news, articles, websites. Think contests, infographics, link bait.

One way or the other they will lead to links and is in some form or the other... link building. But it's definitely not the link building you are talking about  (3 way, or non-reciprocal).

I hope this helps / clarifies and ignites some ideas/thoughts.

What platform is your website ? You could also send me the URL via PM or post here and I can check.

Hi Ben

I understand the panic in such a situation. I truly do. I checked your website and the fact that you do not have a robots.txt. You also do not have any kind of noindex or anything like that in your code and you look like a strong established website.

Do you have an XML sitemap in your webmaster console ? I would suggest you build one and submit it if you don't already have it.

Other then that, I would also suggest to have a robots.txt even if it's blank. Rather then a 404 redirecting to your homepage. Give me 24-48hrs and in my opinion, you should be back.

I hope this helps.

It would be best to make it a 404 or you could consider still having the property listed but mentioning it's no longer available and displaying similar / nearby / related properties on that page as long as it makes sense from both the usability / TOS and other business issues.

Think from a user's perspective. Let's say I took a URL of a property from your website and linked to it from my blog post where I am talking about my vacation or if I emailed it to friends/family. If that property is no longer available, what's a good user experience for people clicking on that link from my website or from my email. In my opinion, it might be a good idea to have a user friendly message saying that property is no longer available and displaying other related properties.

I hope that helps and makes sense.

Honestly, my advice would be to grab a list of your backlinks using both Google Webmaster Console as well as the OpenSiteExplorer and merge them into a spreadsheet and get rid of all the duplicates.

Next step would be to identify which of those links are spammy and you'd be better of having them removed. This is in my opinion the hardest part depending upon the volume of sites/links.

Then hire somebody to find email addresses of the websites where you want links removed. Finding something on the page and if nothing else, using whois. I would then send an email to each one of those contacts and in a quick short email, tell me the URL where the link is located and your site URL. Tell them to remove the link right away since you have received a Google Warning. I would imagine this taking care of a good portion of those links. I would send another email in a week and then again for a total of 2-4 times to see if you get a response and get the link removed. When nothing else worked, offer then $10 for the link removal and that should gain their attention. If that does not work either, I would suggest you move on.

I hope this helps. You could get somebody on odesk.com or a similar site to get all the labor intensive work done.

Just make sure any of these domains do not have any history in the Search engines. Check archive.org and check the SERPS, Open Site Explorer etc to make sure if they are/were unknown to the Search Engines. If that's the case, there's nothing to worry about.

Honestly, I think you gut is telling you the right thing. And thankfully you answered the question yourself.

The fact that those pages were created to manipulate rankings (as in doorway pages?)

If that's the case, and there are external links to those pages, I would do exactly what you are thinking. Delete those pages and let them be a 404.

Did your client also receive the unnatural links google penalty notice ? If that's the case, then it's a no brainer to do this right away. You could also try to find if there are link networks involved and if there are certain webmasters who control multiple website specially when you say 3800 links from 1500 domains. I would atleast try to get "some" of them removed or atleast have some effort. If there's a way to send a blanket email to all of the 1500 domains, it's well worth the effort of atleast trying.

I hope this helps.

1. Where are you ranking currently compared to your competition?
2. How many common keywords to you see ranking between your website and the competition?
3. How large is your website compared to the competition ?

Looking at the metrics, I think the fact that you are competing with internal pages and yours is a homepage, makes it easier. Are you sort of a niche site ?

It's more of quality and then relatedness of the links, then just pure quantity. I would continue to build brand links to homepage, inner pages and adding more content to strengthen my presence in the niche.

I hope that helps stay on track. You are definitely on the right track in terms of what to look at. Just don't get distracted in the number of root domain links / domain authority.

In my opinion, 100% visible is better. So yes, you are on the right track. The concern that you have in your head that lead you to this question is right. It does not carry the same weight. If I were you, I would display it all and/or highlight the important areas of the content using some creative design techniques. Think SEO, but also think about the user. Would they really read all the content. Highlight the important/keypoints for them to see.

I hope this helps.

Please see answers in Bold.

1. is the bottom content ok? please scroll down all the way. --- **The content is good. It should help your homepage rank for a lot of long tail keywords, provided it's optimized for them. **

2)  We used semantic keywords for 5-6 anchor interlinks to the same page to promote core products from the home page.  Is this too much? - Anchor Texts to the same page won't help. If I were you, I would rather send 5-6 important links to the most important (different pages). Multiple links to the same page from your homepage won't help IMO.

3)  We repeated footer path the same as the header fly window (same link, same word), is this over-optimized?  If not, does it serve any SEO? -- I don't understand this part of your question.

Is your site brand new or relatively old/established ? If it's relatively old/established, do you really care about the extra 30 uniques a day from 30 domains ? If it's a brand new site, relatively new(ish), and it does not have a link profile of it's own, I'd probably not do it. It just sounds scary.

However, going back to if you are established and have have  strong domain authority, link profile, redirecting domains is not an issue. EG, Apple.com has tons of domains that redirect. Some of them have lots of history in the SERPS. Think of all kinds of mis-spell domains, trademark domains and so on. So whatever makes sense from a usability perspective, definitely do it.

In my opinion, it's a very clear, think line.

Sebes

Are you saying there's an image "alt" tag, but no src="something.jpg"  ? That is a the darkest shade of gray if not completely black hat. I would definitely avoid it. This is a classic, simple, easy to detect case of over optimization, whatever else you may want to call it.

I would strongly suggest not to do it. We are in 2012. This might have worked in 1997 when Google was just born and it was primarily Dogpile.com and Altavista.com

Get them cleaned.

I would analyze the top 10 competition not just your head keywords but also some long tail keywords and find opportunities.

If you look at your rankings for keywords like, I think it's also about making sure your pages are properly optimized. See your SERP ranking for https://www.google.com/search?q=medical+plaques

I would recommend using the http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new tool here at SEOMoz to identify some oppurtunities and strengthen your on-page.

As far as Off-page is concerned, I would recommend you to be very careful and do some strategic link building instead of the outright link buying. There's a considerable risk involved. What you need to do is build domain authority, not try to rank via anchor text hyperlinks. Does that make sense ?

I see you have canonical tags in place. Considering that, I would suggest you are good. No need to setup any of those redirects. Canonical tags are in essence sort of 301's anyways, so you are all set.

As Ben and Alan have recommended, do something newsworthy. Think linkbait. However, before you do anything like that, I would suggest you look at your link profile and see if it makes sense to do something like this.

Have you been penalized for unnatural links ?
Do you have unnatural links ?

You could also have knowem.com or another agency or (DIY) signup on all social networking sites and have a lot of brand/follow/nofollow links. A natural link profile contains all kinds of links and not too many of 1 particular kind of links. I hope this ignites some thoughts and ideas.

Try this in the .htaccess file. It should work fine for sure. You don't need to manually add your website name.

<code class="htaccess" title="in your .htaccess file">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</code>

Depending upon the site, I have seen campaigns indexed in as little as 12hrs and as much as 48-72hrs. Again, that could also depend upon what's in the queue and what the resources available are and how big your website is.

You might also want to try the Crawl Test tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

It usually completes pretty fast and the data is always good to have.