Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Have you read Google's blog post about high-quality content and sites? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Thanks. I think I will stop accepting off-topic anchor text links on guest posts to be safe.

One of my blogs fell from a PR4 to a PR3 but traffic might be the best in 5 years. The toolbar page rank is a pretty poor indicator and I prefer to look at Mozrank and SEOMoz Page Authority. Here is a good post on the topic of why toolbar PR is a poor metric: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2011/06/pagerank-8-reasons-dont-care.htm

Hi beeneeb, I will be using the blog to create credibility and draw in perspective customers on topics within my industry.  It will be a blog within a website.  Thanks for the answers everyone!

Thank you Theo for your response, I really appreciate your time and answer.

I have an active blog getting hundreds of posts per month with most posts going into two categories (one by topic and one by geography).  It has nearly 200 categories.  We don't use tags.  What we have is wild enough - but those categories pull in an awful lot of traffic and on average get a couple of posts each per week.

Your idea of offering links to other content written by the same author is quite sound. The question is how to best implement that idea. You specifically ask about writers who have an extensive content history. You could use a system simliar to what Matt Cutts uses on his blog. If your writer has a similar history to Matt, I would prefer having the 2005 - 2009 entries grouped by year rather then by month. This change would consolidate 50+ links down to 5.

Thanks for the reply! It's definitely tough to kill content (especially when you paid a writer to do an interesting story or event coverage). So using your suggestion, I looked at a minor section, thats new, but has suffered over the past 30 days. 130 articles  73% bounce 73% exit 1m TOS 26k pageviews of those, 35 articles have 100% bounce rate, under 10 pageviews, under 1min TOS. I assume applying a simple metric such as this, site wide, and unpublishing articles that fall under this category, would help clear the brush away from the newer content?

Exactly! It's good time to revise all the titles! I think it's way better than 301-ing the whole blog. You never know how this may affect our ranking. It prob. would be fine, but you never know Thanks again!

I've previously used LivePerson. Not difficult to put into the site and pretty easy to use. If someone's on it during the workday, it'll chime when someone is requesting a chat. If you are offline there are options to forward questions to an email address or alert your mobile phone. They can also customize their chat window to fit with your site design and layout, etc... Not sure if it's the best but pretty reasonably priced and easy to use.

I would welcome your feedback on my blog - http://blog.onlinemediadirect.co.uk It is listed on Google news so thats where I get most of the traffic.

Interesting article - thanks for sharing

One thing to consider with site structure is your analytics. Using a directory structure can give you some valuable information in your analytics -- you can look at a particular category of product in aggregate and see how it is doing, if it is set up properly. This post from LunaMetrics has some more ideas for setting up a GA-friendly site at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.

This is really exciting!  I've configured the code to put a line after the video that says, "Want this video on your website? Here's the code:" and then if they use the code intact it will show the video with a line underneath that says, "Courtesy of mywebsite."

I explained the answer to this in the second part of my original post.

This is the challenge about replying to "fast" questions in a Q&A. How thorough of an answer should be provided. I agree with EGOL in that the category and tag pages could and perhaps even should ideally be built out, offer more content and be indexed. Many sites choose not to take this approach and simply keep these pages merely as indexes or organizers. IF you choose to do such, then I maintain my original advice to use the noindex, follow tag. With respect to robots.txt, the best file is a blank one. Many sites use the robots.txt far too much. It should be avoided whenever there is another solution available. In this case, it would be a big mistake to use it.

"quality content = ranks well." Well that's what Goog keeps telling us. ... so are we talking real world or pixie land? Honestly, I knew I was stepping into a pile of crap when I put the "Ranks Well" criteria in there. But, it sure makes for a good litmus test. So yes... quality content = ranks well. ...and the vicious circle continues.

For some more current information, you can check out Google's official page here http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/?hl=en. Have you been able to get in Google News since you posted this, or are you still trying?

You can you a 301 to redirect back to the main page, but where is the anchor that refers to ./category in the first place? There is nothing showing up on your home page. Your can do a crawl test to try and isolate the erronous link. The two links your posted are the same page and both work for me.

If both of your sites have a mixture of original and duplicated content (and also when dynamically generated urls are creating duplicate content) the surest thing to do is to declare the original source of the duplicate content using the rel=canonical tag. Now, if you are using duplicate content across domains you would use the cross domain rel canonical: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html This will prevent the .ie version showing up in the SERPS. See also this link for info on the rel canonical tag: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 And this article on duplicate content: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html