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Interesting. I didn't know position was an SEO factor for content but can see it makes sense. Thanks again for sharing!

Do you say Google will think its spamy and won't propagate any link juice or just like a few. ** No, not spamy - but so many people are doing that and those links should not count and send out PR anyway - since those are not "natural" links. You won't get into issues for those - is just that google won't count them. There was an incident a few years back with a WordPress theme provider that had a similar link in the footer and the theme got very popular and so they got a lot of links. At that stage they got into issues as those links where "seen" as spamy - but after google "fixed" that case now they also have a algorithmic rule to treat them as they should but without hiting the target site - as again - a lot of people are doing that, it make sense and they are not SEOs to add "nofollow" so Google is taking care of that on their own. in that case wouldent it be better to dofollow only the home link? ** In my opinion that will look spamy - since it's clear you need to cut down from the site wide links but still have those links on your SEO "campaign" Personally I would leave them as they are - it make sense to have them as you said those are bringing in referral traffic and some might even "count" and send some PR your way.

The reason it shows is probably because your Analytics code is also copied and therefor showing up. in the long term this could give a small problem with duplicated content. while if your site stays a better, more popular site it won't affect you hugely, but try to contact the domain owner, or the hoster of this fraud website. and that way try to get the site taken down.

Great Answer! So for your larger sites - what structure do you use for your XML sitemaps? Focus on loc, priority and changefreq? Also is there a risk if a lastmod date is left to be 12-18 months old the search engines may start penalising the site as they deem its out of date or am I assuming they will do this by analysing the cached copies and seeing there have been no changes? Does lastmod only really benefit sites that update frequently (even daily) and for sites with static content it should be left off? I do have a further question about large ecommerce sites - is it best practice to have a one XML sitemap for the main pages and top level categories and then a separate XML sitemap for the products (I'm thinking for a site with 500 products.

No, the Geo targeting in Web Master Tools is not for boosting the Geo keyword (in your case "India") so it's not going to boost : "SEO services India" for your site because you have the GEO setting to India. The GEO setting in WMT is just to clearly state what is your target audience - and in this case is India -> so your site should do better for all searches from India. It might actually decrease your chances to rank in US based on that - so you have to chose GEO location settings only if you are really targeting mainly a specific location... Hope it make sense.

Hey there, I know a bit about the e-cig space, when I am trying to understand permutations, e-cig vs ecig vs e cigarette I do something super simple.  I type in one term and see if Google bolds the matches to the other terms. Here is an example: http://screencast.com/t/mmVk3tdE now egis doesn't seem to match e-cig, so I would try ecigs for instance, and you can see here what matches and doesn't match: http://screencast.com/t/GsxgthQXxTBA We are splitting hairs here though, I find that over time (and usually very quickly) the machine learning starts kicking in, and Google gets all the matches, so I wouldn't worry too much.

Cheers Dennis, I see so it may see the changes in the short future rather than the long run.

Dennis - thanks for passing along this info - very useful. Let me read over what you've suggested - hopefully my confusion will dim! Thanks!

A short reminder that for the most part, using "link bait" is now considered old-school... What you need to do is to create content that is SO SO compelling in your channel that folks will link to you!

Maybe I'm missing something -- but I've never seen the benefit of tags to the end-user (at least as most site authors use them.) Tags are often displayed and authors often over tag. Many authors confuse tags with SEO page titles and come up with really bad ones. They also confuse tags with categories. I've tried and failed in the past to educate multi-author sites on the distinction between all these. Again, maybe I'm missing something -- but I just don't see tags as that important in the grand scheme of things. I focus my attention on ensuring posts are done in accordance with a regular schedule on agreed-upon topics in agreed-upon categories. We display by category, recency, and popularity. So who needs tags?

Ok, so, the case studies cited in the article you linked: Naked pizza (http://www.squaremartinimedia.com/twitter-business-case-study-naked-pizza/) The only numbers they mention are these: So what is the ROI for Naked Pizza using twitter?  Well the company’s first twitter only promotion on April 23 resulted in 15% of total sales, with 90% of those being NEW CUSTOMERS!  On May 29 twitter set a store sales record with the bulk of the traffic coming directly from twitter.  How much?  68.60% of the total sales came from customers who stated “I’m calling from twitter”! 15% of total sales from twitter on April 23, total? counting brick&mortar sales as well? It doesn't tell how many twitter followers they have, what was the cost to collect those followers, they are not saying what is the CPA, the CR, they are not giving any metric to value if it was a real success or not. In the same article when it talks about Dell case study is not linking to any real case study, but I did some google to search for one and I found this other article: http://www.informationweek.com/desktop/dell-makes-$3-million-from-twitter-related-sales/d/d-id/1080465? It's rather old; it's state the big success of Dell have been 3 million USD revenue attributed to Twitter, from 2007 to 2009, with a total of 600.000 followers. I have no idea what is Dell average order value, let's assume it's 500 USD, it means a CR of 1% which is not all that bad, but we don't know the cost of generating those 600.000 followers. Also when they refer to Whole Food case (http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/reaching-millions-with-twitter-the-whole-foods-story/) they do not mention any CR or CPA or figure, Whole Food is saying they use Twitter and Facebook for customer care, they get in touch with customers, which is reasonable, but no sales. They got 1.7 million followers, which is an astonishing number, but they are a beloved brand, it's not hard to imagine they attract a lot of existing customers. I still wish I could find someone with some figures showing a real success story.

Just copy a couple sentences and paste them in Google surrounded by quotes. i.e. "content"

No, a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. So, if you went to /old-page it would auto-redirect you to the new domain's page. This prevents duplicate content across the domains.

I see that page ranking for both "student loan forgiveness" and "loan forgiveness." So it looks like you accomplished your goal but may have in the process gotten the wrong page to rank now for "loan forgiveness." Can you give us an update? What did you do? Of did Google change its mind?

Hi  T and RafalJ Thanks for your question and reply - it got me doing some more research and I followed RafalJ's lead (link). It was not clear to me how RafalJ's solution solved the initial problem which was avoiding duplicate content problems but now I see how it works. I found this question has come up before on Moz: Geotargeting Duplicate Content to Different Regions (http://moz.com/community/q/geotargeting-duplicate-content-to-different-regions-href-and-canonical-tag-confusion) and includes a link to this article in Dejean SEO (http://dejanseo.com.au/canonical-vs-hreflang/) (recommended by the ubiquitous Gianluca Fiorelli). The DejeanSEO articles provides another angle in support of RafalJ's suggestion. cheers Neil (sorry about the naked links - typing on my ipad and the links popup does not play nice)

No problem - that's what this community is all about