When you see a category >subcategory>product the best way to tackle page title duplication would be Product Name with an unqiue identifier (eg, size etc)>categoryname>section

The unique identifier will make each product page title somehwat unique.

In that case, I would do a url based redirect to your affinityproperties URL. Joecline doesnt ring many bells. But do not do a domain level redirect, rather put in a URL based redirect.

You can use open site explorer to see the link profile just to make sure that affinityproperties has a better link profile. If Joecline has a better link profile, I would keep Joecline since the link authority matters in Google rankings.

Joe,

1st of all, which one of your websites rank better for your target keywords?

Which one is an older domain?

Which one gets you more natural traffic (not from search engines or referrals, but direct traffic).

I would go in with the domain that comes up on all these 3 answers.

You can extract the initial set of keywords from Google keyword external. That should give you a reasonable starting matrix of the set you should targeting.

Also check out from real internet users ( maybe aspirants, students who would be likely to search something similar to your website's offering) to see what they would use to search for a website product like your's.

That would give you an idea of what keywods people are looking for.

Think as a user, not a internet marketer.

You can also try the SEOMOZ pro keyword difficulty tool. Thats pretty good as well

well, dont worry, Bing ranking signals are a bit different than Google. Try to submit a XML sitemap to Bing as well.

Rand posted a useful article a few months back. Here is the link:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

The idea is to keep doing right things and eventually, it will jump up.

I dont think that vanity URLs matter that much (if at all). I think that building authority and posting relevanta and useful information is more important than the handle name. I would get some reputation on the social media accounts 1st rather than worry about the username or twitter handle for the social media handles.

a rel=nofollow tag on the embedded tag would be a good thing to do since that would tell Google not to give any link authority to that URL.

1st of all, do you have https on your website ? It would be a good idea to disallow robots through robot.txt from indexing sensitive parts of the website (user login etc etc).

Then submit a website through a sitemap. ( You can also mention sitemaps in your robot.txt).

That should get the ball rolling. You shouldnt expect huge benefits over a short period of time, but it will slowly show up.

Contact sitesupport@seomoz.org and I am sure they'll compile a list soon.

put the reviews in # for now till you have a good content base and then carefully do the flip to vice versa.

sorry, my bad, I meant, noindex for tags and categories.

Sometimes, if you have put in a short and less keyword oriented description at DMOZ, you would like to replace it with an optimized snippet (although, you cannot fully control what Google shows as snippet: it maybe your meta description or excerpts from your body content).

If you feel your DMOZ snippet serves you well, you can let it be.

If you are using PHP, then you can include as is explained in the URL below:

http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/

Yu can use a javascript based useragent redirection as well:here is the URL:

http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html

You can also use the Yahoo Library API to detect browsers (mobiles have different browsers as compared to desktop computers and laptops.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/yahoo/yahoo_ua_detection.html

For apache level redirection:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1005153/auto-detect-mobile-browser-via-user-agent

Hope these resources help you.

For Google:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861

and

http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=30275&topic=1051770

For Bing, there is no official source, but bloggers have put together one.

http://www.searchbrat.com/bing-search-advanaced-command/

Hope that helps.

Add a meta tag as or

That will do it for you.

Google's resource for this:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264#2

Make a social network or profile website where everyone has their own space where they can write (something like a personal blog). Now, ask people to write reviews, send customers and users of your services for any of these professionals a feedback form with the URL to their profile and tell them to rate and review these guys.

Keep a strict moderation policy and try extracting useful information and compile them in a wiki kind of a storyboard as a summary of discussions, or a composed real time bio.

That should keep search engines interested.

what about adding a # in the URL? Have you thought about that? That will drive all the authority to the page you want to rank higher in search.

I dont recall the video, but there was a talk that search engines disregard the part of URL after #, but crawls them.(correct me if i mis interpreted the video, or didnt recall it correctly).

But, that should be a solution to your problem.

Further you can add nofollow to your category and tag pages, if you want faceted navigation and content duplication issues to be solved.

You may want to see how your website cache for your homepage looks like on Google. Maybe its reading the wrong header everytime. My suggestion would be to check that 1st. If it shows fine, I dont think it will hurt your rankings as such. If you have rel=caononical in place correctly, you would be fine. It would be worthy to identify your pages where you want rankings and based on that, you could diagnose.

I would suggest that depending on the number of pages, you can either do a htaccess based redirection or an apache mod redirect.

