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Guest posts/articles wouldn't generally be considered paid, but they can create problems if they're obviously low quality or if you're spinning the same articles across dozens of sites. It really depends on a lot of factors: (1) How much you use this tactic. No single tactic like this, especially if low-quality, should be the bulk of your link-building. Diversity is very important ("natural" link profiles tend to be diverse). (2) If the sites are part of a link network. There's been a big crackdown lately on networks, and many article marketing services use them. If you're buying into a network or service, it's a lot more likely. If you're finding places to guest post manually, it's probably not a big risk. (3) If the post/articles are clearly spammy. Use your judgment - if you look at the blogs your articles are posted on, and there are 20 other articles all on unrelated topics in spammy verticals (mortgages or pay-day loans, for example), it's going to be easy for Google to spot your quality issues. You may not get penalized, but the links will be devalued.

Hi Ocelot, I would advice you to register on http://myblogguest.com/. Great community in the background and you can find quite a lot resources on where to post your articles. Gr., Istvan

Hi Thomas- Thanks for your response. I like Author hreview - easy and seems to work nicely. I'm still keeping my eyes out though. I'm definitely going to check out GD star rating. Thanks for the tip. Cheers! Lisa

Hi I found great information on the topic on http://www.blueglass.com/blog/99-comparison-points-between-google-and-bing-webmaster-tools/ Hope it help you as well.

All word press sites i have crawled have many problems, duplicat content link juie leaks, Orcahrd has less problems, but as i said its not perfect it has its own problems, but all over it is more seo friendly. The main problem i have foudn it that it places more than one h1 tag on a page, i have written a url-rewrite outbound rule for iis to fix this problem. It is more friendly to a deveoper that wants to rewrite it also, you can use Microsoft Live Writer to to creat and publish your bogs or even Microsoft Word. http://www.orchardproject.net/

Sounds like you or your client is trying to game Google. I would put BOTH locations on one page, like a "Contact Us" page. The product and services should be stand alone.

The link building category of the SEOmoz blog is also helpful. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Hi! Looks like Rand beat us to this one, but just a few quick things to add for ya. I did a quick crawl of the site in Screaming Frog. Looks like most of the duplicates titles are due to two things; Your tag pages all of the same name. There must be away to set your titles for tag pages to reflect the tag name. Its counting every page twice - one with the slash at the end (ie: /contact-us/) and without (ie: /contact-us) (note: seems like the same for your descriptions and pages headers - this could be the "duplicate page content error") So, fix your tag pages and see about why the pages are loading with a slash and without. The 404s are there, but they look like some sort of squarspace issue with how images are cached or something - not actual pages on the site. Looks like one of your links to wikipedia has a stray character in it causing it to be a broken link. I would verify/cross check these errors in Google Webmaster Tools and then Rand's suggestion is perfect for the 404s. Hope between all of that it helps! -Dan

Alan, I'm a new discountasp user. So far I'm pleased. But today I learned that they can't accept my money for a multiple year domain registration. Their billing department says that its a system problem.  Any comments? Would this cause you to revisit your recommendation (or my use of discount asp)? Thanks, Bill Kania www.practicalclinicalskills.com

Hi Kane, Thanks for your response. I digging into it right now. I'll let everyone know how it goes. Gary

Hello SKE, I've dealt with this or similar situations several times and have found the following to be the best course of action: 1. Report the scraper site to Google using the DMCA complaint form: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1& 2. Take measures to protect yourself against future scrapers. http://www.affiliatebeginnersguide.com/articles/block_bots.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/postpanda-your-original-content-is-being-outranked-by-scrapers-amp-partners Good luck!

It seems like maybe we're getting off topic. Why does the affiliate have to suffer in order for the merchant to succeed and vice versa? The real problem here seems to be that you are giving your affiliates the same content you use on your own site. Either make them write their own content or change what's on your site and feed them the old content. It is more work, but you could start slowly by writing fresh (exclusive) content on your site for the most important products. This would give you the ability to test it out unless there is some site-wide (e.g. Panda) issue going on . As both an affiliate and a merchant, I've always found it best if each has their own content. For one thing, the affiliate site sits earlier in the funnel so it would make sense that they wouldn't be using the same message as the merchant sites product detail page, which is about as far into the funnel as you can get without being inside a shopping cart. If you are unwilling to do this I think EGOL said it best: "However, if your rankings are falling it could be competitors (and your good affiliates) are working harder than you." If you really want to be seen as the authoritative version when there are multiple sites with the same content, the biggest factor in my experience is simply links. Domain authority plays a role too, but a couple of deep links into your product page will make all the difference. I presented about some ways to get links into product and category pages at SMX West, 2012 (link to presentation) and also wrote a blog post about it here on SEOMoz. Hopefully that will help you get started, but there's no easy, scaleable way to do this that isn't a little bit on the gray side. To do it "right" in Google's eyes just takes a lot of elbow grease. One last thing. As an affilaite there is no way I would agree to putting a cross domain rel canonical or rel author tag on my site that points to the merchant's site. You would lose any affiliate worth their weight in salt that way. To sum things up for Gavin, here are your two options as I see it, but they aren't mutually exclusive: 1. Rewrite your descriptions and either give the old descriptions to affiliates (e.g. have a database with two different descriptions for every product) or stop giving descriptions to affiliates and make them write their own. 2. Build more external links into your product pages.

I would recommend Wordpress for the same reasons as Moosa and Tommy. As for books, I would suggest reading Content Rules as this not only discussing blogging but also other useful content such as Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks etc which can all boost SEO. Best of luck in your blogging adventures! Enjoy.

This is a matter of choice to me and case can be different from audience to audience! But I guess the safe strategy in that case would be the following! You ultimately have to create 2 pages one for each so the best idea is to collect all the info about two pages and this time the information should be more focused on engagement and conversions. I mean create a unique contain that include rich media i.e images and contain… in a nut shell your both new pages should contain better information then the one you currently have! Then add two graphical tabs, 1 pointing to A and 2^nd one points to B. Build links on both pages and try to make them rank in Google as well! (see which page rank 1st) and then redirect the current page to the other one! People may object about the redirect idea but as the page is relevant for both keywords so redirection to any page will be fine! (IMO)

Why do people jaywalk in a busy intersection? They want to get somewhere faster & are willing to take the risk of getting hit by a car because it "could never happen to them" OR They just don't know better, SEO is sort of this weird tiny little niche market that is not understood very well and to make matters worse, it changes every month... I have had good friends who are very smart but had to have long arguments with them on SEO, They love giving me text links, but to my name only "because linking to my NAME" is the best thing. I have to explaine to them over and over again that a text link that describes my product "boudoir photography"   "pin up photography" is much better...So they go the extra mile and spend oodles of time and make me a super pretty graphic and link to me from a banner... Same with PR0 linking essays & blog posts, they just don't know any better. (what was a GREAT solution 5 years ago is now hurting rankings) The funny thing about SEO in general is older sites still have higher rankings, so the OLD SEO advice in many cases is still at the top of SERPS. So every day people who are just learning read for days on how good linking from squidoo pages are...when in the past year it has taken a huge hit, same as paid blogs.... SEO is actually very harmful to the current relevant education of SEO....

As long as there's a reference to the XML sitemap, in either configuration, you should be fine with the one sitemap.

Emm, you know the subject of the keyword is not so easy to market...If you know what I mean! Anyway thanks for your time!