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Hi Rookie123 Having unique IP's may be of use from an SEO perspective if you have multiple sites that you are interlinking with the hope of boosting SEO. However there is no guarantee that Google will not be able to work out that the sites are still in fact related. If this is a single stand alone site then I would not worry about having a unique IP as I am not aware of any tangible benefit and would be more focused on resolving the duplicate content issue. Hope this helps.

Hi, it usually takes a week for your first site crawl to be completed. Thanks!

I fyou have 301 redirected, then you dontneed to use canonical

Ok question is how can we hire wikipedia writers I see the logic but realistically trying to find someone with a genuine experts view for each industry you work in within seo is blooming difficult What's your way around this ? Do you just do it yourself ?

Thanks for the ideas!

The only thing that possibly helps with Wordpress is that it does come with plugins that you have to install by the way that automatically updates your sitemap to Google.  I know a sitemap is not any significant help in ranking but it prods Google to tell them "Hi look a new page" but again as the previous posters mention this is usually just a receny bump. There are lots of other 'SEO' (deliberate italics here that make life easier for titles and descriptions.  But as far as Googel cares your site is just text and if you make it attractive they will/may come back more often.

You can see the SEOmoz opinon on microsites in this whiteboard friday - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake Unless you're looking to take up SERP real estate on exact match "Furnace Filters Canada" I would put the blog on /news (or /blog, /updates, etc) and you can still install a copy of the WP software (I assume you've gone the self host route?) in just that folder. If you are looking to take up real estate I would still have the blog in a subfolder, and use the .info to either give info on furnace filters or info about your company. While .info domains have traditionally been seen as spammy (due to their low cost) I don't believe they are treated significantly differently to any other gTLD if you provide a quality site.

One quick aside: categories in WordPress are easier to SEO then tags.  Wordpress collects category descriptions.  Plugins like All In One SEO Pack can use this info to write a meta description for you.  Wordpress doens't collect descriptions for tags so plugins can' use this info to write out a meta description for your tag pages.

I agree with Egol all the way.  However I'm less concerned about Google abandoning Blogspot than wanting to move to another platform, and being able to re-create and redirect all my pages, links, and rank.  With your own domain you can do this, but as a subdomain on blogspot.com it might not be possible. Redirecting blogspot.com sites came up in another thread recently.

Ok thanks. I'm going to do some research into this anyway - I'll make a post if I find anything that may be of interest.

It is against Google TOS to ask for a link, so the best way to do this, as Dejan SEO have said is to cause a reason to link back to the competition page o the home page. There are various methods of this, and the best has been mentioned - include a code snippet on your contest page, perhaps with a blog footer like so: This post was for a competition hosted by Company Name, promoting Product. Visit their website for more details on this competition (With links in obviously). This will trick a lot of people into thinking that it is necessary to include that footer following their post to keep their entry legitimate, and will obviously be gaining you the contextual link you're after, to multiple pages if you'd like. The other method is via profile badges, or a specific badge for that competition. Encourage users to add your badges to their sites/blogs/individual posts, and make it as easy to do so as possible. One final thing, make sure you give out badges to the finalists, again, linking to your pages. If they're winning something they'll feel obliged to use the badge! Hope all of this helps EuropeanSEOguy!

As an Associate, I marked this question as answered. Catherine, glad you were able to get your question answered so quickly! When you next visit this thread, it'd be great if you could mark the Helpful Answers, which will give some extra MozPoints to these gentlemen.

By the way, fantastic information EGOL. You make it very easy to break down what sort of content is best to put on a blog post. Thumbs up for sure!

I would definitely create a new blog at gardenbeet.com/blog. This will drive traffic and links to your main site, which appears to be your ultimate goal. Do not worry about linking out. If the link goes to a relevant site, linking out can actually be a good sign of credibility for you. Not to mention link karma. What you do with the old blog is up to you. I would recommend moving the content and 301ing the URLs to the new domain. Here is a link to help you out. http://en.support.wordpress.com/site-redirect/ This would result in the current links pointing at the blog to pass juice to your main site. Simply put, optimizing one site (gardenbeet.com) is easier than optimizing two (gardenbeet.com and your wordpress blog).

If I transfer my blog to my website will that mean all my link juice for my main website will be given to all the links i have on my blog.I link to heaps of people from my blog Also many of my links from my blog point to domains that point to my main website - given this info would you still advise to move my blog from wordpress to my own domain?

If the articles are in your own directory then I'd edit them and add a link to your homepage and a few other pages too. Then, take your easy solution and write new ones for your website. DD

Do all of the pages receive back links? It would be a laborious job and perhaps not worthwhile but you could look at which of the pages receive a substantial amount of links or links from high quality websites. Then just include the "Good" pages in your new site. Like you say, I think you would benefit from losing some low value content that doesn't rank well and doesn't have many quality links pointing to it. Whatever you decide it would be interesting to know how that effects your site. Perhaps even worthy of a YOUmoz post?!

Have you submitted a news sitemap? It should only include links to your news articles. http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=74288 Also it looks like they want to know more about your editorial review process. Here is the standard message from google about being included in News results. We typically include sites in Google News that: have news content reporting on recent events - please note that we don't include informational and how-to articles, classified ads, job postings, fictitious content, event announcements, advice columns or adult content; have content that is original to the site; are written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has multiple writers and editors with accessible contact information; don't solely promote their own activities or products; don't violate Google's quality guidelines available at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3.