Here is an article which could help you.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

SEOMOZ had an awesome whiteboard on this.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation

Some more additional resources:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dealing-with-faceted-navigation-a-case-study

Matt Cutts on faceted navigation:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

Hope they help you

I had a similar problem when the co-founder from my last job asked me the same question.

I came up with a small basic list for things I had seen my techie folks crib about or I had an inclination to.

#1. No cabins and closed door for folks. Guys like me have that weird feeling that maybe if someone is sitting in a cabin, he/she is more preferred by my boss (silly thing, but true)

#2. Unlimited caffeine supply

#3. Stylish personal sound gear(headphones, mics (preferably bluetooth)

#4. gaming room for multiplayer games

#5. Ability of every guy to make his desk the way he wants.

#6. Music room with instruments

#7. Sleeping capsule

#8. Foosball table, pinball machine, table tennis board

#9. Provision for booze after hours

#10. Ability to choose any configuration and make of hardware.

Yes, you are actually showing 2 shadow copies of your website to Google.

Use a nofollow, noindex tag in the meta. Also, it would be a good idea to have a rel=canonical in place for your testwebsite.(just in case).

The best way is to enable the creation of unique content daily. UGC and user participation if added to the unique content would add to the crawl ability. If you want to go a bit high tech, you can put the fresh content on a webcache to enable Google bots to visit you more frequently. ALso, make sure that your older/archived pages get some content cycled ( new comments, new tweets etc etc)

Dont use linking scripts. Thats what I would suggest. Try getting contextual backlinks from content sources such as wkipedia. Sadly, there is no short cut to link building, but its what that will give you the mileage. Link building today is useless.

bad neighbourhoods can make Google blacklist you. Move your hosting somewhere else.

Then recheck the content for any issues (duplicate content etc) and then submit to Google for reconsideration.

Dave,

That isnt a good way to look at it. I would actually run a SEM campaign with the brand name and its variants to see impressions and then judge.

Also, I would start building up traffic for more generic keywords with the brand keywords. People generally dont search for brands, rather they search more for generic terms (North Carolina  summer camps as an example).

Let me give you an example:

If there are say 3 copies of your webpage

www.domain.com; www.domain.com/index.php; www.domain.com/home.html

Ideally, you would want everyone to land on the 1st option, so here is what you could do.

Activate canonical for the url #2 and #3, in the rel=canonical tag specify the complete URL for the #1 option. That way, even if Google crawls the #2 and #3 URL, it will know that the URL that should be considered is the #1 URL.

rel=canonical does not redirect the page unlike a 302 or 301 redirection where the page is redirected to the URL you want.

If you have enabled canonical tag on your URL to redirect the shadow copies of your webpage to 1 location, it should be fine. In the long run however, you should think about getting a 301 redirect to your homepage URL for the URLs that are shadow copies.

Douglas,

Actually, I was reading up a few articles on the same topic and I came across these. They may help you better understand what the update was like.

How innocent websites were targeted:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-farmer-update-harmed-codependent-site-owners/28248/

Search Engine Land's view:

http://searchengineland.com/google-trying-to-minimize-collateral-damage-from-farmer-update-66495

It seems that websites with large amount of user content which were not very tightly moderated fell prey to this update. As with all algorithms, this update has its share of problems.

One is still to understand why ehow wasnt penalized whereas websites like business.com were.

One thing is for sure:

Do not stuff keywords into your content for SEO

dont put up low quality content

post only original content sueful to real users

#solve all faceted navigation issues (which is largely a problem of large ecommerce websites)

You can type the following syntax:

after User-agent: *

Disallow: /foldername/subfoldername

also, you can name your sitemaps in the robots.txt file.

They can be defined as

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

If you have multiple sitemaps, you can have multiple sitemaps listed.

Check out microsoft.com. They have a global website at microsoft.com which by default redirects to Microsoft US. If you go and select another country, you can see the change in URL.

You can see Matt Cutt's Opinion here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Unless you are confident about your offerings and if the intended content of your sub domains would be very different from your website's homepage offering, then maybe you can go in for a sub domain kind of architecture.(citing Matt's closing words)

Hi Kashifa,

I would say, subdomains is a bad idea to start. If you havent started, I would suggest you to go in for a folder based URL. Sub folder URLs that is wisnetsol.com/qatar or something like taht would give you better mileage. Subdomains are often taken as separate domains by Google, so you would have to do all the hard work for the subdomain as well.

