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Hi Samuel Scott Thank you for your response.  I am still having trouble understanding all of this.  Are you able to check through our site to see if we have everything in order for the rel=canonical?I went through the guidelines provided by Moz.  I will be making some updates to the content so they are more localised.  Unfortunately due to our merchant services, we can only accept NZ Currency which is a bummer, it would of been great to advertise USD and AUD on all the relevant sites.  I have also updated the countries in google web masters as well. The only thing I wasn't so sure about is the rel-alternate-hreflang you mentioned, and funny enough I saw that my competitor had this, which caught my attention hence this post, and I can only see that the language tags are the only thing set on our site. I have talked to my developer about this, and he doesn't understand what needs to be set accordingly. Thanks for your help.

You mention that its only been a month. My gut feeling would be to say this really isn't long enough to see any tangible results in regards to SEO activity. As previously suggested aim to get your blog on your domain as quickly as possible and work your content marketing efforts from there!

Hi I thought that there was a good chance that you had been hit by Panda at some point as your site content was so thin and the little content you have could be even considered over-optimised purely there to rank for a term in the search engines. Every time Google brings out an update there are changes to how it looks at sites and even though you haven't been doing anything to yours it could have triggered a penalty as it matched the relevant criteria of the that specific algorithm update. Have a read of these two resources I think you will find them interesting - http://marketingland.com/panda-4-1-changes-content-performance-strategy-103850 and http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/panda-4-1-analysis/ Don't forget Moz's Google Update History - http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change In terms of your site and how to fix it I would stick with what I suggested originally and make sure you start building a great information resource for visitors - then more will come! Focus on really beefing up that copy on each of your pages. Also consider employing some form of review system and encourage visitors to review the different places hotels, restaurants, etc. Also make sure that you have submitted your XML sitemap URL to Google Webmaster Tools - plugins such as Yoast SEO will automatically update your sitemap when new content is added. Remember Googles aim is to serve the most relevant content for a search term whilst also providing the best user experience. Again I hope this helps

Thank you, I appreciate the answer

We have this problem today. We publish a post, it gets picked up by another site that typically outranks because it is a great blog/site and they outrank us for our own story. They always link back to our original post, but very rarely do they use canonical which would be the preferred method. Theoretically, Google is supposed to know who the original source for the content is and rank accordingly, but I have seen and continue to see the other sites rank higher. However, I do see as time goes by we eventually start to outrank these sites for our posts. As a bonus though they are backlinks to the blog. So in the end, if you are borrowing or syndicating someone else's post, always link back to them as the source, this is best practice and as an example of who does this, news agencies. They will syndicate content from the original on their blog and link back to it. As for the B post linking to the C post, I would think this could backfire as the content on B is duplicate to both C and A but doesn't give the proper credit to A. It may outrank but over time could be penalized for thin or duplicate content.

well said

How delightful that you refer to Invisionpower as I recently took the software for a test drive and plan to purchase it in January A question though that has been troubling me. I use a paid for hosting service, which forwards to one of my sub-domains. The problem is I have nearly 7k pages of duplicate content (all from the forum), I really want to add a no follow and then remove the forum pages from the search index and thus remove all of the duplicate content. Though I'm worried that adding no follow to the sub domain may impact on the main site. I have a lot of page one search positions, many long tails which combined result in a lot of visits, but I also have a couple of short phrases that get 50% of the visits alone, so I can't risk making any changes, actually I'm pretty terrified to make any changes, just in case all of my website pages are removed from the index.

So yes, Google is starting to factor in mobile user experience as one of it's many ranking factors. It is still a bit unknown how this works -- machine learning or human review? -- and exactly how much you're going to get dinged. But if you can't get the budget, then that's a different issue. You need to be making a solid business case for spending the budget to get a mobile site. You need to dive into your analytics and figure out the user experience for someone coming in on mobile. Figure out how much money you're losing because of this experience. Figure out how much potential traffic you'll get. Figure out how best to tackle the project. (Depending on your site, you might not be able to make everything mobile right away. Example, Moz's site is terrible for mobile, which we're planning on fixing. However, the blog and Moz.com marketing/resource pages are the priority. Putting our software into a mobile experience is a different project.) Best of luck!

Happy to help!

As far as I know, you can always tell Google to ignore links when it's hurting you in Webmaster Tools, right?

Linkedin sponsored updates can be geo-targeted, but they can also be expensive. It's worth investigating.

Hi Thank you so much for your recommendation for the Redirection plugin. I have installed it and it is working fine.

Thanks for the link. Interesting. Looks like deleting posts could have many unintended consequences. I think I'll hold off for a bit.

This is something that I am very familiar with. We are in almost the exact same situation. Matt Cutts at Google is pretty responsive on this subject. Here is a video where he describes in detail how Google views duplicate content : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA My professional opinion is that you should try to get as much unique content on the page as possible. I have been successful at getting my customer reviews to appear on site and in the source code of the page. I believe this has directly helped the rankings of my product pages. If everyone has the same content there is really nothing to separate its relevancy in the eyes of the engine and most times the searcher as well. If you are all on the same level where is your competition? What sets you apart from their pages. Customer reviews, in my opinion, are the holy grail of on page content. If you have no product reviews (tsk tsk) then you can implement in house reviews, like a manager's review or have someone in the company write, in their own words, some informative article between 500-600 words to help give you content that is unique. Content is king, even duplicate relevant content can be harmful in my opinion. Just because it won't cause a Panda penalty doesn't necessarily mean that the content isn't negatively effecting your SEO.

I think a good little memory hook here is hard answers make for easy links - or, in more content marketing times - hard answers make for well ranking content. -- What I mean here is that if you look around, find a question that is being asked but there is no good or really, truly authoritative answer then you have a solid starting point. This still requires you to do all the donkey work but that is the name of the game to some extent! Hope that helps! Marcus

What they said. or create another website. Link back to your site. I'm thinking we got baited in to answering here as it might just be a random post lol. Mods please check

You can search for blogs/sites with tools like feedly.com and check Domain Authority with opensiteexplorer.org, yes it's a irritating labour intensive manual work.

Buzzsumo is another good source of trending information. It's a hubspot product that allows you to search for what's being shared (popular) by domain or key phrase. There are free and paid versions of the tool. The free one is probably good enough for your purposes.

thinkseo, You might want to provide them with some ideas related to what they might say on the page. I find people really just need to get a sense of what to write. Or perhaps you can say you'll do it for a little extra $. Here's one link on creating better services/about pages http://www.seocopywriting.com/content-marketing/7-hot-tips-for-writing-a-top-converting-services-page/

"Keyword phrases are highlighted with bold/italic/sizing/etc as appropriate", if you would do this purely for SEO I would say not to do it because it looks pretty unnatural.