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They way you are thinking is something that has bothered the community for more than a decade. Yes, you are actually right that keyword based domain names are ranking higher than non-keyword based. Most likely over time this will change. Something that I always seen with Google is that they are trying to implement changes slowly (meaning that over time these keyword based domain would most likely fade away).

But if you look at the issue at a marketing prospective does this client only want to rank for one keyword? Y/N?

• Yes: then go for it! if this eCommerce will not be targeting now or in the future other keywords then stick to a keyword based domain
• No: if you have a lot of different products and you are looking to rank for different keywords, its better to build a brand name for your company by having a brand name oriented domain name!

I tend to focus to the brandability of the domain name (short,catchy, .com, etc) rather than the keyword focus, UNLESS we you are going to target an extremely competitive keyword which by it self could bring tons of traffic!

Some articles worth reading are:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-your-domain-name-will-impact-seo-social-media-marketing/

http://www.motocms.com/blog/marketing/10-tips-choosing-domain-name/

The domain authority you are viewing is the one of blogspot.com and not your subdomain.

Unfortunately you can't expect high rankings just because you are using a subdomain from blogspot, although in some cases you maybe benefited in non-competitive keywords.

In your case, you should not expect much from a subdomain of this kind.

You could basically ensure that those who are submitting these articles are optimizing the work for you. Am referring to basic on-page optimization on at-least having an appropriate:

• meta title, which that would be the article name, or the first 40 characters of the article name + your forum name.
• Heading 1, which it will be the name of the article
• Heading 2 will be the sub headings, etc
• If the user is adding an image he can add some text to describe the image (thats you alt tag)

I believe the above are the very basic things you could ensure that your submission template does for you by default. Now as for the link coming to this page 'article page' make sure its keywords based link, article name for example.

 <code>You should have the below canonical tag in you meta information! This should be available for every page of your website!

Check also the information posted by Google (guidelines) on the below link:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en) PS. If you view the source code of this very page, it has it's own canonical! This is to help crawlers identify the uniqueness of the page, especially if you have two pages with similar or duplicated content.</code>

You can write a book on the subjec. Exact Match Domains or EMD work but not as much as what they used to. Google has reduced their strenght over the passed years or so, and most likely today are in their worst. So to anwser your question EMDs would maybe be a small benefit when used to target a keyword which is very competitive, but a greater benefit when used to target a non competitive keyword, but nonetheless valuable to you.

you can read more here: https://moz.com/blog/the-exact-match-domain-playbook-a-guide-and-best-practices-for-emds

Sometimes plain HTML based website are easier to optimize. Make sure you add the necessary meta tags, google analytics, headings, etc. you could manually create friendly urls with htaccess! also manually create a robots.txt file and even an xml sitemap which you should find many online portals that could create one for you. Because you will be working on just the code, don't forget to check if there is any broken links!

yes you can still work just fine the html websites!

Basically the domain: http://buy.gazelle.com/ has following:

DOMAIN AUTHORITY 66 /100

PAGE AUTHORITY 48 /100

Is not just another random website, since it has many links and especially links from Iphone related pages, e.g.:

http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-watch-trade-ins-coming-soon-says-swap-site-gazelle/

which the above has 52 DA (Page Authority)

Now as to the question about the the zero content, is not that much of a zero if you look at the customer comments. You basically don't expect much of a content from such a topic. So what customers say matters more than information about the product, which as you said above other pages on the website have such information. What Google views in this page, is that this a URL near the home page (1 step away), which it values this page more than the rest of the pages. It may also view that the website has a lot of information regarding the Iphone, thus making it authority for this topic.

Also the most important thing is that it has links to this specific page from many pages of this websites, although not appearing in MOZ Open Site Explorer at the moment.

Also the competitors ranking for this keyword, have a different meta-title, thus having lower chances of ranking above http://buy.gazelle.com/buy-used-iphone-5/

Yes if you apply the canonical, it will not appear in the SERPs.

By changing the category page to Samsung S6 News you could have the following results:

• The rankings will remain for the same category page.
• There will be a change towards the new product change but only if you allocate many links from the website but from other websites.
• Or, it could destroy even the current rankings as none of the two pages maybe fit to rank high for the given keywords.

Every change requires taking a risk. My action plan would be:

1. to have many links from all the websites to this newly designed product page.
2. ensure you have checked that technically the new page is optimised accordingly.
3. issue a canonical tag from the category page to be the same as the product page.
4. monitor and apply changes according to rankings

Hope you are successful at your task!

Am guessing the easier way out of things is just to say build a blog, which in a sense means more content, fresh content, involvement from the company and maybe new links. It also allows you to attract new keywords.. so blog is not such a bad idea. I just hope that you could find more people that would devote their time on their content and website rather than just say "ohh I have an seo to do that, he does everything and we don't wanna get involved"

but yes there is tens of other things other than a blog that are more important..

Am sure you could work on the optimization a bit more, especially of the images.

none the less if you require the same structure and you are unable to change the size then I would not worry so much about it. Having a fast website is only one of the hundred of different factors that affect SEO. Just work on the other factors and it will be fine!

To atart with the anwser, not recommended. Is best to have one single page ranking for such an important keyword. I would not worry so much about duplicate content, but more towards wasting your time and money.

Another solution is to develop this page, but force the page to take the roll of the category page. Maybe by issuing a 301 or just replacing the page. Am sure there is an easy way your developer could do this.

Yes, in an addition to the canonical tag you will need to setup the redirects. But am not sure how you would do that on microsoft server.

If you have new pages which have the same or similar content as the old pages, those old pages should be redirected to the new ones. If you are to use a ready made plugin or go for the traditional way thats up to you.

For significant keyword we would track both. google does indeed inter relate keywords found on a context either in a phrase or even in a page, but in most cases the rankings will be lower.

I am now thinking the possibility of using a canonical tag, so for Google there is only one page, the new one that you are trying to promote. So both pages should have as a canonical the URL of the newly designed page! hope this helps

having gone that road, never mess with black hat. Keep it nice and clean, work on your website, improve your on-page optimization, report them to be on the safe side, and wait...

the worse thing someone could do is fight fire with fire. Let them burn and stay clear. The only issue is if you are in a non competitive industry.. Is that the case?

We had a similar project few months ago, but from a .com to a .com

The website gain all possions over just few weeks, with an increase in rankings due to improvements to the on-page SEO.

maybe these blogs can help (both mention also updating your sitemap):

https://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains

In cases like this I always say: if it cost's nothing to remove it, then remove it!

you want see a boost, but atleast you have a better base for the future, since we just dont know how things will end up