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What happens when you use tags is that you create a page that is called www.your-domain.com/tag/tag-name. You also have the original blog post which is www.your-domain.com/blog-post.

They have two completely separate URLs, but they have the exact same content.

This is exacerbated when you use multiple tags because you increase the amount of chances for duplicate content to be created. And again it's even more expounded when you take into account the Categories, and Date Based Archives.

The solution is to use something like the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and use no-index for everything that you don't want indexed. In my case I want Categories indexed, so I no-index Tags and Date Based Archives.

If you use Yoast's plugin I have put together a fairly easy article on how to initially set it up, and it is pretty helpful in understanding some of the settings. It's geared mainly for photographers running their own site, but should be just as valuable to you.
You can find it here http://www.themoderntog.com/how-to-configure-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast-for-maximum-online-exposure

I would only run one SEO plugin at a time. Use either Yoast SEO or All In One SEO, but not both. They both change variables on the site that could conflict with one another.

I guest wrote an article for The Modern Tog on how to properly set up the Yoast SEO plugin.
http://www.themoderntog.com/how-to-configure-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast-for-maximum-online-exposure

In my opinion it's the best plugin out there. But you need to know how to effectively set it up. Once you get it set up, you only need to use it on a post by post basis.

Since you're describing directories, they may be on a level that is very deep. There was a blog post (I think it was a YouMoz post, but I can't find it) from last year sometime that talked about the depth of directories being an issue for not only Open Site Explorer, but Google as well.

If the links are too deep (like 6 or more levels):

• The bots and crawlers don't even bother crawling that deep into a site
• The page authority that particular page has may not even be worth much
• If the page is worth a lot, it's because other people are linking to it and would get indexed from those locations instead

If you want those pages to index, you will have to go about it yourself. I remember the article mentioned that you can Tweet the page (maybe in the style of "Hey, look I just got listed here..." ).
Also if it's something of interest you could send a link from your own website. I've done that with Bio's that are buried rather deep, like Flickr or About.me.

So it's not really Open Site Explorer and Google, but rather the depth at which your links are is more than likely the issue.

If while looking at a directory in the process of trying to get a link, I would look at it's Page Authority in Open Site Explorer or using the Toolbar to find out if the page you would be on is even on the map. If it has Page Authority, it has a good chance that it's indexed at Google as well, and may be a link of value.

Hi Mike,

I see. So theoretically speaking someone creates 10 different Tumbler accounts. Each with a unique domain (using the Tumbler unique domain method).

Yes, each one will be a completely different domain, but, also, they will more than likely be of the same 1 C-Block or maybe even the same 1 IP (not sure how Tumbler handles their subdomain IP structure). Since they are all hosted through Tumbler on their servers.

It's not the end of the world, but it's also not the link diversity that you thought you might get. Many people have Tumbler accounts and I don't think Google will treat each one as if it was owned by the same person.
That being said, if each of your Tumbler accounts use the same Anchor Text, or share similarities in other aspects (linking to other similar sites, being mostly linky over providing quality content, similar usernames, etc.) Google will more than likely be able to sniff that out and not see those as valuable links.

From a link building perspective it seems that there are better methods. In this hypothetical case, you'll have to remember that there are now 10 micro-sites that you have to generate some value to by building links to and content on for there to even be a little bit of juice to pass along to the site you really want to rank...
Quite a lot of hustle for a little bit of payoff.

I posted this article I wrote the other day for someone asking a similar question.

http://www.themoderntog.com/how-to-configure-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast-for-maximum-online-exposure

With the Yoast SEO Plugin I no-index everything except Categories. You can see how I set mine up under section 3. Indexation.

Here is the original question that Sha submitted:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-with-wordpress-dupe-issues

I know this almost a year after it was asked, but since I was doing a little research, I thought I'd provide a solution I came up with.

When I design a site, I want an attribution link on every page. I can't rely on a visitor saying "I love this site, who designed it?" 3 levels deep, not finding an attribution at the bottom, then thinking that they'd find it on the home page. It doesn't even make good usability sense.

So here's what I set out to do with my sites moving forward:

Still doing Sitewide links, but only the link on the Home Page will be followed. All other links will be NoFollowed.

