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All things considered, it's best to avoid syndication services, as the vast majority of them are geared toward mass-link building spam. The best examples of content syndication done right in our niche are our very own SEOmoz and HubSpot. Both companies have a wide variety of content dispersed amongst all of the highest-quality sources (their own blogs, press releases, other authoritative blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, etc.) It's manual by nature, but it works. There are, however, some great syndication services for specific tasks: Video: TubeMogul Press Releases: PR Web Social Media: HootSuite I hope that helps!

So I advised him to remove it asap and wait until google has recrawled the site without that on there. What is the next step?  call Google and ask to review the site to see if there was a penalty?

Cody, why would the serving host make any difference to google? If I access a SEOmoz page and an image on that page is served to me from a local CDN server rather then the main SEOmoz server, why would it be any harder for Google to index? The image is still accessed through the same URL.

Hello Kevin, I would suggest that you Change the old Listing to the new name then add in the tracking number to the "other numbers" category of the listing. Then suspend the new listing. Google Boost may assist, however Google Tags have helped me in the past with promoting a video about my client.

It also wouldn't hurt to log into Google Webmaster Tools and see if there are any messages to the webmaster from Google in there about any problems.

The page being indexed already is not a factor. You want to add the tag to the primary page and all variant pages with parameters. The next time those pages are crawled, Google will see the canonical tag and adjust the URL accordingly. Your question is difficult because the answer would depend on how your CMS is coded. Generally there is a template which is used to create the pages. Your template would need to be modified using a conditional statement to provide the canonical tag for URLs with parameters. This would be your best solution.

Hi Theo, This is an old post you commented on, but I wanted to expand on the question and ask your thoughts: I have a real estate website where I show MLS listings (properties for sale shared by Realtors) which means these MLS listings also exit on 100+ other real estate sites. For my various MLS result pages I use rel=prev / next for paginated pages. Now, here is the question: should I also ad a "no index, follow" on these paginated pages? According to a Google blog post it said no need to use when using rel=prev / next. However, in my case these pages are very similar to other pages around the web and not original content. Yes, I know I could make more unique by adding content, but that is not what my users want. I need a simple clean look with minimal words. So, if I have a result page with 10 pages, would no index follow 9 of those pages make sense to reduce the duplicate content on my website? Or, is issue that my result page will look "thin" compared to competitors and that will impact my ranking negatively?

Again, many thanks for your answers and your time in looking at these results. I hadn't even noticed that the first listing hadn't actually claimed their place page (which does surprise me). When you say that a company could achieve the same results by doing appropriate SEO on the local and organic level, I take it you mean SEO on the Places page and local targeted SEO on the main site? Many thanks for your help and advice on this. I wanted to gather as much information regarding this area within the local search before committing to the client. I have done a great deal of research about local search and SEO but was unsure of what was making Google actually rank these sites where they're ranking them. Regards, Michael

Here is my best guess about what this metric is aiming for: How does the quality vs. quantity of the links to this page compare? If a page has a mT/mR score of around 2, with Trust being 4 and Rank being 2, then you're looking at a content that's linked to from great sources but isn't linked to a lot. If the mT/mR score is .5, with Trust being a 2 and Rank being a 4, then you have a page with a ton of links to it, but few that are from "trusted" sources. My guess is that the latter case might start to look like spam to Google - someone building up low-quality links (blogger comments or even the dreaded linkfarms). I am not sure what to make of a page where the Trust and Rank are both high and the ratio ends up looking close to 1. We have one page that falls under this category - the Trust and Rank are both higher than the competing Wikipedia entry, but the mT/mR ratio is lower because Wikipedia has a lot less strong content and fewer strong links directly to that page on an admittedly niche term.

You make excellent points.  I'll escalate this to "the pros" and see if they're able to bring their guru powers to bear on the trouble. Thanks again Ryan for all your advice.  It is greatly appreciated.

I see, thank you.

To clarify - It's a popularity thing to me. It's not directly related to overall traffic, but if a site gets more traffic, it's going to be talked about more, linked to more, etc, which increases SEO. That's what I was getting at. Guess I didn't make that clear

Doing it this way is indeed pointless. But if you adjust the strategy a little, it can work very well. What do I mean?  Instead of satellite sites (new domains with no link history, no trust or authority), create satellite pages on established authority domains (Web 2.0 sites, blog platforms, etc, youi know the ones I mean). It's all about the domains (domain authority, links from domains are more important than page metrics). And don't just stop at one page. Publish multiple pages/articles on those authority sites. Of course, you must also build links to your satellite pages

OK, great, thank you. Is there a forum on SEOmoz where I can ask for professional help? Or do I just submit another question? Thanks.