Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Unfortunately, it is very situational and tough to tell without seeing the sites. I tend to agree with Marcus that it generally makes me a little nervous, but Zachary is right - sitewide links aren't necessarily bad. They just tend to be associated with quality issues, especially on large scale. Still, one site is one site. Worst case, those links are probably just being devalued (in other words, Google is turning down the volume on them). If you're sharing content across the two sites, you might want to try a cross-domain canonical tag instead. It really depends on the degree of the duplication. Still, a link bank from each piece of content to the original content is generally a good idea. Any sitewide links, like footer links, on top of that, are probably very low value. Whether I'd remove, nofollow, or leave them alone, though, really depends a lot on the quality and the relationship between the two sites.

Typically, no, Javascript links won't be indexed and therefore won't pass value. Google has frequently claimed to be improving their parsing of JS, but i certainly wouldn't rely on it. Conversely, it's probably best not to assume they can't either (eg using JS to cloak spammy links etc.).

I looked at the sitemap, and they are including the http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz but not the canonical page - http://www.masternewmedia.org/entrepreneurship-the-full-story-of-seomoz-told-by-rand-fishkin/ So based on this example, the page on SEOMoz is still included in the sitemap, regardless if it has a canonical or not. This seems to make sense, since canonical links are used only as a hint and not an absolute directive. I also noticed that Google is choosing to index and rank both pages, on Page 1. SEOMoz  is ranking higher on my browser for "the full story of seomoz".  A few things going on here. Why is google choosing to rank SEOMoz higher than Mastermedia.org for this page?  There's a canonical setup, but google is choosing not to follow it.  (again its a hint not an absolute)  this doesn't always work. I would think Google would be able to filter out the duplicate content easy.  In this example, they are clearly not.   SEOMoz is ranking #4 and Masternewmedia.org is ranking #5 for query "the full story of seomoz"

Some of the exact-match domains that we own have been devalued by google. However, there are a few that have increased in ranking for exact match keyword searches (much less competitive keywords). There still is hope! I would include the keywords in the h1 and content. Also, create a blog on the site that includes the keyword you are trying to rank for. The power of an exact-match domain alone won't make your site rank well. Include some good content on the site with the keywords included.

Hey Jane, a little off base here. Let me try and help. Can you say which search terms you are going after? If you can drop them in the post (or PM me) then we can look how difficult they are, look at your site and Really, I would look at doing this with some content. It seems like you know why this is a better machine, start talking about it online. If there are some kind of tanning communities or other blogs, see if you can network with some people and do some guest posting to generate some better links with more longevity. Honestly, it all depends on how competitive it is for the keywords you are after but a few high quality links, some focused service type landing pages and some content articles to try and go after the larger slice of search than just dry transactional queries will all help. If you blog about tanning, share your knowledge, use twitter to network and reach out to lots of other tan / beauty related blogs and see if you can guest post. Identify some targets, add comments, get friendly with folks, let them see your amazing blog, then ask if you can guest post. You would be surprised how easy this can be and if your competition are just doing the same tired old stuff then... you will see results from this. PRWeb - meh, can be okay, but for what you want to do, you may be better writing content for your own site and networking with other bloggers. If you are small as well, a few quality directories, maybe there are some vertical directories? Maybe there is a tanning community where you can share some knowledge, make some more contacts etc. Hope that helps!

Thank you for this information. I will pass this along to our developer. In reference to (3), I agree with. However, I was bringing it up because I was unsure if we were to correct our canonicals, all of the duplicate content warnings as well as duplicate titles, would go away. We aren't creating, nor does our CMS create, duplicate posts.

There was a fad a few years about doing microsites, where everyone was trying to create as many 'feeder' style sites as possible.  Lately, the trend has reversed, (Penguin / Panda) where the focus is more on creating a single great user experience and a brand associated with it. In your case, 'personal development' and 'personal development training' could be considered as competitive, just based on the sheer number of ranking pages, and the number of advertisers for the 'training' keyword. By putting the two blogs as subfolders (or even merging them into a single blog with 2 authors), you can expect to gain backlinks and build up social activity around your site at a much faster rate, compared to running them on separate blogs. It potentially would be more fun for the blog authors as well, as there should be more readers and potential comments and discussion, and readers who follow one author stick around to join the discussion on the other blog authors posts. So, I strongly vote for a single site / blog platform.  Of course, you may have to contend with some personal egos, to convince two people to share the same blog, but for SEO and ranking, it will produce much faster results.

Too much ads on a page can affect a visitor's experience with your content. The presence of too many adverts may lead them to think that the content was meant solely to sell a product or a service instead of providing helpful information. I do agree that judging if a content has too much ad is relative. Perhaps you can do a survey and see if people feel that the website is too loaded with ads. I think "Are there excessive adverts on this page?" is one of the questions included in some of the efforts to replicate Google's Panda questionnaire. They were trying to see if high ad ratio was one of the signals being used to determine if a site's content is crappy. Many of the websites that have been hit by the first Panda update were loaded with adverts so proper attention to the amount of ads on your page may get more links.

ok. i will do that. can you please if you can check my blog to see if i have other possible errors ? titles, tags etc... Thank you  !!!!

Bonjour Nancy, You can use any gallery plugin for your WP page and if you follow the guidelines for images you shouldn't have any problem with the SEO. Pay attention to all attributes for images (image name, alt, a href, title, description, image size), I recommend you to optimize all of your files using software like Adobe Photoshop. From a photographer perspective I like to use Flickr, large community and you can easily create galleries, badges for your website. Hope it helps

Yes, I have the conversion tracking, and doing pretty well for the very small budget I have to work on the site...

Hi William, Just getting it checked out now. Colin

Actually, RSS feeds are also used as a defensive method of link building. YOAST makes a plugin for Wordpress that everyone should use (if they use wordpress), one of the features is inserting text and links into your RSS feed. Obnoxious scraper sites use RSS feeds to populate their websites, they do not monitor the content, its all automated. By putting links and a citation in your RSS feeds, this lets you at least get a little benefit from their theft of your content. Link Explorer shows feedburner and a couple other RSS agg sites as high value referring sites.

Yes, it seems that this is the case that it's the .ie website that been crawled more often. I have recently launched a new section on the .co.uk website which has been crawled by Google and is not currently on the .ie website: http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/tinnitus/ However even though this copy is all original verified using copyscape, when I copy and paste the first paragraph into Google.co.uk, this webpage above is not the one that appears in Google.co.uk, so maybe there is something else going on? Thanks