James, I think that you can afford to do some apache level mod_rewrite so that you can mask your URLs with better looking keyword optimized URLs. mod_rewrite on apache is something your LAMP (linux, Apache MYsql,PHP) programmer would be aware of.

Programs and ecommerce cart programmers normally use easy to code names, but at the end it takes a lot of pain to rename all the categories and product names to something meaningful.

I had a similar problem and I got a mod rewrite done since htaccess modifications for 301 redirections and URL masking would put stress on the server and can slow your page load time.

Mhkatz,

I would refrain hiring agencies to do link building for me if its a mature website. There are other legitimate ways to obtain SERP results.

1. Social mentions and retweets (Google ranks them well if some influencial profiles retweet it).

2. Blog mentions with backlinks to your website.

3. Wiki mentions

At the end of the day, if your website content is growing, I am sure Google will rank you for related keywords. Backlinks shouldnt be the only idea behind SEO.

If you are there just for reputation management, I would advice that you push the brand name mostly. Of course, if you are targeting secondary (read related keywords) which point to the website's offering rather than the brand keywords, you are doing a great service for your client.

You can actually talk to your client letting him know about your intentions so that you maybe credited for the effort.

I would say that golf clubs would serve you better than just clubs. Clubs can also mean a gathering place for folks with similar interests where you get clear results for the keyword golf clubc if you mention it in the URL itself.

Hi Laurent,

If its wordpress, I can think of a few plugins to help you there. SEO Smart links is a great plugin to help you in that respect. URL: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-smart-links

Then there is a popular post plugin which will showcase your popular posts in the sidebar. This is a great way to leverage you old/archived content.

James,

The easiest way is to get rid of the 9999 at the last of the URL. If you can, add a rel=canonical tag for all such pages. That should normally work.

If the problem is rampant, you may want to remove the "show all products" option from pages that do not have more products to showcase. I would also suggest using a mod rewrite on apache to write better URLs for the same. Category33 sounds a bit weird to me. It could be named more SEO friendly.

If you want to get more information on rel=canonical implementation here is a link to help.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Add a rel=canonical tag for the pages that have multiple URLs.

You can see some resources here.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

If you use the rel= canonical tag you will have to do it for all pages with this issue. If the issue is widespread, you can consider a 301, but that wont be very effective for SEO purposes when compared to rel=canonical tag.

The 1st question I would ask myself as a website owner is: How many pages have duplicate content on them? Maybe try going the manual way and check for yourself. There will be pages you do not know about. Use a tool like Xenu's link sleuth to extract all links on your website(which are reachable from atleast 1 link of your website).

It may happen that google is adjusting its index for all. Worth keeping a track on whether your competitors are losing at the same or slower rate or not.

Every client is different. Never judge a client by their profile or website name or even by the nature of their website.

You must talk to every client and understand what their accurate needs are. Then only, you will be able to understand which provider will be good for the given requirement.

I like the question set that has been posted by Richard here. Some questions to add maybe:

1. How would you deal with a content heavy website which requires URL rewriting?

2. What measurement tool (free) would they use to measure social engagement?

3. What would be a website's most important success and failure metric?

Based on that, you will be able to judge which agency best fits your client's requirements

Ross,

the fun part is that even Google doesnt know if the website hosted on the same set of IPs have the same owner or belong to different owners. Shared webhosts have such issues. Although, it maybe worthwhile to see if the IPs in that range are getting page rank or not.

As Barry said, it wont give you much mileage.

Try these tips too:

-Ask for video testimonials from your client's customers

-Add industry trends, studies and analysis and make sure you email a relevant group of people letting them know that you have this study in place.

-Build twitter/facebook streams and invite your client's customers.

-Do some tight PPC based on exact matches and pin pointed geographical targeting. That will tell you what opprtunities you maybe missing

• Do some more keyword research and also ask your friends for search suggestions by building user scenarios. Explain your client's product/service to them and get from them what they might be typing on Google/search engines. Do a research on whether your same set of competitors appear on that set and its related set of keywords or not.

• Update your client's user base with newsletters which are actually useful to them.

Based on the version you have on your server, these documents would be helpful:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Please note: this is not something you would like to do unless you know Apache confuration yourself and you know the codes and its logic.

Subdomains do not pass on good link juice to your domain. As Alan rightly pointed out the value is undermined due to the fact that Google sees them as separate domains.

Have you tried apache based redirection and URL rewriting?