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Yes...I will end up doing both...because staying up until 4 or 5 AM many nights is not going to work for me in the long run.

Just because you buddy did not get caught speeding does not mean you won't. Duplicate content doesn't help anyone. Neither does forum signatures. My question would be how many links did you gain in what about of time? 100+ in one week/month/year? Did you add links slowly or just gain them all in one week? If you just put up a site & all the sudden have hundreds of links to it... you might have been busted for unnatural linking...

thanks for the advice on this one, i always thought the sandbox was still around, i tend not to take on clients with very new domains or even recommend a domain change for this very reason, thanks for putting me right on this one, i will need to google!! Yea content and onsite has been completed, I didn't want to do much link building other than business citations.

If the links are pointed at your own sites, there's no reason not to let the juice flow to your own pages.

No not at all, this is just normal linking, dont use no-follow, there is nothing to be gained by them, they still leak link juice like any other link, it just goes nowhere, instead of passing to the linked page.

So here's something interesting. If those PR toolbars are so behind, why is it alreay showing http://www.buildmyrank.com/ to be a PR0 when it was just de-indexed by Google a couple weeks ago?

It's okay to put similar available products on the product page that is no longer available. Before de-indexing them, make sure that the category pages have not garnered any backlinks. If they have, it might be worth 301 redirecting. If not, let them become deindexed.

Good answer, explains everything

I just use this one tool to export a site's data to csv and then play with it in excel http://digitalhighrise.com/how-to-capture-your-pinterest-audience

Thanks for the reply mate - yep that's what I think it is! The strange thing is our biggest competitor WD have got amazing links from high authority domains but still can't get top!

Word Separators Avoid hyphens. Hyphens detract from credibility and can act as a spam indicator. (This is a direct quote from the SEOMoz blog) Also, Google webmaster tools lets you set geo-location preferences to sub directories. You can do this by creating  a new "site" listing in google webmaster central that also includes the subdirectory, so in addition to having a www.domain.com listing you would create an additional listing for www.domain.com/it (Italy) or www.domain.com/uk (for the UK) and then set the geo location accordingly. When you're creating backlinks and tracking traffic it's logical to do it per location when you are running a directory so that's another argument in favour of sub-directories. Sub directories are standard practice, however I should mention that if you are aiming for user generated content in this directory and if the topics are broadly varied then you should also consider sub domains. Separating user generated content into its own subdomain allows Panda to penalize low-quality content and leaves the quality content untouched. Hope this helps

I'm not sure how many of your /tag/ pages are ranking but if you can figure that part out, you can try doing htaccess 301 redirects for specific URLs, example: redirect 301 //tag/Milwaukee-SEO.html http://savvypanda.com/services/milwaukee-seo.html If you need further help with .htaccess and Joomla, I'm pretty well rounded with my skills. We use Joomla for a majority of our clients (followed by Wordpress.)

When you say "duplicate blog content", do you mean that the paths are creating duplicate URLs for the post themselves, or for that the tags, categories, etc. have overlapping search results? If it's the latter (more common), I'd generally NOINDEX those. They aren't really duplicates, and canonical isn't appropriate in most of those cases. Agreed with @Boomajoom, though, it does depend on how integral those paths are for search. Some people use tags as major category navigation and build links to them. For others, the tags are just secondary navigation. If your paths are all creating different URLs for the individual blog post, definitely use rel-canonical on those. That's a problem, and they are true duplicates. I'd even advise seeing if you can not do that - it's just messy long-term, and the perceived usability benefits are very, very small in my experience. It's almost never worth having multiple URLs for the same final page.

Is there a way for the search engines to find the new content? If you're blocking the old content from being crawled, even if there are redirects, it makes it that much harder for the new URLs to be found. Also, do you have a sitemap with the new URLs?

Its a lot of work, but you can copy and paste or use other ways of reusing code. one day hay

The best way to avoid duplicate content issues is to write unique content. If you are going to quote a website, fine, use the code you have indicated above and I would be sure to drop a regular<a href="" link="" to="" the="" source="" as="" well.<="" p=""></a> <a href="" link="" to="" the="" source="" as="" well.<="" p="">But why stop there? If you can add one block of text taken from another site, can't you add another block of text, only make it original and unique? I find it odd how people get so hung up on how Google will treat their duplicate content and it is so worrisome to them. Best solution is to write more content so that what you have isn't 100% duplicate.</a>

Do you still have good success by just doing content? Yes.  We have a few niche retail sites and an info site that are all competitive in their niches. How much content do you usually need to produce before you start seeing good rankings for shorter-tail keywords? It is not about quantity.  It is all about quality.  When  we put up content it is usually the best page on the web for the keyword that we are targeting.  We post it onto the site, it usually does not rank very well at first, but a year or so later many of the pages that we have made are at the top of Google.   Some are not.   Put up the pages and don't worry about them.  If they are good their rankings usually rise. Would this same strategy work in a local setting (ex. 'insurance London, Ontario')? or is it mainly for global/national sites, where location of visitors is irrelevant? If I was going after local terms I would be using local search optimization methods.   Most of the queries that we are going after have nothing to do with a local service or product. How do you promote the content that you've created? Post everything that you do on your homepage.  Send it to everybody who knows you (and has opted in).  We have a couple of blogs that each get several posts per day.  All of those posts automatically displayed on relevant pages across out site.  They go out to twitter and FB.... we also have email and RSS feed subscribers.  We use addthis buttons all over the site to make it very easy for visitors to share. A few times per year we have a topic that we are excited about and will submit it to sites like reddit, digg, slashdot.  That usually doesn't work - but when it does the traffic is great. Finally, do you work on multiple sites, or just for one company? I only work on my own sites.