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Thanks for responding Jason (your pic looks like it was taken in a rain forest). As to traffic in Spanish for our clients product/service there is enough to put up Spanish language. As I said in reply to Ryan, I am going to have one site for the main with both English and Spanish. I would ask this: you said if considerable Spanish searches you would do one English and one Spanish, why? (Just interested in the reasoning on any SEO) Frankly, I think you could be right as much as I think doing one with both languages could be right.

Great feedback. thank you so much Sha.

It's not as bad as it sounds

Search engines handle underscores in different ways, so it's best to make them uniform and use hyphens, all being equal - This appears to be best practice in Google's eyes. I wouldn't worry about it too much thought and I would take vitalscom's advice if you were thinking about moving them over.

You are correct Brian and I have updated my original response. The primary remaining advantage is any Google AdWords advertisements stand out more as they display the Google Checkout logo.

Where can I find knowledgeable website developers that know about proper seo!? The best advice I can offer on this topic is, don't try to combine these two jobs into one person. I know some great web developers. I know some great SEOs. I don't know any one person who is great at both. I have met many web developers who are certain they "know" SEO, but they really don't have any real SEO understanding. The opposite is likely true as well. I mention this information as a cautionary against any individual who may present themselves to you as such a person. Find the best SEO you can, find the best Magento programmer you can, then have the SEO evaluate your site, make recommendations and have the Magento expert make the necessary changes.

Sounds like a great opportunity! You might also try the SEOMoz free jobs marketplace if you haven't already www.SEOMoz.org/marketplace.

I am sure you can find the expressing via a Google search, but even easier you can ask your host to do it for you. Most small sites use managed hosting, and most hosts are willing to help. Give them a call or open a help ticket and ask.

Ricky, the .net site appears to be penalized, go to google and type in akinsseptic.net - results show for the .com site.  Also, if you simply type in akinsseptic in google you get neither site. This is an indication of trademark suppression AKA Google penalty. Your first step would be to unwind the penalty, until the sites are cleaned up you won't get rankings unfortunately. I definitely believe that domain name age plays a large part in rankings out of the gate.  I have heard that it is better to let Google find your site on it's own (from following links on the web) rather then submitting your URL to Google, because if you submit it Google they start the clock from when you submitted it. I have not tested this but since it's possible I never submit new sites to Google URL submit tool.

Totally agree with Ryan Kent. You should write a paragraph of content that is unique to the company featured. The chart is not unique enough and you will get flagged as having a high ratio of duplicate content. You should also look at all the other SEO elements on this page, understand what keyphrases you are targeting and modify the title, meta and H1 tags.

The answer is right in your question - "runs a number of whitelabel sites". As mentioned, it is largely due to the original publisher publishing the content first and getting indexed - from there, anytime the google bot stumbles across the same content - it will figure out that it has seen the content before, and attribute the ranking to the original. Something that google themselves covered last year here (although more specifically for news at the time). Duplicate content unfortunately isn't just "not shown" by the search engines (imagine how "clean" the SERPS would be if that were the case!) it's just ranked lower than the original publisher that google is aware of. Occasionally you will get the odd page that will rank from a different domain - but that is usually due to being fresh content, I have seen this myself with my own content being aggregated by a large news site - they might outrank me on occasion for a day on one or two pieces - but my original url comes out on top in the end.

Hey Will It's tough to advise you off the cuff on content for your products but do some keyword research, see what people are searching for in relation to these products and see if that gives you any insights. It may give you blog post ideas to pick up pre-purchase search traffic and it may also help you flesh out those product descriptions as they are a bit skinny at the moment. We want to think about the percentage of the total page that is unique and therefore having a longer product description, some reviews or other content that is specific to that page will certainly give you more scope for long tail search and help you stand out from the boilerplate product description merchants. Fashion orientated blog posts about the different products may well be a good way to get some internal keyword rich links and pick up people searching before they are ready to buy. If you can then convert that kind of traffic to your twitter or facebook (or even email) then it all adds up to slowly bringing people in to the site and pushing out what you have to offer. Hope that helps buddy Marcus

REL = Author does not work that way. My understanding of the process is as follows: 1. An author sets up their Google profile 2. The author creates a link from their Google profile to their profile / about page on your site. 3. The author also creates a link from their profile / about page on your site back to their Google profile. By establishing this two-way link between their Google profile and their profile page on your site, they have verified their identity and control over the page's content. This link then allows any content created by the author ON YOUR SITE to be linked with the REL = Author idea. It would not impact content created on any other site. Official REL = Author Google page

I would also recommend you to be active in social media like Facebook and Twitter. The social activity is positive in many ways, 1. Creates a buzz around your business, gives Google positive signals about popularity. 2. You will spread your information to friends, customers and others in your industry, it will help you build the brand.

Gotcha, well depending on the crawl rate (PR/Update Frequency, etc.) and number of pages, Googlebot should be back to check it out, more than a month and I would start to wonder about other issues. But, hey, as Matt said above, if you can gain something from keeping those pages, 301 them to an equivilant page on the new site. If you know that thosee pages were low value or had no links (except internal ones), you could go the Remove URL route. Brian

You could surely be penalized. If you really must link to them for some reason use nofollow at least

Very well said.  Backend factors (beyond the obvious speed and uptime) do not easily influence SEO practices in the least. However, when changing the backend of an established site, always make sure that you don't pick up any unwanted errors in the exchange.  Simple things that can be easily over looked such as 404s and misplaced 301 redirects can have a negative impact on your new site!

An idea could be to create unique content around the duplicate product listings, like user reviews, additional images, a video of one of the cars on the lot, customer testimonials or case studies about owning the car, a video of a drag race between the car and a competitor's car, etc.

Wow! What a nice gesture. I would love to discuss a couple of things with you, mainly around our content. Should I just message you through here or do you have an email I should use? Thank you! It's great to meet someone in the same sphere...

Paul, OSE is no-where near as complex as Google's algorithms and can only rank links in a relatively simplistic manner. Although it's a very good tool for getting an idea of what's going on, there are so many other contributing factors that Google will use that just can't be included in OSE. For example, the directory links may be ranked highly in OSE because it's algorithm looks at all the links going into the directory and determines that it's probably quite a good source. Google however may have penalised the same directory (something OSE can't determine) and so any links from that directory may in-fact be worthless. When using OSE, I tend to use my gut instinct as well as the stats to tell whether a link is worth anything or not. If a link looks particularly spammy then it probably looks the same in Google's eyes. Also - it's worth remembering that OSE's index is much smaller than Google's, therefore although most of the decent links will be in there you may not be able to see some awesome links that your competitor has, simply because they're not in the OSE index yet.