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Yes, adwords CR would give you that answer. The budget required depends on so many factors. But you can reduce the list of KW sampling the complete list. But at least at macro level if you discuss that with someone from your client who knows his market and his consumers you should start getting an idea. Logic+common sense is a good start. I would analyze that before to start changing the website. But if you do the opposite is not that you are going to break any porcelain. Duplicate content is not like a manual penalization, as far as I know, once you fix it and google crawl the new version the ranking is updated.

Hi Both, many thanks for you help. Pete

Some useful ideas there - thanks!

Thanks Cyrus!

Forgive me if this is a silly question, but does this mean you would need to go and identify all the urls with extra parameters, and add canonical tag pointing to the primary url? Coz if so, that would be an extremly labourious task, no? Some of my duplicate issues, have 50+ urls that are being counted as 'duplicates'. There must be a better way, hence, I fear this must be a silly question...  

Hi, Ubersuggest is maybe something you can try. http://ubersuggest.org/ It's a bit limmited, but sometims still some good suggestions.

I think one thing you should keep in mind is that 301 is meant for content being moved. In other words moving one page from one site to another, or from one path to another, without changing the content of the page. If you move a page you use 301, google see the change and discount a small portion of the page juice (1%? 5%? no one knows exactly) but pass the vast majority to the same page on the new location. But... Once upon a time a popular black hat technique was to get control of a page (actually many pages, as many as they could) with a good juice and do a 301 redirect to another page, a target page, to just pass juice. So... Google, wearing its shining armor, decided to fight back, and changed their algorithm to penalize that, in other words if you do a 301 redirect from one page with a certain content to another page with a totally different content, google notes that, doesn't like it, and penalize the ranking of the target page. Exactly how much of the two page content should stay the same to pass google antispam rules nobody knows, you can find out running some tests, my guess is probably it's also very specific to the page, domain, authority, etc... I heard, but I never tested myself, than if you do a 301 redirect from one page on a domain or path, to the same page on a different domain or path, and slowly in the following months you change the content of the target page till it's completely different from the original, Google won't penalize you.

Haa! I love that infographic Greg! We have a printed version on our war room wall

Hi Sheena, sorry I didn't respond sooner, I wasn't receiving any notifications. Thank you very much for your answer though, this was extremely helpful and helped verify that what I was thinking was correct, with some added help from you. I didn't think taking away the 301 was the best approach, but from a bosses standpoint he sees it as them getting clicks that shouldn't be theirs, I just have to do my best job of explaining why it's better for long term. The hreflang is in place and I think the best approach would be to consolidate international domains to the .com ccTLD's Thanks again, very helpful. -Reed

You are correct, this has been discussed quite a bit—the answer is subfolder. Here is an excellent, recent, thread on the subject: http://moz.com/community/q/i-have-a-blog-on-a-sub-domain-would-you-move-it-to-the-rood-domain-in-a-directory Here is what Rand Fishkin has to say, with an example from moz.com: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating  An excerpt from his response: "We recently were able to test this using a subdomain on Moz itself (when moving our beginner's guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to the current URL http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo). The results were astounding - rankings rose dramatically across the board for every keyword we tracked to the pages."

My apologies, it's been a while on this thread. Just tested what, and it doesn't what? What site? What would be awesome?

There are two options in my opinion. Use the same Meta description if they are helpful for your audience. I know this will create problem as far as the Google and SEO is concern but the importance of Meta description as a ranking factor is questionable so if it is helpful for user, you can take that risk. Do not use Meta description at all. This way Google will pick any random Meta description from the content and I think as Google is someone who did that so there can be no legal restriction to it. Hope this helps!

Awesome - thank you Sheena!

It's beneficial because you're helping your audience and they will appreciate and remember that. Perhaps they'll refer you to others, link to you, bookmark or share your content (getting you more exposure) or come back and visit your site another time. Is there evidence to support that claim? Highlights from the 2014 Search Ranking Factors Study completed by Search Metrics and published in August/September 2014 states that "Although the off page factors were within a margin of error, it was interesting to me to find that volume of nofollow backlinks is now well correlated with higher rankings [emphasis added]. This aligns with the findings that Rand Fishkin and the IMEC Labs team of experimenters uncovered earlier in the year." Nicole Kohler from Moz wrote a post just this past June that shares anecdotal evidence that nofollow links have lots of "hidden" power. It's well written, logical and convincing. Google (via Matt Cutts) has stated repeatedly that they value "natural" link profiles without ever clearly defining exactly what that is. That said, Webmaster Tools will issue a warning if considers your link profile suspect. Hope that helps.

Hi Graeme, For old product pages - your solution is good regarding showing users alternatives to the out of stock products. No need for an "out of stock page" as there's no value in that for crawlers or users. Regarding point 2 - if you redirect discontinued product pages to category pages that should be fine although Google may regard that as a soft 404. If there are loads of products like this and you 301 them in one go then the chances are it will flag up in Google WMT. If there are a small number and you introduce them gradually then you'll probably be fine. For the crawl errors question, adding value to the pages in terms of related products is a good solution if that's viable and the pages will be different enough from each other (i.e. no duplicate content). One thing that isn't clear at the moment is if you're redirecting empty category pages all to the homepage - or if it's possible to redirect or canonical them to their parent category. e.g. For home -> clothing -> men's clothing -> shoes If all the men's shoes are discontinued, then redirect that page to men's clothing rather than to the homepage. This reduces your chances of getting a soft 404, and is also arguably a better user experience. Hope that helps, George

I think using the .com would be fine. I would avoid 301 redirecting the penalized site to the clean domain.

2 things nobody said: 1st Robots.txt says disallow to image and Theme (where i guess css and js is included) 2nd WebOfTrust warning to not enter the site because of not trustworthy

Thanks. Done since a while and already live Tej Luchmun

It's tough to speak in generalities, but in almost all of the cases where I suspect negative SEO was in play, there was an inherent weakness or problems in the link profile to begin with. If you add those problems to a domain with a questionable history, your risk is going to be fairly high. If you were a new site in a completely different industry with no history (or a good history), then the history of that domain might not matter. In your case, though, I'm hearing some alarm bells. Also keep in mind that unless you're going to start over cold-turkey, and not 301-redirect any of the old site, you'll carry any link-related problems with you. So, re-launching on a new domain is definitely a big decision and will probably take months of work to rebuild momentum. Granted, waiting for the next Penguin refresh could take months, too, so I understand your dilemma. If you're going to take this step, though, I'd put the time and money into a domain with a clean history. You can't afford to do this twice.

Hi there, Google tends to consider text in the main content areas more than text in supplemental areas (like the sidebar) and text in certain areas (i.e. the meta keywords tag, title element on images/links) may be ignored entirely. On the other hand, keyword stuffing in any area could lead to problems. Keep in mind that keyword density isn't a ranking factors. Never has been, never will be. Google tends to look at your page more holistically (or at least they try to) so taking this approach usually requires a bit more natural approach than inserting keywords at strategic locations. Not to promote my own post, but I highly recommend reading about these advanced SEO concepts for on-page optimization: http://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts These help explain how Google may judge your page beyond keyword usage and placement. Finally, you typically won't get in trouble for duplicate content if you stuff keywords, but you could easily suffer other algorithmic penalties. The best advice is to write naturally, make sure your content clearly communicates your main ideas, your content is focused around your primary keyword topics, and you provide a user experience that makes people want more.