Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks, Thomas.  That helps a lot.

Webmaster Tools is showing that I have 78 duplicate title tags.  Here is an example of tags they deem to be duplicate:

• www.lifeinsure.com/blog/life-insurance-trusts/
• www.lifeinsure.com/blog/life-insurance-trusts
• www.lifeinsure.com/life-insurance-trusts/

I have done 301 redirects from any posts beginning with "/blog/" to "/" Any idea why this is happening?

Dan,  thank you for your post om WP SEO.   It is the most informative piece of writing I have found on the subject.   I'm going to dig into my sites this weekend to make sure I have set up my blogs per your instructions.

The responses to this question have been great.  While I have written some very good content, I have learned that "if you build it, they will come" doesn't necessarily apply to writing content.

My question is, once the content is written, what are the best ways of getting it "out there?"

We were penalized for back links our SEO firm acquired for us long before the Penguin update.  As I found out, link removal can be a slow, painful process.  After months of trying to do it ourselves, we hired Virante, a company that is SEOMoz-recommended.  They are fast and efficient and it was well worth the money.

Only one of the directories they contacted wanted to be paid $10 per removed link.  It's no wonder they were one of the spammiest site contacted.

Thanks, Peter. I appreciate your feedback. We are going to move slowly until we get a response (or not) to our reconsideration request.

Rand, I appreciate your feedback.  We have been doing this for 9 years, thought we were doing a fairly decent job of building a brand (until we took a hit) and plan to continue for the long term, so I think your advice on building the new site(s) is a good one.

Once Google responds (or doesn't) to our latest request, we'll make that decision.  By the way, we have been using an SEOMoz-referred company to help us with link-removal and, despite Google's refusal to budge after a huge number of links have been removed, I think they're doing a very good job.  I know what they're up against, so I'm hoping to be able to give them rave reviews once this is done.

We were hit hard on both of our sites yesterday and can't afford to wait for the dust to settle, as some folks are advising. We have been attempting to work off a penalty on one of our sites by undergoing a massive (and expensive) link removal project over the last four months.  We are on our third reconsideration request and, hopefully, this last round of link removal will have done the job.  I'm hesitant to go in and "de-optmize" the site by changing title tags and changing the anchor text until the penalty is removed, but I'm not sure if that's the right plan of action.  I am, however, going to dig into the non-penalized site and change some title tags and anchor text.

Any thoughts on this strategy would be greatly appreciated.

You basically have to contact the websites from whence the links originate and ask them to remove the links, which can be an arduous process.

We were penalized for links one of our vendors got for us, so we are now going through the process of getting the offending links removed.  We are working with Virante, who is an SEOMoz recommended vendor and they are doing a great job.  Hopefully, as a result of their work, we will get our penalty lifted soon.

We host our blog on WordPress as part of our site.  The blog "address" is www.website.com/blog/post.  If I were to take the same content that's on this blog and post it on a Blogger account we have, would Google consider that duplicate content?  If not, would there be any benefit to doing this?

On my blog posts, I have links to all the categories and months, dating back 5-6 years. This make the number of links on each blog page well over 100, which I understand might decrease the value of each page. Is there a problem with having more than 100 links on a page?

Dan,  thank you for your post om WP SEO.   It is the most informative piece of writing I have found on the subject.   I'm going to dig into my sites this weekend to make sure I have set up my blogs per your instructions.

We were penalized for back links our SEO firm acquired for us long before the Penguin update.  As I found out, link removal can be a slow, painful process.  After months of trying to do it ourselves, we hired Virante, a company that is SEOMoz-recommended.  They are fast and efficient and it was well worth the money.

Only one of the directories they contacted wanted to be paid $10 per removed link.  It's no wonder they were one of the spammiest site contacted.

Rand, I appreciate your feedback.  We have been doing this for 9 years, thought we were doing a fairly decent job of building a brand (until we took a hit) and plan to continue for the long term, so I think your advice on building the new site(s) is a good one.

Once Google responds (or doesn't) to our latest request, we'll make that decision.  By the way, we have been using an SEOMoz-referred company to help us with link-removal and, despite Google's refusal to budge after a huge number of links have been removed, I think they're doing a very good job.  I know what they're up against, so I'm hoping to be able to give them rave reviews once this is done.