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Hello, SEO Gurus!

First off, my many thanks to this community for all of your past help and perspective. This is by far the most valuable SEO community on the web, and it is precisely because of all of you being here. Thanks!

I've recently kicked off a robust niche biotech news publishing site for a client, and in the first 6 weeks, we've generated 15K+ views and 9300 visits. The site is built on the WordPress platform.

I'm well aware that a best practice is to noindex tag and category pages, as I've heard SEOs say that they potentially lead to duplicate content issues. We're using tags and categories heavily, and to date, we've had just 282 visits from tag & category pages. So, that's 2.89% of our traffic; the vast majority of traffic has landed on the homepage or article pages (we are using author markup).

Here's my question, though, and it's more philosophical: do these pages really cause a duplicate content issue? Isn't Google able to determine that said page is a tag page, and thus not worthy of duplicate content penalties? If not, then why not?

To me, tag/category pages are sometimes better content pages to have ranked than article pages, since, for news especially, they potentially give searchers a better search result (particularly for short tail keywords). For example, if I write articles all the time about the Mayo Clinic," I'd rather have my evergreen "Mayo Clinic" tag page rank on page one for the keyword "mayo clinic" than just one specific article that very quickly drops out of the news cycle. Know what I mean?

So, to summarize:

1. Are doindexed tag/category pages really a duplicate content problem, and if so, why the heck?

2. Is there a strategy for ranking tag/category pages for news publishing sites ahead of article pages?

Thanks as always for your time and attention.

Kind Regards,

Mike

Hi Robert,

This was an answer you gave to a question I asked a while back, and I really appreciate it. I think we might go in the direction of starting over, since I am confident that we can out-content and out-SEO our competitors in the client's niche. Just a question about the 301 redirect: will the penalty associated with the original domain transfer to the new one if we do a 301 redirect? I'm not interested in transferring the page rank, but I would want people who arrive via direct traffic to the old site be able to be redirected to the new site. However, if a 301 is going to transfer the penalty, then I'm not sure how you get return direct users from the old site to the new one. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks again.

LOL, Cyrus. Yeah -- it just seemed like the right term. The client is a "bad person" -- she just put link building in the hands of people who used all of the methods that are now taboo.

And thanks to everyone's comments thus far -- it's all great feedback. Here's the other thing: if we were to start with a new domain and not 301 from the old domain, we'd miss a lot of direct traffic. The old domain goes way back, and a LOT of people hit it directly.

It also worth noting that the penalty the client has is not site-wide. It's keyword-specific In fact, the site is actually up for the year on non-brand organic search traffic -- it's just other keyword terms and not the bread and butter ones that used to rank high. Now I'm thinking that maybe we just work around the penalized keywords.

Hello, SEO Gurus.

A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual).

Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam.

She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok.

Here's my question:

If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2).

Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?"

I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.

Many thanks - all of these comments have been great. I should clarify: 1) the articles are not evergreen; they are/were topical news articles. 2) The client's primary website is not a news/publishing site, but rather a lead generation site for his recruitment business. His new web property is essentially a completely different business endeavor: a niche publishing site. We've been using blogging on his lead generation site as a means of fast-tracking his search engine visibility and drawing in readers from his target demographic who can/could in turn become conversions. With the new site, We'll be driving web traffic to the site, and he'll be monetizing it vis a vis ads.

Hello, SEO Gurus.

I have a client whom I've been working with for a few months now, and part of our service offering is to publish and promote fresh, daily content on his site's blog. This strategy has been a huge success thus far, he is very happy with the content, etc.

Now, he is getting ready to launch a second site, which will be a news publishing site for his industry niche, and we will once again be providing the content on a daily basis: we're going to be producing 10 to 15 articles a day. It's a big operation for us.

The client, however, is concerned that he doesn't want the site to appear "thin" on content in the early going, and asked if it would be possible to populate the new site with the articles we wrote on the other site's blog.

My gut reaction to this is that it would be an exceedingly bad idea to do this. While we are the ones who authored the original content (and we've used author tags and publishing markup), the best bet is to simply start fresh. Besides that, seeing as we'll be pumping out tons of content on a daily basis, it won't take long to fill up the content coffers.

That being said, I just wanted to run this past you all and see if anyone had any alternative ideas on how to use the old content without it being duplicate content. I was thinking that maybe designating all of the old articles with noindex, nofollow could be an option?

Many thanks in advance for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

Mike

Hello SEO Gurus,

Here's a question I've been unable to find an answer for: if you manage to get a publishing website or blog included in the Google News aggregate, can it negatively affect organic search visibility?

I've never read anything that explicitly says so, but I have both read and experienced how e-commerce sites often have difficulty in ranking high for both organic and shopping searches. It seems that Google balances out visibility between the two.

Has anyone had any experience with a website or blog that managed to rank high for the same high-value keyword on both organic search and news search?

Thanks in advance!

Mike

Wow, that's new! Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if the plug-in is at fault.

Well, as usual, issues compound into new issues.

My many thanks for your help and insight, Brian.

Kind Regards,

Mike

Sure, here's an example: this is the main website: beautifulpacific.com, with the blog being located at beautifulpacific.com/blog. One of the satellite sites is beautifulfiji.com, with its blog at beautifulfiji.com/blog.

Many thanks for your reply, Brian.

The satellite websites are not where conversations/sales take place; they feed his main site. I agree that providing a feed via the blog's RSS would make more sense. And when you say, "but if the point of the content is to be consumed, enjoyed, attract social shares and links, build traffic and then convert, then there's really little if any gain to be had in [noindexing]," I wholeheartedly agree. Even if it were to solve the duplicate content issue, it would preclude us from being able to put fresh content up on that blog and leverage it accordingly.

I can tell you that there is nothing nefarious in the client's idea here: his intentions are purely to give users fresh content to explore on the satellite sites. But as he relies on me to guide him in terms of SEO implications, I don't think he thought through how duplicate content could hurt him.

To me, the best-case scenario would be to use these blogs to pump out fresh, authoritative content for each satellite site blog -- a more intensive undertaking, to be sure, but a best practice -- and include an RSS feed.