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Jarrett, the canonical tag you have in place will suffice. I'd suggest either to have users moving between the sites in the future or to modify your CMS to auto add the canonical tag in any future posts. It might be worth speaking to your syndication partners and changing your API to only show an excerpt with a link back to your site. This will also eliminate the duplicate issues and allow more of your pages to rank. It's highly unlikely for you to get your larger media partners to add a rel=canonical to your posts on their site as they simply don't need to, as they are more likely getting the content indexed. Aaron

@Steven,  I would suggest that you blog about all extensible keywords and link from your blog post to the main actionable page. You can use related keywords as anchor text. For example: web design, website design and affordable website design do not need three landing pages. You need to group your keywords though do not try to optimize one page for more than three keywords; it is difficult and takes time.

Thanks Alan and Richard. That's just the sort of confirmation I was hoping for.

I always prefer the pipe for the following reasons, though I don't think it has any specific SEO value. a) its reader friendly b) its a natural separator c) as Seth says below, it looks cool! d) Whats good for SEOmoz is good for me!

The answer is NO, there is no inherent risk of ranking loss or credibility loss when redirecting old URL's. Think of it like the post office, lets say you move a lot and as a result you have become very familiar with their change of address form. The post office isn't going to delay the delivery of your mail just because your Dads in the military or your Mom keeps moving to escape old flames. Relocating is a part of life and when it comes down to it the Post Office and Google, for that matter, thank you for 301'ing your mail so it doesn't stack up and clutter the Index with undeliverables.

I regularly post new 200 level pages to my site, so I guess I'm most interested in getting new links.  However, I do see the point that Alan is making as well.  Thanks to both of you for taking the time to answer this.

Thank you for your quick responses. I'm not going to purchase other domains such as xyzwebdesign.com as I'm only going to be SEOing one domain, in particular it will be xyz.ca, I do however own xyz.com and xyz.net and will 301 redirect those to the .ca. Because I'm a company in Canada I figure I should optimize my .ca,  and make that my main domain and not my .com.

Double listing - all the way!

Problem solved, well, more like diagnosed! Although the pages were A grade optimised, filters on the page (i.e. sort by high price, low price, new products) were seen as duplicate pages as the CMS would take the static page and add some dynamic content for the filter. Rel Canonical has sorted it, but we shall see next time Google updates.

Mmh, good point. Never heard that "privacy policy page" could be a trust signal. Is there an article somewhere that talks about this? Well, I took those two pages as an example... but my question was about avoiding link juice to flow on non-SEO pages in general. Thanks a lot for your answers!

I agree with Keri here. If you want to be able to produce detailed reports, consider doing it the way described in the Lunametrics blog.

If you have a site that has been matched with a brand then Google will rarely remove your site entirely from the index. Take JC Penny for example. They didn't suffer any rankings for the term JC Penny. They suffered rankings for other terms that they had been building bad links for. Monitoring your keyword rankings and noticing large drops in positions on a per keyword base might give you a better idea if you have been hit with a penalty.

Normal. Don't be surprised if you are 15 tomorrow and in the 60's next week. Think of your rankings as being like the weather. Right now the trend is weather getting warmer, but some days it will be really hot and some days it will storm and get cold. Overall these are just flukes in the general pattern. Your rankings will do the same types of fluctuations. Only get concerned if your rankings drop and they stay there for over a month.

I like to name at least one of the pictures with the exact keyword I'm targeting in the title tag: greatest-home-example-ever.jpg and then the alt attribute would be "greatest home example ever". Then, for other images on the page, use similar, but varied file names and anchor text, such as: great-home-example.jpg, greatest-home-example.jpg, etc. I have no idea if this helps rankings or not, but I also like to optimize the meta data in the image. I figure it might help, so why not! If you're using Windows, you can right click on the image, choose properties, click the details tab. Put the keyword in the title, subject, and comments. I'm sure you can do it on a Mac as well, probably just as easily.

Thanks Roger and Dave.  I appreciate the responses.

Thanks a lot for your kind answer. I understand your point. But my question is: if I'm doing SEO for, lets say, two languages on the same domain (that is why I use /en) is it the same having a backlink in one language pointing to the root domain instead of the subdirectory? Thanks!

I just did a little deeper look into the code of the competitor websites.  They are using a css in the code: This creates a scrolling text box on the homepage.  I've included the code on one of my home pages and we'll see if it effects my results at all.

To me this sounds like a completely legitimate reason to 301 the pages to that new location. If you do get in trouble with Google it will be pretty straightforward to explain it. If you run into an algorithmic penalty the solution would be to remove 301s. This, however is not a likely scenario at all. Another option you have is to use rel="canonical" to tell Google that the page they're crawling has a correct canonical version. This will not only fix duplication but will also consolidate link juice much like 301 redirection.