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Hi Andrea! You will not be "penalized" for duplicate content, but Google probably won't be indexing pages seen as duplicates in their search results. If you are optimizing those category pages for specific keywords, then you will need each category page to have content that is mostly original and unique on each. If you really only have one of those pages optimized and the others are there mainly to help the user on your site, you can use a rel=canonical tag to "tell" Google which version of the page (the specific category page) you wish to display in search results. Let me know if that helps! If not, ill try to eloborate

This may be an issue. Because these are extremely technical sites I have never done anything with Google+ but it might be time to revisit that.

Hey Joel, Thanks for the feedback on this and the links, while I'm not a coder, I'll definitely dig into the apps already made! Appreciate the response! John

Hi Mandy, The second part of Keri's question is important. To create a strategy, you must first answer these questions: Does the client meet face-to-face with customers or is business done virtually? Does the client have a physical office/s in cities within the states you are mentioning? Do customers come to these offices or do employees leave from these offices to serve customers at their places of business? Your opportunities for promotion are based on the business model (physical vs. virtual). Please provide as much detail as you can so that you will receive the best possible answer from the community.

Cheers.

Hello, We ran a couple of boosted post ads in november and october to promote a survey we were running but that's it - nothing recently and the only ads listed in our campaigns are the two I've mentioned above.

Hello David If you have only a couple of hundred backlinks to analyze, you're probably better off doing the analysis yourself "by hand". If, on the other hand, you have many hundreds/thousands of links, you may use an automated tool such as: http://www.linkdetox.com/tour/. I haven't used the tool myself, but seems to cover most of the operations necessary to get rid of links. Good Luck Jorge

Working on it. Thanx

Thank you Keri, I really appreciate you took time to answer my question so quickly. JJ

Daniel - No worries… If there hasn't been a manual action (just a big drop in rankings), disavow is a great tool to use. I think on the darker side of SEO, there has certainly been competitors in highly competitive spaces who have tried to create spammy links pointing to competitors as a means to win at this often zero-sum game.  So my hunch is that is why Google realizes that sometimes links show up beyond your control. Best practice, though, is to contact the other website and ask for links to be removed.  But sometimes this can fall on deaf ears…  Thus, Google's disavow tool… If it was my site, I'd try to get some of the bad links removed. And then really focus on a high-quality end user experience…  including site load time, engaging content, etc... Hope this helps guide the decision… Jeff

This is the page http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Health/Compare-Health-Insurance.aspx KW: Compare Health Insurance

Andie - We work on a lot of eCommerce sites with similar left-hand navigation filters. I think that the thing to keep in mind is that these pages are often like search results pages, and require a human to choose options to create those URLs.  As a result, they shouldn't be pages that a typical crawl bot would find. That said, each eCommerce system acts differently, and it's possible that permanent links are created that are added to a site map. Or, it's possible that Google's bots are starting to check boxes on eCommerce filters to better mimic human behavior.  After all, Google has created self-driving cars. The data driven approach: I would check to see if any of these pages are showing up in Google Webmaster tools to see if it is, indeed, an issue, before trying to go crazy about duplicate content. Hope this helps, -- Jeff

We saw a lot of this across multiple client websites. Once we saw it on 2, we went and checked all of the others we are optimizing and noticed almost 50% of them changed. Mainly, their Home page Title and Description were modified for various searches related to the client's brand/business name. Taking note of what Google had changed everything to and cross referencing to the on page content, we edited their Home page Title, Description and also portions of their body content or widget section content. We then resubmitted the sites to Google through Webmasters Tool and have seen most convert to what we want and Google is now displaying. Try those tactics. Hope this was helpful based on our experiences. - Patrick

I've read case studies that people don't like them but they get high results none the less. I think they have their place. But yes, one must take care and it' should definitely be responsive, or set not to show on mobiles.

Do you mean the "Most Popular Blogs"?