If you use WordPress, you can use the following conditional statement. (Of course you'll want to replace your own Anchor Text and URL (unless you design pretty websites and want to give me the credit ).

if ( is_front_page() ) { echo "[](;</span><span style=) [   echo "http://flauntyoursite.com";   
   echo ">Flaunt Your Site](;</span><span style=)";

} else {   
   echo "[   
   echo "http://flauntyoursite.com";](;</span><span style=)[   
   echo " rel=";   
   echo "nofollow";   
   echo ">Flaunt Your Site](;</span><span style=)";
} ?>

It's important to leave the Space between the " and the rel=" otherwise it will collapse the url into something not readable and give you a 404 when you try to click it.

Hope this helps some of you.

Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags.

I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.

I use UBL for creating citations. It submits your Local Listing information to over 200 Buisness Listing sites like Yelp, and others. I don't use it primarily for link building purposes, as I don't know much about how quality the sites are or if they're even followed/no-followed links, some may not even have links, etc. They're primarily for the Citations to improve Local. So I pretty much forget about links when I do that.

And based on what I'm hearing from the Google Penguin update, Directories may not be that great of a place to build links currently either. Or at least there is a little more of a vetting process that link builders need to go through right now before selecting a directory to submit to.

The difference between something like:

http://www.nvclothing.com/product.asp?lt=c&catid=17763&sec=women&pfid=NVC02304

And what you could do with something like:

http://www.nvclothing.com/wildfox-couture-red-sparkle-heart-long-sleeve-tee

Is pretty significant. Keywords in the url are tremendously valuable and it's worth it to get a developer that is familiar with url rewrite for ecommerce sites like yours.

As far as the duplicate titles and content, big deal. Bear in mind, that you are not going to face any penalties, but you're missing out on performing as best you can and ranking for searches you should be, because the website is not following best practices by having unique content and titles for each and every page.

It's a bit of work, but totally worth the effort.  

Yes!!! If you somehow purchased or obtained a competitors domain, you should definitely use a 301 redirect to have all the links that they've accumulated point to your site.

As far as Local (Google Places). That will be a little different because the Places Page tend to be associated with the actual location, and the business name. So that one won't be as straightforward of a deal. It may involve taking down the Google Place page, which could push you up in Local results.

Well Open Site Explorer and the Toolbar try to predict what Google will see your site as. Domain Authority and Page Authority are values that the SEOMOZ engineers attempt to mimic the unknown Google algorithms, based on correlative data that they collect with Linkscape.

But yes, Google has algorithms that are based on trust and how well a site ranks, and how many links it has and what kind of sites they come from. They're obviously their own, and rather private.

Blog Commenting is huge for low to moderate competitive terms. In my experience I have many wedding photographers that rank only as a result of followed comment links.

In fact I know a group that have set up a system for announcing when they have posted something new, and the other members will go post a comment. It's a requirement to have No-Follow disabled.

The people posting get a link back to their site (it's obviously not a great link, but it's a link. It also isn't keyword targeted - too spammy for most site owners).

The site owners get lots of comments and their clients get to see that the photographer is popular and see great comments about themselves.

ETA: Sorry, I saw you were talking about No-Follow. Yes, there is some speculation that No-Follow is still passing some juice along. 
And it's also important to note that No-Follow isn't No-Index.

That means that Google can still crawl through the links that are No-Followed. The No-Follow is just to say that you don't "vote" for the site.

Well, the search engines are a little smarter than being limited to one word keywords. You can think in terms of 'Key Phrases.'

A lot of my clients deal with key phrases like "Indianapolis Wedding Photographers." or "New York Portrait Photographers" So it's completey fine to target "Real Estate San Diego." or "Real Estate Fort Lauderdale."

I would also use something like Google AdWords to come up with additional terms that are being searched that are similar to the one you plan to use so that you can see search volumes and potentially find better terms to target.

It could slightly if, and only if the hosting service you're moving to is a poor service, with frequent downtimes, and bad/spammy websites on the same IP (If shared hosting). I would just make sure you use a reputable hosting company. But for all intents and purposes, SEO is more of a Site issue rather than where it's hosted. So you shouldn't see any effective drop in the SERPs.

Well, if you don't want it to rank, I would at least follow accessiblilty best practices. And those would be:

• Make the images very clear to read
• Provide "Alt Attribute" text for each button that clearly says what each button is for
• Provide "Title" tags that identify the menu button (this is for screen readers that speak the content of a site to blind internet users).
• Make sure that you "map" the area of the button so that when a person hovers over the entire button, they get the little hand that indicates there is a link there.

