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Hi Bob, That excellent question I'll have to look in to and confirm. More later. Thanks!

If you haven't tackled this yet, I'd suggest the Redirection plugin for Wordpress for IF you need 301s. I've only used Studiopress a little bit, but I imagine it has some features similar to Thesis. With Thesis, I can change on the fly what pages I want in my menus. The pages themselves (their contents and URLs) don't change at all, I'm just choosing to now have "About Us" shown in the menu and not show "USS Iowa" in that menu. If my husband adds a new page to the site about flags for our ships, but forgets to put it in the products folder, I can edit that page and the Redirection plugin automatically creates a 301 redirect for me. Likewise if I make a typo in the page name and don't catch it until after the URL has been created, I can change the URL name and the Redirection plugin automatically creates the 301 redirect. This paragraph applies to any WP install with that plugin, doesn't matter the theme you're using, just make sure that option for automatically doing the 301s is checked. Does this help at all?

Hi Melia, Your website brings back memories. In my teens, my career goal was to become a traveling OT for a firm like yours. A few twists and turns of life later, and here I am. Did the advice from Jeff and James help you make a decision, or are you still needing some more help?

When you say cached on a china server, do you mean cached or a copy? if you ping your domain from chin does it giove the same ip number as it would in the US? anyhow google will crawl from the US so all should be fine.

You can add them to teh sitemap, but they will be found if they have links, unless your site is huge. I would add them to the sitemap if it is easy to do, but i would not loose sleep over it

Thanks guys. That's about what I was thinking too.

I don't think that there is a simple answer to this. I would study the content, current traffic, conversions and links into this site.  Then decide how all of those individual pieces can  best become assets to your primary site. It is possible that your ROI will be higher allowing both sites to survive.  Or possible that the newly acquired site is of very little value or even risky.

Presuming both the sites hosted in UK share the same or similar interests/categories/niche, it's definitely the UK hosted site to the UK hosted site. Sounds like you already knew it, just wanted to make sure

Good question, because those pages look different to a human. The SEOmoz web app uses a similarity threshold of 95% of the html code. This takes everything on the page, both hidden and visible into account. In this case, it's counting all of the navigation and sidebar as well, which is significant. What's left of the unique content - the part that matters, makes up less than 5% of the code. Here's a tool you can use to check the similarity: http://www.duplicatecontent.net/ I ran the pages through a couple of tools which showed 96% HTML similarity. (but only a 92% text similarity - which is good, but not great) For perspective, take a look at Google's cached versions of one of these pages. This is how googlebot sees the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4fKrbNTUnegJ:www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone+http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1G Since Panda, when I see a site with this many navigation links, I usually advise them to restructure their site architecture into more of a Pyramid shape, so that you reduce the overall navigation on each page. There are 2 ways to look at this: First of all, Google is much more sophisticated than SEOmoz at detecting duplicate content, and they are also better at contextual analysis - so they can probably tell these are not true duplicates. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

If there is enough unique content on each individual page, having the form on each of them is best practices from a Conversion Rate Optimization perspective. Alan Bleiweiss Director of Search @ Click2Rank

Appreciate it! We'll check it out. Thanks for the feedback.

Just to clarify, I want to direct the link juice to: www.mydomain.com from app.mydomain.com.  As these high profile websites will be linking to the app. My idea was to have them link to a page on the www.mydomain.com/app that I would effectively redirect back to app.mydomain.com. But if I use a 301, the 301 will direct link juice back toward the sub domain (app.mydomain.com). So my question is ... will the 302 keep the juice at the www version (not pass the juice) Hopefully this makes sense.  The other option is to simply let them link to the app. and add a canonical tag that points the juice back to the www version.

Google's been doing this for a while now. Here's one post about it over at Search Engine Roundtable. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023139.html

You could essentially add them as Product Tags on the Product Level page only. If you don't hyperlink those keywords to anywhere, you should be fine. However, it would be even better if you could somehow incorporate these phrases as part of the product description. That would be the best option in my opinion.

Not really so. In fact you need to use also the rel="canonical". In order to not get you confused, I really suggest you to follow the implementations steps presented by Tim Grice in this post published on SEOWizz: http://www.seowizz.net/2012/02/consolidating-link-signals-international-link-building-just-got-easier-maybe.html

The issue is that Google won't and shouldn't index pages that are restricted. This is best for user experience.  Most people won't sign in to view the content. You basically have to create two sites.  One that is visible to all, and Google where you show or preview a bit.  then the other that is protected.

Hi Hannah, "I think" I will just leave the .com in place... I can see a lot more .co.uk's in the SERP's for my keywords but perhaps that is just because I live in England and everyone has bought .co.uk's I have already done the geo targeting in web master tools and claimed a places page etc. Thanks for your help Keith

Thanks

Just thought I would update the results on this. After taking PoolGuy's advice I 301'd the duplicate pages to their main pages, i.e. [Black Widget in City] ->301-> [Widget in City] Now almost every single main page has moved up on average 12 places to #1 on google! The duplicate pages are still showing in the SERPs but appear to be dropping and I guess will eventually dissapear. So I'm now a staunch promoter of dealing with duplicate content!

Thanks for the awesome comments Cyrus. So what you suggest is going slow and develop solid, long term and genuine links by commenting to blog posts in the same niche, good quality PR submissions. good quality Article submissions and making relevant form posts? Would you like to add something to the above list?