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Hi guys, thankyou for your responses, I'm taking it all in, and just thought of something which may draw users in "Make your website something that offers real benefit to your site visitors." Its a nightlife forum, so people look for stag and hen information, I've emailed a couple of stag and hen companies to see if they'd give discount to members via my site. So if i was to create a locked section, "stag and Hen discounts" and make so they need to post maybe 5 posts, to auto unlock the section. its a win win, I get post contributes, and the user gets discounts!! just thinking of something else other than just stag and hen, in this way. what you think?

any kind of time estimate for when we should be re-crawled?

Think pretty much any Javascript menu would be obfuscated for Google..... but bit of a grey hat approach though. Been reading some interesting articles about pageRank sculpting and whether it's still possible.

Juan A lot of factors influence rankings in different countries. For example between US and UK, the domain name extension matters. So if you were a .co.uk website, it would rank better in the UK then US. Similarly if this .co.uk site was also hosted in UK, then it would rank even better in UK. Further, if the site was targeting UK english, instead of US english (which it should), it would again get counted towards a positive strength to rank in UK, but not in US. I hope this helps understand the reasoning behind it... atleast from a 10,000 foot view.

They're new, improved versions of old videos. I looked back, my original post was ambiguous. So a typical video would be on the same topic as the old video, but with refined presentation, different visuals, and in HD. So brand new, but covering exactly the same topic. Is your answer the same?

Amy - a few ideas here: you might be dealing with what's called 'keyword cannibalization' here.  It helps to have a clear plan of what keywords you'll be focused on for every page on your site.  It's tempting to stick a bunch of keywords on every page and into your meta tags for every page - but sometimes less is more.  Just focus on the 2 to 3 keyword phrases that most accurately describe any page.  Make sure those keywords show up in some form in the title and H1 tags on the page. After you do all of that optimization, I also like to run a tool like the Screaming Frog Seo Spider, to see if there are any pages across the site that have exactly the same or very similar title tags.  If you have more than a few pages, it can happen very easily so it makes sense to go back and double check that later.  You can sometimes discover two or more pages on your site that actually have very similar content.  In a case like that, pick the better one, add any relevant content and 301 redirect the old page. in terms of linking, you can go a long with just by doing good internal linking.  Try to make the links to your pages match the target keywords as much as possible.  For inbound links, a large portion of your links will naturally be brand links to your homepage.  Focus as much as possible on 'good' links, from vendor partners, industry associations, and trusted blogs.  There are lots of strategies for getting these kinds of links.  They require some effort / outreach - but will serve you much better in the long run than a few hundred irrelevant forum links or directory submissions. After that, make sure you've signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, submitted a sitemap, and make sure you don't have any issues with slow site loading or canonicalization (where the same page is referenced with slightly different URLs). Hope that helps - without looking at the site too closely, that's the best advice I can give.

Thanks. I would love to hear if anyone has seen any SEO benefit from just straight syndication.

Correct. Here is an official blog post on the subject: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html

Thanks Miriam

Ok thanks a lot ! Cheers !

Hi Keri, Yes I know, maybe I didn’t express good myself. From this what I know the search engines pick up news according to some criteria. You can’t submit them directly. So in my opinion to appear there you have to release a real press release. Something what will make the people to link immediately on it. To receive instant popularity. Example. Me I am reading every day news on the Cyprus news papers. The same news they are posted on the net the same day. Most of them don’t even appear in the news from search engines. That means that are not newsworthy enough. So, I give one example now. When this happened, all people got mad and they start to share the news, on Facebook, twitter, post it on blogs, post it on news sites etc. That was in international news sites all over the world. Immediately the search engine news included it in. So in my opinion that you get there you have to release a press article which will make the people to start immediately to share , backlink on it, post in their blogs etc. So the answer is so simple. Just give them some real news. That’s why I answer so simple to michelleh. less than 1 hour ago If I am wrong correct me.

Apparently, you need to submit your site as a news source to them. http://help.yahoo.com/l/sg/yahoo/news_global/submitsource.html?from_url=&last_url=

Google doesn't say 'don't syndicate content' they say 'syndicate carefully' and include a link back to the original source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Hey Marcus, I've implemented a few of the things you suggested, yet to get a blog up and running but hopefully it's in the process. Seeing as you gave me such a thorough reply I was wondering if you could help me with another site. www.data-contracts.co.uk I am struggling to rank for concrete repair on google.co.uk. I've tested a few things but cannot get anything to budge in the SERP. Any suggestions? Cheers

If you just added the site in seomoz campaign - it can take some time until other pages are crawled. And since it looks like there are no issues with your structure based on a site: search it should solve by it self in just a few days. If this issue is older then a few days then indeed something is wrong. It will be a good thing to check and see if you are not blocking any bots though. (either by default or as a setting for bots trying to crawl your site in order to save resources). I've seen it happened. If all things "fail" then you should take Andrea's advice and contact customer support but out of curtesy you should review the situation before sending the ticket

These links sound relevant and extremely wholesome. Great websites link to other great websites all of the time.