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Hi Mike, I'm going through older questions that are marked unanswered and wondering what you decided to do in this case, or if you're still looking for advice. If you still want some opinions, you might try asking this again as a new question, with any additional data or insights you've gained since April.

Awesome!  Thank you so much for the advice Ryan!

As Zachary says, these results are personalised. The best way to check is to use incognito in Google and Private browsing in Firefox whilst being logged out of your google account. This should remove any personalisation from your searches.

Thanks Ryan, These are all things I suspected, but it's good to have an outside confirmation as well.

I'm from Burnley originally and I've worked in Blackburn and Manchester previously but now I live and work in Dublin, Ireland It's nice to see somebody local on here. I would suggest Social Bookmarking the new pages that you have created and I think you'll be surprised at what will happen, something so simple. Have you updated your sitemap as well?

"Ensure your 404 page is helpful. It should contain your site's normal navigation bar along with a search box." good point, there is nothing worse than a 404 with no information. Something to consider is the amount of fun you can do with the 404 landing page. Write a fun title Iframe a funny blooper youtube video Link to your most visited pages Link to your social platforms Write a joke I have had good social reactions from this.

Hi, I'v been using disqus for a while now. Haven't seen any negative results from that. So the question fb comments vs. disqus would be reach. Facebook is the most used platform but you might loose some feedback because of reach. Disqus is compitabel with all major sosial sites.

I know there are many opinions on how to handle paginated pages. My opinion is to just use a noindex, follow meta tag on all the paginated pages. The thinking is that these pages don't have any intrinsic value of being in the index themselves, but you still want the engines to be able to crawl to all your products from your internal links. I would only use the next and previous tags on paginated articles or galleries. The canonical tag is meant for duplicate pages and doesn't really make sense to use for paginated pages.

...any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines... What you are doing will almost assure that one of the sites will be filtered from the search results.  And if you are going to have lots of links between these  sites I am willing to bet  one month's pay that one of them will be filtered from the SERPs in under six months. other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping Google doesn't really care if you scraped that content or if it was a gift from the Pope.  They don't like to show duplicate content in their SERPs and will work to filter as much of it as possible.  Adding meta tags will do nothing...... Your primary problem is cross-domain duplicate content... adding "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....." sounds like more duplicate content WITHIN the domain. There are no shortcuts.  If you want to ensure that both sites will perform well you will need to pay the price of unique content. this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with If you were my employee I would  hope that you would try to educate me.

This is basically a way for sites to try to control the performance hit of being crawled too often by the bots. I don't think its ever worked to get a site deemed unimportant by the engines crawled more often than they would otherwise. If your site is not getting slammed by bots (and if it is, you probably have bigger performance problems to go after first) then, like Ryan Kent said, there isn't much use for these.

As Ryan pointed out, I would only be concerned about the browser type-in visitors. The more popular your website will get, the more # of visitors you lose to your counterpart. If you are project is serious enough and if you can afford to get the .com, I'd go for that.

It took 2 weeks for us a few months ago, but we were simply told that the site did not have a penalty. We made some changes both internally and created some better links and we were back up the rankings,

I agree with Stephen on trying to cut down the number(replace with related kw)  and monitor the results . The motivation to do so is more about user perception rather than SERPs. Page looks good above the fold but becomes a bit less compelling as you go down . The tools only provide suggestions (good ones actually) rather than edicts , on top of my head imagine running that tool on cars.com keyword "cars" . As far as "KW density" this device from my understanding was meant to cultivate best practice ; to optimize for form and flow rather than trying to gain an edge in the SERPs (might not be KW density after all) . This article is old but I hope it helps in explaining KW density (or the non existence of). Hope this helps . Cheerio

I am glad I was able to help and I am sure you'll do great with the long tails especially if the niche is not highly competitive. Hit me up in a few months would love to hear you did well.

Google can read PDFs, and returns them in search results, but some users might prefer to view an HTML version.  Also, it looks like images in PDFs are not indexed, according to the 2nd post below. Regarding duplicate content, Google says (2nd post below): Q: Is it considered duplicate content if I have a copy of my pages in both HTML and PDF? A: Whenever possible, we recommend serving a single copy of your content. If this isn’t possible, make sure you indicate your preferred version by, for example, including the preferred URL in your Sitemap or by specifying the canonical version in the HTML or in the HTTP headers of the PDF resource. For more tips, read our Help Center article about canonicalization. These will be of interest to you: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4472512a5515686b&hl=en&fid=4472512a5515686b00047d6de91c24fa&hltp=2 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pdfs-in-google-search-results.html

Google just announced some tags to help support pagination better.  They say if you have a view all option that doesn't take too long to load, searchers generally prefer that, so you can rel=canonical to that page.  However, if you don't have a view all page, then you can put these nifty rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in to let Google know your page has pagination, and where the next and previous pages are. It sounds like you don't want to go the view all route, so you should read the second post below and you can implement the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags. (from the view all post below) However, if you strongly desire your view-all page not to appear in search results: 1) make sure the component pages in the series don’t include rel=”canonical” to the view-all page, and 2) mark the view-all page as “noindex” using any of the standard methods. View all: http://googlewebmastercentral.blo... next/prev: http://googlewebmastercentral.blo...

Yeah I'd recommend consolidating the content onto one page, and 301 redirect the old pages to the new version. If there are clear differences between 2 or more sections of the content then it's not a problem to have those parts of content on separate pages as they're targeting different keywords. The less "thin" content, the better. Cheers Rob

If what you are asking is how to optimize the image so it does well in google image search, then best way is to put a caption under the image you want to appear in the image search Google pays attention to about the next 70 characters following the image on the html/php page. so if you want to rank well for brown bowling shoes in image search simply put brown bowling shoes on the html/php page right after the image, also use brown bowling shoes it the alt attribute of the image , this will especially help if the image is clickable. It sort of counts like anchor text of the image.