Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Ryan, Thanks for the quick feedback.  This clears up things for me a bit. Thanks, Stephen

It sounds like each author page is reproducing the articles written by the author, or snippets of the article. It's up to you how to best present the author pages for your site's visitors. I would suggest simply offering a title list of their articles. Perhaps a 100-word snippet for their latest or most popular article may be helpful as well. If you currently are having pagination due to trying to offer snippets for every article, this approach can make the pages more useful for visitors and resolve the duplicate title issue. If you decide you like your pages as-is, or if you still have pagination after making the adjustment, adding "Page - 2" and so forth to your pages should resolve the unique title issue.

Thanks for all the advice! I realized that Google doesn't care about the tilde -- or at least is not doing the same redirect as SEOMoz. Recently one of my older sitemaps was flagged by Google with errors because too many of the files were redirecting. All of my sitemaps would be flagged if pages were redirecting on a wide scale. My pages generally rank in the top 5 in Google and maybe losing the tilde would get me to #1, so I'll keep it in mind for the future. Thanks again for the help.

Thanks Greg, I totally get your point about "Earning" links. Struggling a bit with the notion that my competitors will give me a quality link in return for content. why would a competitor do this? I am also struggling with the notion that "The more quality links you get, the higher up in the serps you go. Its that simple." In my recent experience (post panda), that simply isn't true. I have clients with really good link profiles that totally blow away the competition (according to seomoz site explorer), there on-page SEO scores are all "A" yet they rank below many inferior pages and sites. I suppose my worry is that so many other factors are coming in to play that I don't understand. I will keep on "earning" links and see if it has the desired effect. Thanks again

For one of my sites comparing to google webmaster tools on a page that has been established for over a year webmaster tools lists 30000 links and opensite explorer lists about 3333 links so about 11% though i doubt it will be 11% for all sites as there could be many factors involved in this effect. number of linking domains is about 90% of what it says in webmaster tools. hope this helps

Everything I have seen points to a sitewide dampening effect. A big change with Panda is that poor quality pages on your site can drag down the entire site, which is why some SEOs are advising that you get rid of the low quality or duplicate content. Hubpages tried to get around the sitewide effect by moving pages to a subdomain which Google usually considers separate from the main site.

Hi Ryan, It appears that Google indexed the non www version of your page before you put the redirect in place (I am assuming that it is a 301 redirect you have used). The problem with waiting for Google to correct the index via the 301 is that the likelihood of it being crawled very often is extremely low. There are two reasons for this There is only the one page accessible. No internal links leading to other pages in the site and only one link to an external site from that page. There is absolutely no text on the page for Googlebot (or Roger Mozbot) to crawl (the bots can't read what is written in the images) Basically, the lack of content is providing no evidence that the bot should return very often. The bot is pretty much seeing an empty page. The redirect is working fine, so as long as it is a permanent redirect (301) then you are good, but the main reason for using it is to consolidate all of your URL's into one. This avoids duplicate content issues and makes sure that search engines don't get confused and treat them as different sites. Both are Still valid and will work. As to wanting Google to adjust the index so that it appears as www,funtranslator.com, if you have set it up in your Google Webmaster Tools account, go to Site Configuration, choose settings and set the preferred domain name to the WWW version. That is the best you can do to send them the signal that you wish to use that as the preferred domain. If you don't have webmaster tools set up, then you will need to add and verify the site first. I can't see that this will be a problem for SEOmoz, since Roger Mozbot crawls the site directly. He doesn't need Google to tell him what to do. If you want to check this for sure, just email the help team - help [at} seomoz.org and ask them to confirm. Hope that helps. Sha

Now its all starting to come together.  I love involving the community in the decision.  Will do!

thanks. Now it makes sense

Hey Jen, Its so good to see you back!

it is like selling ice to eskimos in terms of convincing the brand managers who are convienced that they have too much equity in their existing brands to dillute/consolidate I understand your situation as I have been there myself on more then one occasion. Having worked with eskimos I have learned they like money, so perhaps speak to them in financial terms. I would request a meeting with those who have the authority and ability to make a change and share the following ideas: combining the two brands into one would be a significant cost savings. Product labels, designs, two websites, all aspects of branding from commercials, ads, promotional material, etc. can be condensed into one yielding savings. sales can be increased. Why does a mayo company maintain a website? They probably aren't selling their product online so they recognize supporting their customer based with recipes and other information is helpful. By combining their sites their rankings in SERPs should noticeably improve. Rather then having the #5 and #7 results perhaps they could be closer to #1. as Sha suggested, they can wrap a promotion around the name change. Engage your customer base in a tweet-fest and otherwise ask them for input. Ask your customers to vote for their favorite brand name. if they established a single brand name their advertising dollars should work more effectively. Creating a single commercial/ad that runs nationwide is going to be more effective then splitting the country up. From personal experience I had never heard of "Best Foods" until I moved to California. When I watch tv and see a "Best Foods" ad because I am seeing a West Coast feed, the "Best Foods" ad is wasted on me. With a single brand, it would be more effective. Almost every piece of logic involved indicates a brand merger. The only legitimate concern is how to handle the transition, and that is a management/marketing decision. A label can be produced with both the Hellman's and Best Food's logo on it then after ?a year one logo can be dropped. We live in a time where we have seen industry giants well known throughout the country fail and close their doors forever. In most cases, these companies developed a successful strategy but failed to adjust. New businesses who weren't held down by past thinking flew past the old companies. It's up to your client whether that analogy applies to their situation. As an SEO, your role isn't to force them into making a change they don't want to make. Instead I would recommend educating the client on the benefits of making the change, and ensuring they are aware of the negative issues and costs of not following your advice. If the client understands and makes the decision, you've done your part and can move on to other tactics to improve their SEO.

Hi there, You can do what you want to do as long as the keywords are loaded in your campaign. Its just a little hidden If you go into the On-page tool you see the Summary view. If you look right above the big heading On-page Optimization, there are two blue text links. Choose Report Card. Now you will see a selector which allows you to choose any keyword from your campaign list and enter the URL of any page in the site. Click Grade my On-page Optimization and voila! Roger will fetch your Report Card! Hope that helps. Sha

To clarify, if you indeed added "quality links" meaning the pages you obtained links from have a high PA/PR, then your search results can improve in less then a day. Google has the resources to crawl the web much faster then anyone who offers SEO tools. The time it would take to see the results in your SEO tools would still be as described with the earlier replies.

Thanks alot. Was hoping that would be the case

Hi, Ryan has given a great answer there. On the subject of what you will see in the search engine result pages, it does not have to be an either/or situation. It is quite common to see multiple pages in a site appear in the same results. The most important thing is that by optimizing specific pages for keywords that are relevant to their content you have more chance that visitors will arrive on a page that gives them what they are looking for. This is much better for the user experience and likely to help with conversions. Congrats on the new job, sounds like you're a natural! Sha

Good points, Greg. From this it sounds like a viable business plan, I think we'll give it a go then. Much appreciated!