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It's definitely possible to win. The exact match domain/branded domain isn't that big of an issue IMO.

Do the basics:

1. Make sure your site is fast, device agnostic, and aligned well with target market wants and needs. Make sure the site is technically sound.

2. Do things that excite your customers and get them involved in your business. Work on building your brand and reputation both on and offline. This focus will lead you naturally into creating that "amazing over the top" type of content we read so much about. The best things just come from focusing on what would delight/entertain/help/connect, etc. with our customers.

3. Research well and align your site content with how users are searching and what they're after.

If your product is strong, you understand your audience well and how to connect with them, and you understand how to finesse the digital ecosystem to help the naturally cool things you're doing for the business leave good digital fingerprints, then you can def. win.

Hi David,

If I'm understanding your comment correctly, the duplication likely exists because you have xxx.com and xxx.com/home both returning 200 status codes. I'm assuming those pages are very similar if not exact duplicates, and apparently have the same page title and meta description.

In order to correct, you'd need to adjust your meta page title and meta description tag so that each page has a different tag. Ideally though, if these pages are really the same, you'd pick one that you'd like to be the canonical and most likely 301 redirect the other to the canonical version.

Hi BobGW,

I'm assuming when you say "we're doing a product review based on sales data" you mean that you're reviewing a product that has been a good seller for you? Or, perhaps you're reviewing a few products in a category and and writing up your review based on which ones sell the best and have the best reviews?

For me, linking out depends a little on what type of site you have, and more on what is going to provide the best experience for a user.

It sounds to me like you have one product that fits in this product grouping and you'd like to do a review of competing products along side yours.

In this situation, I probably wouldn't link directly to the competitors (but I would certainly site any appropriate research with links), but I likely would include links to other third party sites that discuss your product as well as the competitors products. This information combined with your own should help users feel like your being as objective as you possibly can.

Bottom line is though, consumers are suspicious if you have a dog in the fight. Perhaps you could give your product or a trial of it away to a few bloggers or members of the press in your industry in hopes that they'll provide some feedback on their own sites. If it's favorable, you could then mash-up this content in a variety of ways which might include a side-by-side comparison of your product (along with this new third-party information) stacked against competitors, or perhaps quotes from the third party services that reviewed your product along with your own internal sales data.

I can't be certain that's answering you question, but the bottom line for me is link as it makes sense for users, and use the rel=nofollow attribute if you aren't 100% sure that where you are linking is credible. If you can avoid linking to a competitor and still have a useful set of content, I'd do it.

Hey Mitch,

Thanks for the clarification--I think I understand your situation a little better now. Let me ask you this, are the pages your reviews sit on significantly different than the pages with the same reviews that your competitors have? Meaning, is the only cross-over the review portion of the content?

To answer your adjusted question, I would personally say no--review content is not different than any other type of content that could be construed as duplicate. I am wondering if you could solve your issue by differentiating the pages you have with reviews that match your competitors by adding other types of content to them. This might help add valuable context for a search engine as well as differentiate the page enough to help an engine sort out that they are different even though there is some content overlap. Just a thought.

My other thought on this is that maybe it's worth setting up a test? This is certainly a gray area and there are probably people who would have differing opinions from mine, so perhaps a good next step is planning and working on a test to see what happens with a small portion of pages?

If the content isn't thin, it sounds like you shouldn't have an issue with an algo like panda, so I don't see a huge risk in the test from what I understand of your situation.

If I've got your site right, I'm guessing you're asking about pages like this: http://www.gooverseas.com/study-abroad/austria/ies-abroad/47342 and whether or not you'd allow them to be indexed because the reviews at the bottom might be on other review sites. Again, if the content on the rest of the page is significant and not the same as what's on other similar pages, I wouldn't worry to much about it. If it is, I'd run a test and see what you can do.

Without doing more research, that's the best I can offer at this point!

Oh, and you might want to look into this (2 of many)...

• http://www.gooverseas.com/leave-a-review?page=589
• http://www.gooverseas.com/leave-a-review?page=2

That does look like something that would get you hit by panda.

Hope that helps and sorry if I'm still not understanding the question correctly.

Personally, I wouldn't go back and forth. I'd pick one and push to the other depending on your goals. If you don't abuse you shouldn't have a problem IMO. You'll need to be extra careful if the sites are registered to the same people and sit on the same c-block.

Link where it makes sense, link to other places, and don't be too heavy-handed and it should be valuable if the sites are disconnected enough (not in the situation I described above re-registration, etc.) and it's actually good for users. Referral traffic should help you determine that.

Personally, if they don't provide value for someone searching, I'd leave them noindexed. No reason to run the risk of an algo adjustment because of thin content. Duplicate content is mostly an issue because it makes it hard for search engines to determine which version to rank.