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You can also share it on LinkedIn and BeBee which are both professional sites from which you'll not only get "likes" or "thumbs up" but additional shares and webtraffic. I've also had luck with sharing pages on StumbleUpon. As long as you're tagging and categorizing correctly you should see a significant reaction on any one of these sites.

Thanks Michael!

Jen - I agree with Eli.  It's best not to use the TM symbol in a URL string  - it will confuse the end user when it's URL encoded and scrambled.  Rather, put the mark on your pages and in images. If you have gone through the registration process with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), you should be using the  symbol next to your mark, and not the TM symbol. According to the Trademark FAQs on the USPTO site: http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp#_Toc275426682 Do federal regulations govern the use of the designations "TM" or "SM" or the symbol? If you claim rights to use a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim of a “common-law” mark.  No registration is necessary to use a "TM" or "SM" symbol and you may continue to use these symbols even if the USPTO refuses to register your mark.  Those symbols put people on notice that you claim rights in the mark, although common law doesn't give you all the rights and benefits of federal registration. You may only use the federal registration symbol "" after the USPTO actually registers a mark, not while an application is pending.  And it may only be used on or in connection with the goods/services listed in the federal trademark registration and while the registration is still alive (you may not continue to use it if you don’t maintain the registration or it expires).  Although there are no specific requirements on where the symbol should be placed relative to the mark, most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark.  Note: Because several foreign countries use “” to indicate that a mark is registered in that country, use of the symbol by the holder of a foreign registration may be proper. From another section_:  There are no specific requirements on where the “” symbol should be placed relative to the mark, but most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark._ Hope this helps! -- Jeff

Hi, I had another thought - the old posts are ranking fine on the new site after the 301 redirect. Some are slightly down but in the main, they are approx the same SERP position. It's new posts which are having the difficulty. Are new posts on a new domain difficult to rank anywhere even with a 301 redirect passing authority through? The 301 is passing everything through to the new domain. Getting really frustrated! As I say, I don't have an expectation of search position but this is good content which is being indexed but not being given any SERP position.

Same happens to me with smartphones i have a lots of 500 errors on smartphones that doenst appear on web, and i see good connection. I am starting getting doughts that smartphones on webmaster works correctly.

I checked out your site. You are right, the brand dropdown is a rough experience for the user. Can you create a columned navigation that spaces out the choices? Something similar to that would be what Dicks Sporting Goods has on their homepage : http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/ They have a lot of choices, but they are spaced across columns in the nav drop down.

Makes sense. Thanks!

It's going to come down to just a couple of things: How well the content is written--what's the reading grade level score, are there grammatical errors, etc. How close the content comes to existing content on the web. I'm not familiar with these two companies, but from what you say, it sounds like #1 isn't going to be an issue.  And most likely #2 won't be a problem either--even though realistically they're going to be looking up the raw data from somewhere (Wikipedia!) and doing their best to completely rewrite it....and that's always a challenge. But the reason I don't think #2 is honestly going to be a problem is because right now, Google doesn't seem to be very good at spotting near duplicate content with even just light edits.  Or even WITHOUT edits, just with other content on the page.  As an example, search for this phrase (including the quotes) in Google (it's taken straight from Freebase, i.e. Wikipedia's back door): "The local people are mainly Maasai, but people from other parts of the country have settled there" Google finds and displays 96 YES NINETY-SIX pages before chopping it off and leaving it to the supplementals. Will this go on forever?  Of course not, Google is undoubtedly working at trying to handle detection of this kind of thing.  Certainly it isn't in Google's quality interests to list 96 pages all that suck the description of something straight out of Freebase.  But, this paints a picture of where they are today in doing that....and that tells us that they're a long ways from taking a run at content that you've hand-rewritten from other sources....even if it's a light rewrite.

Thanks. I didn't think it would make too much of a difference but I wanted to get another opinion. I'm not worried about spammy URLs. Everything will be off of a short .edu - they look pretty clean with multiple subdomains.

Felip3, Thanks for the response. I agree - it's too easy for spammers to attack and destroy brands. I especially agree, and have always been proponent, of diversifying traffic sources. Of course, when the majority of website traffic is coming from Organic (as it was for us) and then drops off, it can still leave a bruise. Thanks, Mike

Paid directories are held at the same standard as paid links (see Matt Cutts Video). However, the directories are still weighed based on quality, amount value they add (such as original content), how much work the owners put in and etc. So many good directories do exist. Some good industrial directories (that I recommend) are: Thomasnet, MacRAE's and GlobalSpec (in that order).

Hi Steve, I think that sounds like a good plan.  If the recipe site is gaining links naturally and isn't affected by Penguin then it might be better to work on that one and drive traffic to the main site with it.  I also like the idea to keep working on cleaning up the e-comm site in the meantime. Good luck! Marie

Hmm interesting, now that you mention it. This issue isn't happening for me in Safari, IE or Firefox but it is happening in Chrome. I have not, I don't do much with .htacccess and when I've tried it hasn't worked hah. Not sure how I would go about doing that.