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Is there anything I can do to speed up the process? I noticed that since adding the tag yesterday (I know it is still extremely early), Google has continued to index more of these pages on Website B.

Your welcome.  If that was your issue and you have a lot of pages, I am sure this will help a lot. Have a great day and happy holidays.

I'd have to second this one. Hiring an oversea's copywriter because the client insisted on getting the cheapest one available. It was disaster. I spent more time fixing and correcting the copy for grammar and SEO than they spent writing the content. After about a month the client agreed, and we hired a favourite local copywriter of mine who nailed the copy first time. In the end she only cost a little more and because she could meet the client, we formed a great team and work to this day together. I put that down as a reminder that I won't work with an overseas writer again.

My thoughts as well, just needed to double check! Thank you.

If you had a legitimate purpose you could try using encoding but I'm not sure how this falls within Googles guidelines you would need to check. From experience with similar issues I've found that anything up to about 60% duplicate will rank.

Hi Eliathah, sorry for the delay! Been a bit mad recently! I am using a modified Zen Cart CMS that my webhost modified from an original template I believe. I have in the meantime been removing duplicate titles and content where possible. I have canonicals in place on every site page according to my webhost. How long do you think it will take Google to see the corrections? I have in the last 2 weeks gone from page 20 to page 11 for a couple of my main keywords.

That is correct. However, I would consider fixing the code some other ways too... 1. Adding a canonical tag to the page.html if possible. 2. Suppressing the hpint_id=xyz if possible. Other search engines won't be able to respect your wishes to ignore the ?hpint_id if all you have done is update GWT.

Just a thought as well to add to what everyone else said.  Make sure you go into your Google webmasters and tell Google what country you want them to rank up for. I have had odd instances when a site with a co.uk extension will still rank up in the US for terms even though I don't want it to.  So I advise you to set them. Have a nice day.

I was literally about to post the same question, I've seen a fair few competitor sties doing this, not wanting to taint the design of the page, so they just add a keyword stuffed doc with <--more--> tag in the footer. Black, grey or white on this one? I have a client that has insisted on design block heavy site which makes it very difficult to optimize for.....adding something like this could be very useful.

This is a decision you only face at blog creation time, once you have strated your blog and it is established, I don't see anything that should push you to change unless it is a "business reason" A subdomain is arguably not the best practice, but it is not a bad one either

_Press Release as a means to get back link if that what you are referring, I would say it is a bad idea. The idea of writing a press release is to share some news worthy article with your targeted audience. Ask yourself even if badly written and not so news worthy PR manages to secure top ranks in Google News, would that help your company impress your targeted readers? I do not think so. Rather it will leave a bad taste in the mouth so, the purpose of launching a press release will be lost. So, rather than focusing on the link coming from the press release website, you need to treat it as a powerful tool to reach out to your targeted audience and make them aware of the products or service you are going to launch. _

Tom, there is undoubtedly a difference, speaking broadly in terms of the use of query strings - at the SEO level - and at the usability / customer retention level. URLs that are easy to read are easier to remember and easier to copy-paste too - meaning more robust - less likely to break or get corrupted when run through text parsers. Google is explicit about their preference for clean urls, and a clean url structure for your site as a whole. I'm not sure if this is relevant to where you're at with your particular project, but I always try build a site with a url schema that exposes the information architecture and content priority as much as possible, usually with important pages close to the site root. If you have to use query strings - and of course they are sometimes unavoidable, or actually just the best tool for the job at hand - Google Webmaster Tools allows you to provide explicit classifications for each parameter. Personally I thought this was a great addition to their suite of tools.

From my experience, doing a catchall 301 redirect to the homepage would be more devastating than leaving the 404 pages.  The best idea is just to start knocking them out as soon as possible. For the pages that don't exist and there isn't a related page, leave them on the 404.  Over time they will work themselves out of the SERPs. Definitely don't abuse the 301 redirect feature. It is for permanent changes not temporary changes.  You could really hurt future efforts on your site.