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I believe that google started blogger to make blogging immediately easy for people who have no technical inclination and who would not want to pay the costs of hosting a website. In my opinion, a law firm is not an appropriate user of Blogger.  They should have the content on their own website where it can be used to impress their visitors and demonstrate why the visitor should hire this law firm. Lots of people think that links from blogger to their website are going to be valuable.  That is only true of outside websites are linking to the blogger blog.  And when that happens only a fraction of the power will pass to the law firm site.  However, if the blog is on the law firm site and an outside website links to a blog post then the entire law firm site will benefit from that link. If I owned a site like the one that you are talking about, I would look at the existing blogger blog and if it does not have very many links then I would move all of the posts to the law firm site.   All future blogging would be on the law firm site. All of my blogs are on my own domain.

Laura, Wordpress.com has a Offsite Redirect service that you can purchase for something like $12 per year, or something like that, and it provides a 301 redirect to your new site. If you purchase that service and upload your backup to your new domain, you'll be in good shape on the duplicate content issue. If you just delete the old site and not pay for the redirect service, there will likely be overlap in Google's index of identical content from two different domains and unless you get a lot of good links going to your new site immediately, your old site would probably be recognized as the authoritative one for the first 4-6 months or so.

Hey Mat Interesting response you've written. It appears that Post Panda, Google has cracked down on article submissions i.e. not giving much value at all? So would you agree, that one is better off writing an article and posting it in their own blog, and in their own social media pages? Cheers George

Hi Mike, just to be clear on what Thomas is suggesting, as I think he might be getting mixed up between noindex and robots.txt. If you simply add noindex,nofollow to a bunch of pages, this could still get you in trouble. Noindex doesn't mean DO NOT CRAWL, it means DO NOT INDEX. There's a big difference. If something has noindex, Google can still crawl that content but they won't put it in the search results. The only way to completely make sure that Google won't crawl content is by blocking it in robots.txt or in your case putting it behind a username and password. So to answer your question, yes it's fine as long as it's behind a login, Google can't punish you for it since they can't see it. I hope this helps, Craig

Thanks for the reply.  The link is great! And other than "rel=author" (which I know shows up ), are there other "critical" ones to have?

Yes! As I mentioned in my response above my main source of traffic was Google and the traffic has come down significantly after this.

Patrick, as  I understand what you want to accomplish, the point 3. you mention above is backwards.  The (sample) 301s you want to put in place are from pages on south-africa-holiday.mobi. to southerncircle.com.  Here are some more resources for you http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz

That's no problem at all, as long as the listings are clearly marked as ads and links include the nofollow attribute! This is spelled out pretty clearly in the updated "link scheme" document if you need support: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en "Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines: Text advertisements that pass PageRank Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank"

Wellness, There is no "panda-friendly posting ratio" metric that a blog needs to follow.  However, you should consider the overall engagement of the content you create and how more or fewer posts impact it.  If, by creating more posts, your quality goes down and your engagement suffers, it's time to reduce your posts to the point where engagement for any post is above what it was for the previous post.  Eventually you will reach an approximate equilibrium. That equilibrium is the number you are looking for and it is also the number you are looking to exceed with any particular post. By the way, here's a nice article by Carrie Hill on ways to measure engagement: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-measure-content-engagement-effectiveness-with-analytics-wordpress-154198  , as well as pretty detailed slide deck by Mounia Lalmas from Yahoo: http://www.slideshare.net/mounialalmas/measuring-userengagement

Thanks for the report, Jesse.

hi thanks for that. The reason i was looking to submit to them to gain more subscribers to my feed, after what you have said i think i will leave it, many thanks

Sorry 'bout that. I can't help you on that question.

Yes, the tool will show if your business is using publisher markup.

Don't ask us. Look at your analytics.  Look at your income.  Look at your visitor counts. Look at your links, likes and social shares. One problem with big news sites is that they have waaaayyyy too much content and that makes it hard to manage.  Many of them use category pages to keep the old content available.  They have category pages for just about every city and person and organization that has ever been mentioned on their site.  Then when that topic is mentioned in a story it gets a hyperlink to the proper category page. The category pages can be enormously valuable and rank in the SERPs, pull in traffic, acquire links, likes tweets more.

Glad you love it! They are both custom systems that we are using.

You may use this SEOgadget tool. It is thought for Infographics, but it works perfect for photos too (and aren't both images?). For reverse images searches you can use http://www.tineye.com/, but it still present the one photo per time issue...

If you look at my blog I have really struggled with really good (low / no cost) blog images. I came across this guys site today - it's totally devoted to great blog images and has a lot of great content on it - http://www.betterblogimages.com/the-1-blogger-friendly-website-for-finding-citing-free-images/ Another good article on the subject - http://www.incomediary.com/how-to-use-photos-in-your-blog-to-make-it-more-interesting And my favorite on the subject I have come across in awhile - http://www.incomediary.com/how-to-make-your-blog-posts-stunningly-beautiful-images Good luck! Matthew

In addition to what EGOL suggested, which is right on - you could also check to see which pages are indexed but not receiving traffic (for say the last 3 months). I would do this by crawling the site and comparing an export of your product pages to an export of your organic landing pages from analytics. Any products that Google has indexed, but not ranking or returning in search are good ones to noindex until you make them better. -Dan

This is a good book: Return on Engagement. It's a fast read and covers the basics. Another good book is Content Strategy for the Web (more strategic than the one above). Good luck!

I write for one website but my topics might include: insurance, education, art, bulk commodities, space,  wildlife, construction or economics.  Lots of writers can write about many topics and lots of people are polymathic.  Most of the people at google I will bet are polymaths.