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To start out with, I'd think more along the lines of unique content for each product vs. for each keyword, but yes  you want unique content for each of those pages and each page should be focused on one keyword.

John, Promoting a single blog post via 20 bookmark sites with or without duplicate descriptions isn't going to do anything for the post or your site's authority site, one way or the other.  At scale however, if this is the only method being used, it's going to hurt you.  I would recommend taking a closer look at the other ways your vendor is promoting your site and I'd start first with examining the quality of the content.  If it's not of the quality you would be proud to show your college English teacher, put before a peer review, or frame on the wall of your store, I'd be thinking of looking for another vendor.

When questions like this pop up I feel its best to reference Rand's intro to SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) specifically slides 40-47 which cover site structure. Separate sub-domains are often viewed as separate sites so you are now building separate value identities instead of one. If it's important to you to give them all a separate blog rather than a central one with multiple authors, then you can still achieve this by simply giving them separate sub-directories. Sub-domains will not pass value the same way, and will be focused on different content and not associated with the main site. Back when we had popular sub-domain hosting services like Lycos this is what seperated sitea.lycos.com from siteb.lycos.com and the same sort of thing would happen to your blogs. If you want them to self promote and the SEO value and content association of the mainsite to flow down to them (and theirs to flow back up) structure it as www.yoursite.com/blog/author1 for each author and you'll be good to go!

Make sure you're organized! Following hundreds means nothing when you don’t take the time to actually use the tweets for anything. The key to using Twitter, and avoiding drowning in the constant feed is to group those you follow into lists. Without organizing the hundreds of accounts I followed, I couldn't make use of the endless content. Organizing the accounts I follow allows me to easily see tweets from a specific group say, local news, or competitors, or local partners etc., without having to scan my entire feed. Taking the initial time to organize the accounts you follow saves you loads of time overall!

thanks for this, we have tried re-writing the articles but we would be spending our life time doing this. every week we are spending hours contacting people over copyright theft. it is getting beyond a joke.

The solutions can be a bit site-dependent, but rel=prev/next is Google's approved choice for paginated content.  It does depend a bit on how complicated your searches are (are there also sorts, filters, etc. that create unique URLs?) and how many pages you're talking about. An older option some SEOs still prefer is to META NOINDEX, FOLLOW pages 2+ of results. Adam Audette has some good resources on the subject: http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494 For products, it's a bit trickier. If you're talking about hundreds of variations, and they're very, very similar, then I think rel=canonical can be a good choice. Post-Panda, the risks of indexing hundreds of similar pages are worse than the benefits of potentially ranking for a few product variations. There's no one "right" answer, though - it's always a trade-off. In most cases, I think focuses your ranking power on your core, unique products is usually a good idea.

thank you for the advice

I think the video Bereijk is helpful, but it also might be comforting to know that a lot of good sites, including Moz.com and Rand's blog often post links to their favorite content or make lists of recommended resources. Here are some examples: From one of my favorite blogs, GetElastic,com: http://www.getelastic.com/choice-ecommerce-links-june-2013/ From Rand's blog: http://moz.com/rand/recommended-stuff/ I think if you curate content and put it all in one place in a unique and meaningful way it could actually be very helpful to visitors and end up helping you SEO. There's another site I saw recently that had snippets of SEO News at the bottom of the page with links for visitors to read the rest of the articles, but I can't find it at the moment. I thought it might have been Ahrefs.com or Majestic SEO, but it wasn't either of those. Does this sound familiar to anyone? If I find it I will come back and post it.

In reality this isn't a huge issue IF you either get them to provide a snippet of the content (first paragraph) with a link to your article to be able to read more OR you ask them to set your site's content page as canonical. This will show Google that your content is the original version. The chances of getting another site to set up canonical tags just for you are quite frankly slim. Their sites are probably automated and not manually edited. Personally I prefer to write something completely unique on the high profile site.

Thanks for this. we did fill out a form with google but heard nothing back. at one time we had 30 sites with the same content as ours, when we contacted one of these sites and threatened them with legal action, they were very worried and a solicitor contacted us and told us that they were given the content by a third party. I cannot go to much into this for obvious reasons but the company in question is a franchise company who feel scared about the service so they use underhand tactics. What we need to do is to increase the brand exposure on google so the brand is always displaying in the top of google and people do not see these silly posts or bad articles.

Thanks Sarah. Good luck!

This could be because of your internal linking or external for that matter. if links are passing green car relevance and PR to one page more than the other this could be the result.

Thank you.

Hi Amar I would definitely advise against it - if you have pages with similar content, you could fall foul of the Google Panda algorithm and be penalised for having duplicate content. I would highly recommend producing unique content for each product page, if you intend to rank each one.  Obviously some things might not be changeable, such as product specifications.  If you keep these on the page, you must add some additional content that will show Google that the page is unique.  Otherwise, Panda may strike. The alternative is to rank a content hub or category page that links to all of these pages instead, rather than trying to rank the individual pages themselves. Hope this helps.

Hi Charles, Rather than diving straight in and trying to find inspiration for content, I'd actually suggest you take a step back and develop a process for determining your blog's editorial calendar in the long term. You need to start by identifying who your audience for this content is - then look at what they care about, where the content gaps are in your niche, what USP you could potentially offer and thereby develop a real identity for your blog. If you manage to get these ideas nailed down, the idea generation process should be easy for you. You can do keyword research to find potential topics, respond to industry news, contact a group of your audience to ask what they're specifically interested in knowing about etc etc.. I think process can often be a scary word, but the point of processes is to make you more efficient and for something like working out editorial ideas for a blog - it's absolutely the best way to ensure you're continually creating things your audience will care about. SEO is obviously a very crowded market place in terms of blogs - this gives you both advantages and disadvantages. Advantages in that you have loads of examples of what's been successful and unsuccessful before and can therefore quickly find some potential content gaps - i.e. I think there's space for some good blogs about the intersection between UX and SEO. Your disadvantage is that it'll be tough to get your voice heard among the rest of the good blogs out there, so you really need to nail down, at least in your own mind, why anyone should read your blog - so you can create content that fits in with this mantra and therefore creates an identity for you. Regarding YouTube content - I'd recommend using the YouTube keyword tool to work out what people are searching for and therefore see if any topics you could talk about/create a video on have search volume. If there are opportunities there, YouTube can be a great way to increase awareness around your blog. Hope that's useful, Phil.

Dear Chris, Thanks. Now all the pages are indexed.

A subdomain isn't always considered a new site / domain in itself. In fact, other than blog platforms or websites that offer ugc subdomains, most subdomains seem to be closely correlated with the main domain by Google. There are many examples including the main domain taking a penalty, bringing all the subdomains down with it, or vice-versa. Or you can just search 'bodybuilding', and see how Google integrates subdomains into sitelinks, which is a clear sign that Google sees those subdomains as part of the same entity as the domain itself. Of course, to be safe, you should always try to opt for a folder option instead of a subdomain, since, as Rand put it: "Subdomains SOMETIMES inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics between one another Subfolders ALWAYS inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics across the same subdomain" If you have no option as setting it as a subfolder, the next best option is indeed a subdomain. A root domain is the worst option of the three.

Guest posts are being targeted actively by Google - so aren't necessarily a good idea just for SEO. If you are going to go that route, then just make sure that: the blog is indexed it's relevant to your niche the link they give you is 'do follow' Good luck

Fantastic real life test and observation. Highly appreciated!