Having an image menu is definitely not my first choice. I'd really look at the possibility of using Google Fonts, and something like the CSS gradient generator to get dynamic fonts and gradients if that is what you are trying to do before using images.

But, it's not the end of the world, I have done them in the past (years ago). You just want to make sure that it is very clear and readily readable for people that visit the site.

Hi Sophy, It's actually in line with what Marcus was saying. Your two pages are competing with each other. If you look at the Title Tag for the home page, there is nothing that says "eco products." But if you look at your category page, you'll see not only does the Title Tag say "Eco Products," but it's also in the URL. So you'll have to make a decision as to whether or not you'll want Eco Products to have it's own page or to have it show up on the home page. If you want it to show on the home page, you'll want that in the Title Tag, and you will need to rename that category page as well as renaming the Title Tag.

Well 301's typically have a tiny falloff of link juice (I've heard somewhere in the 5% range anecdotally). But i would think about what makes sense to your users over that. Does having that .html make the urls harder to remember for a user to type in? Is it .htm or .html?

I don't use .html because it is an extra thing to remember. And by not using it, I can have shorter urls that focus more on being simple and having keywords.

As far as 301ing, you could probably write something in your .htaccess file that automatically does that for the entire site.

But I would be inclined to get rid of them.

Totally agree with Nicholas and Michael. The demographic is not SEO's and techy people.

Like your example illustrates, my clients are photographers, so Pinterest is a huge focus when I'm working with them. My company actually developed the first Pinterest WordPress plugin just for that reason. We knew it would be huge for our clients. But hasn't really done much for me in the SEO side of things. It has helped a little for the design side of the business though. So if you're a company that has web design as a service it could help you there.

I completely wholeheartedly agree with EGOL.

It will also depend on the end use. I like to coach my photographer clients to use unique Titles and unique Post Headings for one reason only: Clients.
My photographers will post the photos in their blog to show off for their clients and other photographers (and generating traffic).

I like to use the Title Tags for keywords (maybe it was a wedding shot at a certain wedding venue location that can be used for Chunky Middle searches.
In that case it might look like:
Hotel Del Coronado Wedding Photography | John Doe Wedding Photographers

But for the client who won't necessarily be looking in the Title Tag, and the Post Header is more visible, you can do something like this:
John & Jane's Wedding | Hotel Del Coronado

Both have keywords in them, but one is more user friendly and appealing than the other.

But feel free to make them the same or get creative with them.

For 500 visitors a day, I think Cloud and CDN are a bit overkill. Most cheap shared servers have a 99% uptime.

I think it really depends on how critical you have 100% uptime. (and even then most say 99.99%).

CDN would be beneficial if you have lots of images and you are international.

There are cheaper solutions for CDN as well. Amazon Web Services is based only on what you use.

There's a plugin in WordPress called W3 Total Cache which caches your whole site (rendering it pretty under heavy traffic), plus it will tie into AWS. The plugin is free, and then you're only using what you are using from Amazon.

Again, I just think it depends on how big you are, and 500 unique visitors isn't really a lot to handle for most hosting accounts.

Haha! yeah. It was the first one, but it was coded pretty poorly (I outsourced the writing of it). http://flauntyoursite.com/pin-it-on-pinterest/
And the feedback we've been getting is that users want to use it quite a bit different than we had envisioned. So we're heading back to the drawing board with it. And I'm proud that we got something out there.

What I have planned for the 1.0 version will blow away what even Pinterest is doing with the bookmarklet.

I appreciate your stoke

This looks like this is the backend of some CMS (content management system). Are you using a service or website builder?

The HTML Text would more than likely be the text that you want in the body area of your webpage. If your webpage is about a certain product, you would write descriptive information about your product. If it's about a service, then describe your service.

How long it is really depends. If it's a huge topic it could be a few thousand words. There are really no hard and fast rules, it will all boil down to if you want to rank for something and how much information you need to put on the page for both ranking, as well as providing good information to the reader.

The purpose would be to provide your website visitors information about what you are offering or writing about on your website.

Hi Mike,

I know you asked this a few weeks ago, and you may have already found your answer.

But to answer this, no. Tumbler essentially is just redirecting your A-Record domain to a sub-domain and giving it a nice url.

