Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mark Are you all set with this? I'm crawling the site now with Screaming Frog and am not seeing the 404 errors any longer, so perhaps it has been fixed? -Dan

so if u had a news site would u go the way the sun does by having an introduction with a picture or would u reduce the pictures and go with headline titles instead

Brilliant, Marcus.  Thumbs up!  Diane, be sure to mark his answers as 'Good Answers" Cheers!

Hi Daniel, I can put you in touch with one of the best fitness trainers (certainly in my area) who is actually very active on the web and his own blog. Would this help? Matt

Hi Mat, You have provided some great clarification, thank you. Now, I only have one thing to be sorted out: Should I add the DMCA protection badges to all pages with unique content, as soon as they are created? My dilemma is, that let's say I find my content somewhere else. I will submit a take down request through DMCA. How it is going to be proven, whose site owns the original content? I am definetely not an expert in this, but it can easily happen, that my page is not the older one, and the page where my content is placed to, simply just changed its previous content, but the page itself is older than my relevant page. Thank you

I was thinking of setting up our blog as website.com/blog, however our web support advises against it as they said using wordpress pluginscould cause security holes, Im not sure what to do?

Would you recommend the rel=canonical tag for other page types as well, like informational pages? For example, Website B has been given permission by the content-creating Website A to use A's original content on B's site. Should site B be required to include the rel=canonical tag on each URL where they are using copied content? The content still exists on Website A - is using rel=canonical the best way to ensure they continue to get credit for it?

I'm guessing you've heard the famous line, "build quality content and it will build links for you".  If not, I hate that line as well because it's hard to get links as a brand new website.  However, that's the sad truth about the industry.  Quality user experience builds website rank.  Granted there are a few things you can do in the beginning.  I suggest looking at the directories here on SEOMoz for a few ideas of getting initial links.  http://www.seomoz.org/directories Also focus on your on page optimization.  Don't cannibalize yourself trying to rank for the same keyword on every page.  Craft your site so it is user friendly and provides real information. When it comes down to it, there is not a magic "wave your wand" formula that makes SEO easy.  There is a reason people are paid to do SEO.

Thanks for peeking.  I thought it could take up to two weeks though?  When I tested in rich snipnets, my photo popped up and said I was verified.    I hope I really am  - yikes.

I'm new but yes, I love it here.  I joined after feeling like this is a great group who can definitely help me grow and hopefully I can help a bit as well.

Hello Ben! Yes still indexed, Ive never really ranked very well but I had alot of Long tail searches that came up, but most of it was on the DUP content pages. With thousands of pages how can I Noindex duplicate content? Thank you

As long as you have otherwise good content on your pages, I would think it highly unlikely to cause you any problems. We do it all the time (we're an online newspaper) and adding highly relevant videos increases the time that readers stay on a story. For example, we added some 2-3 minute videos to popular stories. Adding the videos more than doubled the on-page time.

thank you, i will keep these points in mind.

Amazon has a very good model. User has to have an account <-This makes a person have to register an account use rCaptcha to weed out bot accounts) User verified purchase (can't review what you didn't buy from them) <- this prevents anybody from posting a review whom hasn't purchased it directly from Amazon or affiliates Report Inappropriate feature this allows users to report spam and the like, amazon then can look at the post and make a decision to remove it. Instead of looking at 1 million reviews a day you may only have to look at 10,000 spam reports. (example) This model only works if you have a lot of sales. If you're trying to build unique user driven content then this make not be the best solution. Hope it helps

Hard to say - but I see the following potential issues: there's really not that much to say about a piece of furniture.  It would be hard enough to craft one really good sales page for a walnut sleigh bed, let alone, original and interesting pages about that product 5 times.  Eventually you're going to be creating thin content for the lower priority of those sites. product names usually end up being used for the title tag and the H1 tag of an ecommerce product page.  Given that you're products are being named the same across all 5 of the sites, and that they are all running in the same ecommerce software, that's going to leave a pretty clear footprint that the sites are all related. IF you're successful in this, you're going to be competing against yourself in the SEO rankings.  In that case, you'd probably want to consider about how the title tags and the page descriptions are going to look, stacked up against each other. given that the sites are hosted on a 'multi-store' system, they'll probably be hosted on the same IP address, which is something that all search engines use as a clue to find relationships between different sites. Hope that helps!

http://www.swellpath.com/2012/09/your-3-page-agency-website-sucks-for-seo/ found it!

Sure, have a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo Using reverse proxy, there are no technical/security concerns.

"... the main thing is conversion and getting them into someplace valueable for them and you." Well played Brian. That is the perfect way to think about it. Thanks for your help. Mike UPDATE: By "getting rid of" I just mean we are not going to link to them internally and that the videos themselves will no longer exist. We plan to either redirect those URLs to either product pages or to pages requesting a demonstration.

You'll absolutely want to get the blog moved to the subdirectory. Tell your developers they must use 301 redirects to point the traffic from the old subdomain pages to the new location. As long as the blog's site structure and URLs remain the same, that will be a pretty straightforward redirect to write. Once they've done the redirect, test by going to a bunch of the old page addresses and making sure you end on the new pages. Also use a header-checking tool on the new pages to confirm that it's actually showing that 301 redirect was used (not a 302, for example) The sooner you do this the better, so that new incoming links will be pointing directly to the new location instead of being redirectd through the old location. if you want best bang for the buck, check for the strongest links that currently point to the old site and see if you can get their webmasters to update them to point to the new URLs. Even pages that are redirected don't pass 100% of their authority through the 301 to the new page, and there is evidence to indicate that the 301s pass less authority as they age. All good reasons to get the move done as soon as practical. Good luck! Paul P.S. If your blog has a name that people may begin to recognize & remember  (ie that is different from the site name) strongly consider naming the folder /the-blog-name instead of just /blog. Every bit of distinctiveness helps!

Ps The content is like twitter I would use a site and blog + twitter to post short posts as twitter will get it out to many more people then you are getting now using WordPress.com This might help http://www.emagineusa.com/blog/seo-best-practices-for-writing-website-content.htm All the best, Tom