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Could you not use the 'canonical tag' and link it back to a page which gets the largest volume of traffic? Ref:http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

Hi Matt, I checked it out. What I saw was a quality site using your service as intended and citing you as the provider. I would be incredibly surprised if there was anything negative here. There are absolutely no potential low quality signals I can see. Your service is getting adopted by legitimate users and cited appropriately. I just can't see anything wrong with this. If you were "penalized" for growth this would be a gross distortion of what what the "penalty" is intended for. I really see nothing wrong here. Do you have further growth lined up? The only thing I could see POSSIBLY being an issue is getting a burst of links and then having it drop off. But it's only 50 sites - not the thousands you can get using "other" means. I strongly think you should just go for this. If you were a client that would be my recommendation. This IS natural linking. Any other SEO's care to weigh in on my thought process? If I'm full of it I'd love to hear it. But I don't see how.

I like the opensiteexplorer method. The difficulty is what to do once you create the list of .edu's. We're using some of the other blogs on the subject on seomoz.

Thanks again. I am not eager to push any single product at this point. We are planning on building some strategic landing pages over the next few months and I will create some links to those once they are created.

Hey guys, I'm actually looking for the same answer: should I choose to use RDFa or Microformats? I've searched if any of my competitors are getting rich results in the SERPs but their not so it's kinda hard to figure out what to use. Supporting Schema.org is an obvious one because, as Peter states, the SE's are pushing it. Even though they're not using it extensively yet there's a good chance they will make much more use of it in the future. Anyway, also I would greatly appreciate some more input. Thanks in advance!

They only have between 30-50 products (water filters systems and replacement filters) that don't need to be changed out very often.  Yes it definitely needs to be user friendly as well as SEO friendly.  I'm new to shopping carts so this is a learning experience for me too. I will look at foxycart.  Thanks!

You're welcome! I understand your problem, and the canonical cannot solve it. It only works for internal duplicate content. I saw something about a external canonical, but it looks like you're going to pass your relevance to another site, and you don't want that!  ; ) Do you and your competitors have too many duplicated content? I would suggest you to write your own content in the cases of external duplicate content, and this way go ahead of your competitors! Have I answered your question? If so, click the Good Answer button! =]

the best way to judge this is just search in Google and you will see different website in top 10 position for these terms, which tells me yes they are two different terms and google wait them differently...

I think in the future it will affect your general domain ranking a little bit (Seems like a logical step for google?). But just as Ryan says presently it doesn't seem to affect it.

I think the footer is the best way to interlink the websites in a non-obtrusive way for users.  This should make your main corporate site your top linking site to each subdomain - and this is something you should be able to verify in a tool like Google Webmaster Tools.  I do not have any specific examples to support this, but this is a common web practice. This is not 100% related, but Google recently suggested using Footer links as one way to associate your web content with your Google profile account: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 So you can figure if Google looks to footer links to associate authorship - they would likely do the same to relate sites together.

As I see it, Google needs to take no action on paid links. Well, no action different than devaluating them. While the market for paid links grows, the overall value and quality of each purchased link is deemed to go down. At one point people will stop bying them at all.

Agreed, i just found it odd that they currently rank for "print and apply" but not for "print-and-apply" it leads me to believe that if we did target one way or another it could influence rankings. I would be intrigued if anyone else has seen this before.

The first thing I would do is login to my webmaster tools account and submit a reconsideration request. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=1 this goes a long way with Google. Just explain everything as it happened and confirm that the problem got fixed. I hope that helps!

A lot of coders like giving filenames underscores rather than dashes, because when you select (doubleclick) a filename_like_this all the text is selected, whereas a filename-like-this may only have part of it highlighted - so to me, an underscore is more akin to 'treat this like a word' and a dash is 'treat this like a space' - and either is better than %20! For SEO though, the dash=space is worth it where: the URL string is long (thisisnotaseasytoread in the address bar, this-is-much-easier-to-comprehend) - I think that helps users, which in turn signals to Google that you're being helpful if the concatenation of the words would be confusing to a stemming programme - see here for examples http://independentsources.com/2006/07/12/worst-company-urls/ if someone wanted/had to manually type a url, a dash is quicker/easier as you don't need the shift key (which you do for an underscore) if someone shares (pastes) a raw, long URL, with dashes in you have a chance it will wrap in a blog or wherever - reallylonglinkswithnospacesendupstickingoutofthesidesofablogandlookuglyandannoyingandlessprofessional that looks dreadful, whereas you might get away with high-on-the-hill-stood-a-lonely-goatherd I find that it also helps with link-naming consistency, it's easier for you to spot your own typos or linking errors (so fewer 404s to hunt down) Sorry, must dash

Thanks eunaneunan!

The biggest concern is duplicate content. If the domain acmewidget.com points to widgetzone.com/acme-widgets and that directory is accessible from the widgetzone.com website then the search engines will see acmewidget.com as a duplication of widgetzone.com/acme-widgets and almost certainly exclude it from the search engines. I'd recommend setting up microsites under your keyword rich domains that sell a small range of products - the work load is manageable and as long as you provide some unique descriptions and content will work alongside your main website.

Thanks Paul. Fortunately, this site doesn't use a shopping cart. It's for generating offline leads. Hopefully it won't create other issues. Daniel