So what happens is the url website2.com (from your example above) is staring from zero. It also means that if you develop some quality trust and authority on that particular domain, you won't be able to take it with you if you want to use that domain for a site.

The url is essentially invisible, so whatever links you're sending isn't really to  website2.com, but to tumbler.website2.com.

Unless Tumbler offers a 301 redirect option when you want your domain back, the domain website2.com will have no value to it.

I hope that answers your question.

Short answer: Highly doubt it.

Long answer: I haven't seen anything from any of the ranking factors Moz, or anyone else produces, that would indicate so.
And under normal linking I can't imagine a situation that would cause a User based issue (like increased bounces because you got launched in another window), unless it's really excessive.
For example, I deal with professional photographers sites, and they sometimes have a portfolio site, and a blog, and sometimes they are two different systems with two different experiences and often times open the other in a new window. That is very annoying and a can kill a user's experience and they end up with high bounce rates.

I think if you're just sending links to other useful sites, target="_blank" is perfectly fine to use. I do it on my site all the time.

Oh, gotcha. Glad I could help.

Hi Ryan,

Yes, I just did a search for the text I found in the Lightbox description for the Coco & Max logo. Right there. I've attached a couple images to show what I found.

Is this underneath a Javascript?  I'd be interested to learn about the differences between different scripts as I see myself building sites that I would like to use the most SEO beneficial one.

coco-max-lightbox.png coco-max-html.png

And... as it turns out, I was part of the problem. I had a DoFollow directory on my site that people could use for a little Blog Love action.
There was also a thread on a photography group that has been going on since 2009, that I encouraged people to use over the years.

I've written a blog post here http://flauntyoursite.com/jig-is-up/ denouncing the practice. I have a bit of clout in the photography communities, so hopefully this spreads out there.

Marie, if you wouldn't mind reading this and letting me know if there's anything you think should be added, I'd appreciate it.

I let people down big time. I hope the word can get out there and fix this thing.

Well, there's a ton of ways you can do that.

In fact your whole site could be WordPress, and then you wouldn't have to use Dreamweaver to create and edit your site in the future. (Juts a thought).

But yes, you can have either multiple WordPress blogs, or you can have one blog, and only show certain categories for the pages you want... There are about 5 different ways to get what you would want done.

The site that you reference just looks like 1 WordPress website. So you may just need a WordPress expert to show you what WordPress does and can do for you.

Thanks Marie,

I will shoot you an email. Most of my clients are photographers (I do custom website design as well as SEO), so if this is something that's happening more and more, it'd be good to have a solution for them.

I'd have to see the site in question, and see what you'll be adding to the site.

You would use a "Table" for content, but you would use a DIV floated to the right to make a sidebar.

If you don't have any content on your site currently, some will help. But it sounds like you have a foundational problem with your website already. Having a well crawlable and technically sound website is the first step in putting together a good SEO campaign.

Looking at WordPress.org will give you a very small taste of what can be done with WordPress, but if you look at sites that have been built with it, it will give you a better understanding of what's capable.
At it's core, all WordPress is doing is managing the content and displaying it how you've told it to do.

OK. Well, those landing pages can just be regular Pages in WordPress. You could have a drop down menu saying something like areas served or something.

You can even add in the images that you have already done. I'd consider getting rid of all the text as images and make that stuff actual text though. There is good content in your specials that would be good to crawl.

BTW, I love the SLO/Central Coast area. I like to drive up through there from San Diego every once in a while.

Well, looking at your site, I'd say that you have a decent amount of content. But it's lacking a good foundation.

Will going to WordPress improve what your site... Well, it depends on how you create the pages, plus you'll have to make sure that all the urls are matching your old ones, and a whole slew of considerations you'd be faced with when migrating.

Based on where you're at, there is quite a bit of work either way you  look at it. If you look at the SEO Pyramid http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundamentals-pyramid You'll see that there are certain things you're missing from that first foundation step on your site.
I would spend some time here: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo and see hat you're missing on your site.

From there you can look a little more into whether you want to switch to WordPress or something else.

I do think that since you have a fair amount of content, simply dropping that into a WordPress site that you slowly build and get used to on a test site (hidden from robots) would be a big help for you to move to that. Using Dreamweaver is pretty outdated for a lot of things (I'm sure there are some advanced users still using it), but WordPress and other CMS's are so much easier to use.