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agreed, so you can fix this by simply making the content on your site unique and now your previous content is the one that the current and future franchises should be using.

We should have the option to submit cancelations by the end of the year. This is a high priorty.

You can alter your titles and see if that helps, but in the end it's a matter of seeing how Google is changing your titles and then creating a title that's a compromise between what you want and what Google wants. And even in the that case, Google might not listen.

Agreed. Besides, maybe someone (a newbie like me!) with the same question could see how I figured it out, then try it on their own. Or someone can see what I did and say "wait, that's not right ... ". I think it comes from my mentality of not to wanting waste people's time on questions I found the answer to - but, yes, we wouldn't want to punish the people putting time into answering, especially when it can help someone else. Thanks for bringing that up, Keri!

Ketan, I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree? If you look at pretty much any of the blog posts on these forums you will see that more and more everything comes back to content. Original content. Original Content. Did I mention original content? EGOL shared a link with me and I'm sharing it again on another post but it's pertinent. http://www.thesempost.com/google-rewrites-quality-rating-guide-seos-need-know/ Content used to be king and he wants his thrown back! Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog? Duplicate content is something that I am working a lot with right now. There is a difference between duplicate content and plagiarism. What needs to be determined is how the are using this content. Matt Cutts said that roughly 25% of the internet is duplicate content, and a lot of duplicate content is ok, for example if you were writing an analysis, or writing commentary on one of those blog posts then of course there is going to be some duplicate content. That sort of this would be ok. If they are simply taking the article, and posting it, yet still giving credit, then no its not really doing anything except potentially giving your blog traffic. Take social bookmarking websites for example. Let's look at digg.com. A long time ago digg used to take the entire article and post it to their page and you could actually view everything within their website and everything was all gravy. Now, that doesn't work so well. Now, digg usually writes a little blurb, and provides a link. Google will look at duplicate content, determine which ever is the best representation of the content, usually who wrote it first, who has the strongest domain etc, and gives the credit to them. The other thing too is that these websites, Havard, NPR, etc have in their favor is that they are prob indexed often enough to guarantee that they are going to get credit first. As to the question about deleting them. I don't think you necessarily need to delete them, depending on how many articles exist, how much traffic they generate etc. There is a lot to look at. If nobody is looking at them, then sure, you can always do a 301 to one of your new blog posts later down the line. Or maybe your first posts are rewrites or analysis of the articles. Regardless I would provide a link on all of the pages letting people know where you got the information, that way nobody can say you were trying to steal the information. My thought on this whole thing. If it makes you uncomfortable, it's gonna make Google feel uncomfortable. Hope that helps! Good luck! Matt Cutts on Duplicate content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA&feature=kp Matt Cutts on Original content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q

I did exactly what you said but now I am running into this posted above- Yeah, Google Webmaster Tools is where I found the errors. When I implemented Schema it showed me with about 35,000 items, and about 9000 errors. I came in today and now my errors are almost gone, down to 600 but my total items dropped to 1600. I checked to see if any other code was removed and it wasn't, and ran the Bing Webmaster Tools Validator and it shows everything is correct. Why that drop?

That was what I was looking for. Thanks!

Hi CKerr, The only reason I would keep a blog off the website is if you do not want the blog to associate with the company directly but instead be an outside perspective. Or if you want to sell the blog one day. Beside that the blog should be on the site in my opinion. You can also refer to the forum below that talks about the same issue. http://moz.com/community/q/should-a-business-blog-be-on-a-separate-site-or-on-the-ecommerce-site-itself 301 re-directs are great for this occasion. Remember that the blogs ranking and trustworthiness will follow it with the 301 re-direct. All the best!

That looks like a custom report. You get more info on where to find it as wells as how it works in our Help Hub.

Thanks, William!

Yeah I was referring to directories. I figured just brand name would be the safer option but I was curious if other SEOs out there had success/difficulties using the modifier. I appreciate the response, thanks!

Is the bounce rate on the homepage high? Leave the store page and make the homepage more conversion friendly is my recommendation. I understand them wanting to get the user one click closer, but not really the best solution, try to mimic the store page on the home page a bit a keep track of changes and increases or decreases so you can revert if need be. FYI look at the links in your left nav here http://www.iboats.com/aboutus.html  and also your global footer, you are nofollowing internal links, this is throwing away precious page juice.

"So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this." I would not recommend keeping it that way. You could mass redirect them to the sitemap page if they are passing PR and or some traffic, and there is no logical other place to point them. 404's are not really something that can hurt you, providing that they are coming from external sources and you aren't providing 404 links on your site to dead pages on your site, if there are these, then you should fix the internal links at the source.

Is there a PM function on this site? I don't really wanna share my IP to public:)

Hi There PopTech! May I suggest that you start a help ticket at: https://moz.com/help/contact (choose accounts as your category). That way, you can share the full details of your account with us privately and one of our awesome Helpsters can take a look. Be sure, when you create your ticket, to include your account email

Thank you all for your answers. I'm confident your amazing team will make some interesting progress in regards with the above issue.