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My understanding is this: If its a duplicate, as in a copy and paste article, then Google will eventually de-index the duplication and keep the original article. In your clients case though, they are providing the source links, so google doesnt label it as duplicate content, but sees it as syndicated content. Look at news sources for example. The same article syndicated on multiple sites are all indexed and stay indexed. (this is the case for your clients site) What i would tell your client is that fresh and unique content on their site is key for SEO. By syndicating articles, it doesn't provide any benefits for SEO in terms of unique and fresh content, so the operation is pointless unless its for user experience only. Give them an example, say its the same as giving away articles to other websites, and then reusing them on their site as "second hand" articles. Just because its word press doesn't mean its any different to any other website out there. Good luck! Greg

Thanks EGOL, Brent and Irving. Some good advice there. It's not really traditional Guest Blogging Irving in that content providers get fee instead of a link - and are pointing links in from their external sites, so a little loss of control there, though without any anchor text guidelines and so forth.

Cool thanks for this - I tried searching the SEOMoz site but could not find these. I will see how things go.

HI Grasshoper and other repliers, many thanks for your answers. 1.- The alt attribute: You might be absolutely right, I know the attribute and use it every day in my job but hadn't apply it on General-History. The alt attribute is nothing new, so if I hadn't inserted them on the first place and reached 14.000 visits, how come I now descend to 1.5? Is google penguin so powerful? I did not read any change about the alt attribute when I read about penguin, did you? 2.- The Wordpress Theory: This, I admit has impressed me. I think this might not be the only reason, but it can be a major reason of the decrease as the older posts get far away from the home thus decreasing its importance. I very much liked this answer, thank you. 3.- Competitors. I fullishly dismissed this issue because I did not think that other history sites would invert or do something about their SEO, but I might be wrong. Grasshoper would you like to have access to the associated analytics account to study the case? I have SEO friends who consider this issue as interesting as anything, I mean, have you ever seen a non spammy site decrease it's visits as such? Thanks in advance, and by the way, if it is the ads that appear in the header, I would not mind to take it off as it gives very little money. Thanks a lot to all of you.

That has made me feel so much better about what I am doing and has sent the silly gremlin packing from my head. As a newbie to SEO I have been reading lots of the info on this site and this idea came to me as a sort of digestion of what I read and what I felt would be good for my site. It is great to be able to ask a question and get the thoughts and opinions of those who are more expert than I when not certain if doing something will help or hinder progress. Many thanks for the input. I appreciate it. Jean

Hi, If you are going to generate a lot of guides like that I'd definitely link them from the home page. Firstly from a menu item and then perhaps individual links to articles that are relevant to the user on the page they are viewing. After that make sure you are generating links to those pages as well as the home page. You could also put an alt tag on your logo header image. Good luck

No worries Pip, glad you found your answer - can you mark this question as answered? Thanks Keith

After some research I've now submitted my site to Newsnow.co.uk, so it should get more exposure. I'd love to have some ideas on how I can use it to generate more leads. I've created a form at the bottom of every post to make contact, but that doesn't seem to be doing much at all

No language change on the servers. I know I shouldn't be worried but hey, it's my baby. All grown up and going off to a college of her own now... The upgrade should help with site speed so I am hoping that I might get a boost.

Thank you very much for the feedback!

Sure. It is fairly simple Chandana. Much like marketing yourself offline, you need to establish valuable contacts and relationships within your professional industry. The same goes for the web. Search engines derive authority from links, citations, likes, tweets and any measurable metric they can tally. However, links are still the most important. Showing Google your companies digital footprint (or web presence) is vast, robust and mentioned on sites they trust will actually make a site with GOOD on-site SEO very powerful. Without that, you'll only see a handful of your pages indexed and served in positions of prominence. If link building truly is a priority, I would look up Garrett French and read his articles, look at his tools and the Ontolo link building book.

Sounds like the best solution is to alter the template & eCommerce system you are using to allow for that functionality. Anything else would be a hacky workaround that violates the 'Is this for search engines, or users?' rule. Looks like you are running an ASP-based solution. I'll be of no help there

Ah, yes that does change things a bit!  In that case go back to your first post and do what it there.  I'd agree that if you are changing the store anyway then having that as the root make sense.  Your checklist is pretty good.  I'd add "build new links to the new categories" too. However I still think that the key to success for a site like your is getting the content closer to the product. You need to get the stock next to your content, where as it sounds like you are doing the opposite (putting content in to the shop).  That is OK if it is supporting the sales process, but try to think of everything flowing towards the shop not aware from it. Sounds like interesting times.

Hi Chandana There are a few major things to consider when updating the site: **Keep same URLs ** Maybe the single most important factor is to not change allready ranking URLs. I do understand that changing the look of the site might require this, but you should at least do your absolute best not to change them. Also if you have a mutlilevel structure such as www.example.com/category/page be very careful changing the category since that will mean you also change all subpages. I would check pagerank and incoming traffic from search for each of the pages, then make a note on what pages are most important. You can use www.opensiteexplorer.org and Google Analytics for this. 301 redirects If you have to change your URL structure then make sure you do proper 301 redirects to the new URLs. This will not prevent you from loosing ranking on the page but will help you recover faster. On-page SEO Make sure your new site is optimized as far as possible for on-page SEO. Before you move, test the old page, then make sure the new page is atleast as good. Maybe also a good idea to look at headings and try to follow the same structure. Use the quite excellent tool from SEOMoz for this. You should find it here: http://www.seomoz.org/tools Internal Link structure This is not all that easy but try to look at how your internal link structure looks at the old site and move this to the new site. What footer links you got? What keywords you use in the links? What menus you use? If your new site is going for a dropdown menu this typically adds a massive amount of links to your site. This might be important. Be careful When making new sites its easy to get too busy designing and building the new site. Just play it cool and make sure not to make any mistakes such as leaving a no index tag or forgetting to remove a default robots.txt. Take an extra day to go through it all. Spot mistakes as quick as you can Make sure to use Google Webmastertools and Analytics to spot any problems and correct them as fast as you can. Hope these simple tips helps you get going with your move. Good luck and hope your new site turns out well. Fredrik

Try adding &gl=(country code) to the URL at the end of the Google search query. For example: &gl=uk for United Kingdom &gl=us for United States &gl=au for Australia