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It all depends on proportion of anchor text links. Best way is to use multiple keywords and anchors as click here / visit / product name Having too much change - if tilted towards particular keyword - may make Google see it as spam - through an over-optimization effort. Best to view it is through this video http://moz.com/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

See, as a user if you found duplicate content in 2 different sites - it probably will take your interest away from the second site. Google takes user behavior into consideration now by not giving priority to sites which has exact or almost similar content If you want to build niche site by focusing on that geographical market - you should rewrite content which means value to the users of that territory. Even, if the interpretation is same as that on in original site, you should still add on certain points which are not covered in your first site In terms of clear answer to your query from search engine perspective :- "If my content is similar between both sites and both authored by me could that possibly hurt my rankings?" Answer: Yes, as long as the content is similar across site, the search rankings will not gain or rather may be penalized too in long run.

I checked my webmaster, and it said that I didn't have to do anything with url parameters. Should I still try to fix it?

Rand recently made a Whiteboard Friday video about this... http://moz.com/blog/why-you-might-be-losing-rankings-to-pages-with-fewer-links-worse-targeting-and-poor-content

It sounds like the /2001/ portion of the URL to select an option, but the remainder of the page is identical. Is that correct? In that instance, you're correct that the canonical link should be www.example.com/ProductGroup/example/ How you do that is more of a technical problem, and would depend on the software your site is powered by.

It is true they will not "penalize" for tags or archives directly, but you can make your site much better by doing many of the things Mike recommends above. I wrote a post talking through how to assess your tags, and deciding which ones to delete and/or noindex: here. Here's the elephant in the room too, you may rank for those tags, but do they bring traffic? What is the on-site metrics for your tag traffic? Bounce rate? Time on page? It is true you may rank for some tags, but in general they never provide traffic, or the right traffic, compared to the content its self. -Dan

Check your source code for a no archive tag what to look for http://searchengineland.com/google-explains-the-noindex-nofollow-noarchive-nosnippet-meta-tags-10595 Use https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader to look for a bad tag check your robots.txt file  using http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/ Then use http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/free-optimization/ to check for any other thing blocking it REMEMBER your site is new google might not have archived your site yet Hope this helps, Thomas

Lastly, I've been using this pattern in regards to meta tag titles... company name | description Since all the descriptions are unique, would it still be considered a duplicate, given that I'm always including the company name?

Honestly, just list out the domains in an Excel file (or google doc) and make separate columns: One column should read "Contacted" and another should read "Link Removed." **note: The domain list should come from multiple sources, not just the GWT list. It is incomplete and untrustworthy. Use Open Site Explorers list and maybe even Majestic/ahref or all of the above. Remove duplicates and sort your list and it should be pretty obvious which are the spam links based on anchor text and domain URLs. Put x's in boxes accordingly. Then just go ahead and take all of the screenshots of email contacts you have and put them in a folder, zip it up, and attach it to the email. That's what I would do. Like I said, the more info you can include the better. As much tracking and data as you can possibly overwhelm them with. They may not look through all of it, but it will definitely indicate to them that you have figured out the problem and worked really hard to fix it. Please keep us posted on how this works. As you may be able to tell this is something I work on often and am very interested in the process and how it works out. I and the whole community would be incredibly pleased if you were able to keep us informed as to how it turned out. Good luck!

I'm guessing you are using the ?* stuff as a tracking string or site-wide search querying so the original page should have the rel=canonical attribute added. This will tell Google which page has the original content and will help your website avoid the penalty.

Hello all, Thanks for the input. I'm on the marketing side with a site that presents our products. I'm tryign to clean up inbound links. I pulled the Inbound links report from Moz.com and have concluded that I want to focus on the sites that are NOT listed as "no_follow." Troouble I'm having is the report headers: <colgroup><col width="90"><col width="115"><col width="143"><col width="95"><col width="37"></colgroup> | Link Equity | No Link Equity | Only rel=nofollow | Only follow | 301 | | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Does a 'Yes' value in the 'Only rel=nofollow' column mean that the link is marked as nofollow? As in "Affirmative, this link is marekd as nofollow, yes." Then there is the 'Only follow' and other headers. Know where I can find a Moz article explaining these? Thanks in advance for any and all help. Regards, Joe

I am guessing you must have accidentally set up a link to /win-a-party/ instead of /win-a-party. Search engines used to associate paths ending in / as a directory and paths not ending in / a file. This is a great Google Webmaster Blog article on the subject. I would suggest you either 301 redirect it to the preferred version OR you use a tool like ScreamingFrog to find the incorrectly setup link/navigation and make the actual fix. Hope this helps. Mike

Thanks for the helpful advice!

hi, i have just got a reply from my hosting company To use the If-Modified-Since HTTP header, you need to have both mod_expires and mod_headers enabled as Apache modules on your server. I have just checked that for you and I can confirm that both of the modules are enabled and you will be able to use If-Modified-Since HTTP headers. Gyi, how would i know use these if the hosting company does offer the service

so does that mean that all i have to do is to add an author name and do nothing else for it to work. do you also know how long it takes for a picture to appear in the search engines as i have not seen anything as yet

Hi This happened to a co. I was working with recently who deleted thousands of pages without notifying the SEO team, this led to lots of work in WMT and lots of digging around to understand where we had lost links. If you've got a load of inbound links pointing at these pages and nothing has been done 301s etc then watch your DA fall, as happened to this company. Ouch. This is what happens when Tech don't "like" marketing.

They will not negatively effect your SEO. In general the pipe character " | " is used to separate title segments. Further situations make sense as well like "&" is used to shorten "and" since "and" is generally of no value. Thus, "&" saves you 2 characters. For example the title of this page is: Special Characters in Title Tags & Meta Descriptions | Moz Q&A Hope this helps, Don

Martijn is correct. Most likely (if nothing changed) a server issue. If it's just a few hours, most likely a server outage. If that wasn't it, your hosting company took you down for some reason. If it wasn't server related, it could be a dns issue or an incorrect .htaccess file, or possibly an internal issue from your location (firewall prevented you from viewing the site). Webmaster tools do not catch everything and if it was just a few hours, probably didn't (unless you get indexed frequently).

cheers chris, i will focus on that.

Hello Rafi, I am going to make necessary changes on it. And, I have started work to gather backlinks on home page with Vinyl Banners keyword from various sources. It may help me to recover my old ranking!