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Michael, the best thing to do for you would be to check Google Webmasters Tools and see what Google sees there as duplicate content. This will help you decide whether you want or not to block /tag/.

Thanks.  I purchased the xml-sitemap generator with video option and it seems to do the trick. Best, Christopher

I think if the query of people in this period are about playoff, is better the you modify the title and a little content too of the page. it can be onìy better for the index Maurizio

Thanks Irving I do ! For example i think this looks better title for say the clothes department of a girls store: Girls Clothes: Girls Dresses, Tops, Blouses & Coats | Girls Gift Shop Than this: Girls Clothes - Girls Dresses - Tops - Blouses - Coats | Girls Gift Shop What you think ?

Excellent suggestions - thanks!

Tamra, This is one of those there is no real answer type questions. I have been running an agency for a while and still occasionally scratch my head when something that is thin as a razor for content, stuffed with keywords, etc. ranks well. Typically, as you get into highly competitive verticals, it is less and less prevalent. As to microsites, why they would rank with no content, no links, etc. it would really depend on the vertical IMO. The more global answer is this: With a change in the algorithm, I think you have to understand that there are a lot of factors that weigh on one another. So, with the EMD update, the main site may have already had a bad link profile, some thin content or old content, etc. So, the weight of those negatives are already on the balance and then boom the next update (EMD in this case) tips the scale and you slide down or disappear. I would think it would be possible that the microsites by not having the links are just rarely crawled (you can look in GWT) and by not really being deep sites, etc. have little to weigh on. Yes, I understand thin content, keyword stuffing etc. it should not be so, but I am throwing out some possibilities. I would suggest convincing them that there is little chance they will stay where they are and this might need to serve as a wakeup call. Good luck, all the best, Robert

Yes I agree that keywords should appear naturally and a good quality content writer never worries about the keywords. Though he/she should be aware of the keywords. Further, its also suggested that article heading should have at least one keyword, making KWs in bold and using KWs mostly in first 2 parah is also suggested. All the above factors are good as far as they are done naturally and as far as it delivers good value to user.

This site has higher rank just due to the domain name compared to my original site.    Also, I am using this site as a test to see what works to increase my google ranking.

I had a similar issue. I was getting a lot of warnings regarding duplicate content and missing meta descriptions on tags and media. I used "noindex" for the tags and media to fix the problem. Since your url is an image, I would think that the noindex would also address your issue. I hope that helps, best of luck.

So right now, we have www.pokki.com that is really our app store that we're using as our home page (nm the bad title tags / metadata etc that we will be addressing as well). We then have a page that is "What Is" pokki page that is written more in the tone of what our new homepage is going to be. The existing home page doesn't give users an idea of what the product does so we want to change it so that our home page will be more contextual and it will then link to the app store page from there (instead of vice versa today). What we will do is redo the content that is currently on the What Is page, which we will then 301 redirect  to www.pokki.com, then move the content that is currently on the homepage to www.pokki.com/apps. From a keyword search perspective, the new home page should actually strengthen our positioning as there will be a lot more text/content that speaks specifically to the product. Hope this clarification helps. I'm thinking there shouldn't be a prob, but just wanted to make sure.

Yeah, set up a 301 redirect. Here's another tip, use this tool to browse and check redirects currently in place for your site: http://www.searchmasters.co.nz/redirect-check/ I reviewed my site and then made sure index.php, index.htm, index.cfm, default.asp amongst others were doing a 301 redirect to / I also made sure my index.html file had a canonical tag that identified my / as my main page. The following code was placed in the .index.html file for that rel="canonical" href="/">

Thanks for the prompt response - I'll look into this now and report back So think I've got it but would be hugely grateful for guidance: http://www.baytree-interiors.co.uk/1130/interior-accessories/candle-holders.html this URL and the same appended with ?stock=&price=&order=&records=1 has been correctly flagged as having duplicate content. As these pages display multiple product are canonical tags the best thing or are they best for specific products? Feel ignorant but learning loads here thanks

I have spoken with database-expert SEO guys who swear by: domain/year/month/post-name They say for some reason referencing the year first reduces the workload of the database, making your site faster, which we know is good. On the other hand, I've always been partial to domain/post-name because it makes each blog post url short, easy to remember if done well, and relevant to your business.  I have found that having /category/ does nothing for SEO.  I used to do this on a wedding photography blog and had domain/wedding-photography/post-name.  When I changed to domain/post-name my SEO results shot up across the board.  So I'm sure /category/ hurt more than helped. I currently use domain/year/month/post-name but will be changing to domain/post-name for the future on all sites, I think.

I would change these links to this to lower the keyword density: Allstate Life Insurance Company American General Life Companies American National Insurance Company Assurity Life Insurance Company Allstate American American National Assurity Try to chill out of overly using keyword terms like "life insurance", it's three times in this URL: http://www.beamalifeinsurance.com/life-insurance-articles/low-cost-life-insurance-with-discounts.html Look at the content, mentioned too many times, and your anchor texts are probably like this on every page. Think less is better, over optimization will get the very keywords you are hoping to rank for suppressed. Lose the keyword meta tag completely for the site, it's a dead tag and stuffing like this is dangerous: <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" content="alaska life insurance quotes, alaska life insurance, whole life <a class="attribute-value">insurance quotes alaska, term life insurance quotes alaska, universal life insurance quotes alaska</a>" /> Only use "life insurance" once in the title tags, is there another synonym for life insurance that you can use? <title>Pennsylvania Life Insurance Quote, Pennsylvania Life Insurance Companytitle>

I think that a site with a lot of pages like this might see those pages survive for a few weeks and then... BAM... they disappear.... then the next Panda update a month later might reduced the rankings of the entire domain. So, if this domain has lots of other traffic that you don't want to lose then I would not use the cookie-cutter method. Would it be possible, are these new pages potentially valuable enough that you could afford to do this properly and have a unique photo and unique content written for each location?  The extra text that would be placed on these pages would pull in lots of long-tail traffic. (I know what its like to write this stuff.... lol)

Thank you, Dan!

According to Matt Cutts this sort of thing is ok - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw - provided you're not treating Googlebot differently - which would be cloaking. However, as I said above I have seen sites that have implemented this sort of thing penalised - likely because they've inadvertently tripped some sort of cloaking filter (even though strictly speaking what they're doing isn't cloaking). Hope this helps, Hannah

Thank you very much Matt. Now I get it