Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've noticed nofollow links showing up in my Google Webmaster tools "links to your site" list. Google shows all of the links.  Followed and nofollowed.  I see nofollowed links on my GWT also. If they are nofollow why are they showing up here? Because Google is showing you the links to your site - all of them that can be sipdered. Do nofollow links still count as a backlink and transfer PR and authority? Google says that they don't transfer PR.  Do they transfer anything else?  Maybe, but only Google knows for sure.

The biggest advantage to running a blog-style homepage is that returning visitors will immediately see when you have something new.  This could lead to increased user engagement, more links, more likes, etc. A possible disadvantage will be that it changes your on-page optimization.  However, all of your off-page assets will be the same for a blog-style or a static homepage.  So as long as your title tag and heading remain the same you will have almost all of original optimization in place.  And, if Google gives any credit for "freshness" you will have that as often as you add new posts to your blog. All of my blogs have a blog-style homepage.  I think that it is a smart idea and the more often you publish new posts the more valuable that format becomes. Consider for your homepage a "most recent" and a "most popular" column.  This will allow you to feature "what's new" for returning visitors and show first time visitors your historical best content.

Egol is correct. It is really hard to address your question without a great deal of specifics. The only general recommendation I can offer is to be sure to cover all the major factors for each page before trying to drill down on your home page. Let's go back to the MOZ Chevrolet example. For your body shop, I would ensure you are listed in any local directories as Moz Chevrolet Body Shop. I would also work with insurance companies, towing companies, police agencies and anyone else I can think of who is a possible source of customer information and can offer a good link. You don't want to get caught up tweaking minor details on the main page when you have big opportunities on the other pages.

In the internet archive, their old title was "DBD Results | Internet Marketing Agency". They're showing up at number 40 in Google right now for "Internet Marketing Agency". I just got spammed by them for a non-SEO site I own with a pitch for $500 a month for paid links. SEOmoz came up when I was looking to see what others had to say about them (after I left a reply telling them what I thought of their spam and choice of keywords for my site).

I'm not a guru, but it would probably be much better to build a Wordpress blog on those aged domains, create regular content and then link it back to your main site, not just regular 301 as you plan doing.

Thanks Ryan. I realize the goal is to not redo them, but we had to put in place some pretty in depth plumbing changes on the site to support canonicals, and I suspect we might make a few tweaks once we see how things play out. I think I really needed a confidence boost that canonicals are only semi-permanent. Thanks a lot!

Hi Kayden, Perhaps it's a better idea to get to the top first and then role out the subdomains. The main drawback here is loss of traffic when you do the 301 redirect. Ross

Pleasure buddy, hope it helps!

Rand mentioned using cross-site canonicals at the linklove event in London, perhaps some of the SEOMoz staff have some data on that kind of usage that they could share? (particularly with respect to the how closely content needs to match from page to page).

Ouch.  That's a tricky one, but a 302 is likely your best bet if you HAVE to move to the new domain and then move them back to new URLs on the old domain with a 301, but why do the middle step of moving these pages to the new domain?  If you're going to put them on new URLs on the old domain, why not just create those URLs and move the pages there?  Any competent developer should be able to work around having pages on a domain remain live while development takes place in the background.  Really the only instance I could see of having to part with your domain for a few months is if you lost ownership of it, other than that, I'd do what I could to avoid bouncing around on domains, especially as far as a brand is concerned.

Yes, greatly appreciate the advice. Can you recommend ay top shelf SEO agencies for  referral? thank you MIke

Awesome, thanks

I wouldn't call it unethical unless you made a habit of it with loads of sites, all providing no value. It's never worth focusing on micro-sites, but if there's a couple there, might as well use them

Thank you very muc for all your advice. It does seem to be a difficult one to address, so I'll get cracking and take your advice and get in touch ith your recommendations. Thanks again Alastair

Or... just don't bother! Make your original site mobile-friendly and dump the idea for a whole separate site. There really is no need, .mobi or otherwise. Plus, then you'll have to sites you have to get links for, when you could combine all those links into one site and get more bang for your buck.

Sorry, god only knows how I missed that. Well in that case I think you are doing what is recomended, I generally think of the canonical tag as similar to a 301 redirect. You are telling the search engines that the two pages should be treated as one and then specifying the page that is to be the front-man of the two. I think the normal proceedure is to have robot.txt for private/personal information, nofollow and noindex for duplicate content however the canonical tag is an easy solution to duplicate content as it is simply one line in the header.

Simply, yes that just about covers it. The things to bear in mind are that there is often a delay in recognising the new domain so there may be a short amount of time where your domain is not apearing on the SERPS. My personal advice is as follows: Pre-move: Buy the new domain as early as possible and put some simple content on it. Submit/register your domain with the major search engines and get a few links to ensure it is listed and the search engines recognise it (this helps to reduce or avoid sandboxing). 1. Create all necessary 301 Redirects. 2. Use analytics and site explorer to find the top 200 or so domains sending traffic to your old domain and contact their webmasters to change the links. 3. Make sure both the old and new sites have been verified and have site maps submitted. 4. Launch your new site with a media and online marketing campaign. The goal is to get as many new inbound links as possible as quickly as possible and to attract a large number of branded searches for the new site. 5. Monitor your Webmaster Central account for 404 errors and to check how Google is dealing with your 301's. Whenever a 404 is produced, place a 301 in place. 6. Monitor the spiders on your new domain. Search engines spend more time crawling sites they trust so when your crawl level is close to your old sites level you are probably close to that trust level (this is a crude measurement). 7. Monitor your search engine traffic referrals to help determine how your new site is developing on the internet. 8. You can also check your server logs for 404 and 500 errors. For more information Matt Cutts published the following: http://blog.milestoneinternet.com/web-development/faq-on-duplicate-content-and-moving-your-site-by-matt-cutts-at-pubcon-2009/