http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

It will work with any site. If it is a small site (500 pages or less) it is free to run manually online. Otherwise for $20 you can obtain the software and automate the process.

There is no advantage to holding back from a search engine perspective. The only reason I can think of to hold back relates to promotion opportunities for the articles. You could publish one article each week, tweet it and otherwise generate interest around the weekly article. If that is not of interest to you, then I would publish all five articles.

Do you have any organization to your site? I can see where some visitors would desire to find lyrics by year, singer, music style (jazz, rock, etc), music type (love songs, happy songs, etc) and so forth.

Even if users found songs by searching, crawlers move through your site through links. Unless your site is extremely well linked and has a great navigation system, you are only going to see a relatively small percentage of your site indexed.

Hi Ed.

A few things you can do to help get your pages indexed:

1. If you have not done so already, register with Google and go to the Google Webmaster Tools page http://www.google.com/webmasters

2. If you have not already done so, create a XML sitemap. Ideally it should be located at http://www.lyricstatus.com/sitemap

3. If you want to locate the sitemap anywhere else, you will need to create a robots.txt file and place the sitemap URL in the file. I noticed you didn't have a robots.txt file. You can learn more about them at robotstxt.org.

4. In Google WMT, go ahead and upload your sitemap (Site Configuration > Sitemap). Then check back a day later. What you want to look at is two fields: URLs submitted and URLs in index. Your goal would be to have all your URLs in the index, but that isn't realistic without a lot of work.

5. Another thing you can do is create a HTML sitemap and place a link in the footer of your home page. You don't offer site navigation so a HTML sitemap can help visitors navigate your site.

Take these steps for now and then you will have a much better idea where your site stands. You can then match up your URLs in the sitemap with the URLs in Google's index. The urls without a match are the pages you need to get into the index.

You can try link building or even placing links to these buried pages on your home page to help get them indexed.

One last note concerning duplicate content. You really should consider adding original content to the pages to help them not be considered duplicate content. Keep in mind the page is viewed as a whole so if you have a song, you probably need to write at least a couple hundred words to differentiate your pages from all the other similar pages on the web.

Good luck.

I can't speak to the author's credentials, but I can speak about the web page.

You should run as fast as you can from that type of web page. It is about as spammy as a page can get. The sidebar is full of large ads. The page is selling reports and memberships for thousands of dollars. The single page contains multiple articles covering a variety of topics, with tons of additional ads jammed between each article.

Before I joined SEOmoz I was lost in the SEO information jungle. Like you, I received a lot of bad SEO information. The best advice I can offer to you or anyone is limit your sources of SEO information. First places to look are:

• Google search "Matt Cutts" + your keyword

• Search SEOmoz

• If you need to expand further, avoid any site with an ad on the page. It's ok if the site mentions it's own SEO tool or membership, but if you see ads for other sites and items for thousands of dollars, close the page. Their interests are clearly not to offer you the information you seek, but instead to use your need for information to service their needs.

Where did you learn this information? Can you offer a URL?

How exactly did you make this determination? Can you offer the URL and the key term you are using?

What you are referring to is link triangles. It's black hat, and punishable.

You clearly want to perform a link exchange, but you know the links would be discounted. In order to manipulate the system, you link to another site to avoid the link exchange.

The bottom line, it is a search engine's job to determine which web pages are the most relevant and reliable for a user. Links are a large part of their calculations. Anything you do to muddy the waters and make it difficult to determine whether a link occurs naturally, or it is paid for / exchanged, it black hat and would be subject to consequences upon discovery.

Ben,

What exactly do you mean by "safe"? You CAN permanently use a 302. There is nothing preventing a webmaster from using a 302 for years. I would never advise doing such, but you are certainly able to do it if you were so inclined.

The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long.

302's are for very small time frames such as a couple days. If you are looking for a suggested max time for a 302 I'll throw a month out as an absolute max, and that would probably be too long. I would be interested to hear feedback from other Mozzers on this topic.

Given your circumstance, I would 301 the pages, then 8-10 months later when the merger happens cancel the 301.

As long as the sites which currently link to Site B maintain their links, and those sites maintain their authority, then site B would not lose it's link equity. You are merely passing 90%+ of that link equity to site B for the 10 month downtime period.