Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Kyle, Great suggestion!  I'll pass it along to the team to see if sometime down the line we can add "meta refresh" to the crawl notices section of the web app. Also, did you know we have a feature request forum? It's a great place to share your ideas. Other people can vote on them and it will help us determine priorities. You should check it out: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums

Thanks for the response. Do you think we need to stay consistent - for example if we decide to use this version - http://www.businessbroker.net/State/California-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx as the preferred version - should we use this as the preferred version for all states -- even if this version is not the ranking version for a particular state? Thanks again, MM

I am a huge fan of building links with tumblr. On webmaster tools, when the domain linking to me is not a tumblr subdomain but is using the tumblr platform, it says these are unique domains and easily puts my site well into the hundreds of different domains linking to it. While I do agree that linking with the same anchor text may have diminishing return you are still receiving page rank and giving the google robots more opportunities to crawl to your site which ultimately still holds a great amount of value regardless of how google sees their ip. It is a myth that google even considers the same IP to be a negative feature. Google sees each page as a unique site (even within the same domain and same IP). If that site is reputable then it can pass on good value and if it is not then it doesnt. So often when people have many sites on the same IP they are not skilled at making them authoritative and thus assume that more sites from the same IP or more links from teh same IP can't add much value which is really not the case. Hope this helps

There's no one right answer here.  So many factors to consider. 1. Real Word Testing For example, have you ever done heat maps or click tracking with a solution like CrazyEgg?  I ask because it could turn out to be that the "recent free reports" box gets hardly enough clicks to warrant it's being kept as compared to the "Browse Topics" links. 2. Existing On Page Optimization From a different perspective, You've only got "fair" optimization on the individual topic landing pages.  For example, when I go to the link for the Debt Collection topic, it sends me to the url http://www.insidearm.com/browse-topics/?topicid=2515 When I look at this page I see the following flaws in your page level SEO: You've got a weak page Title No URL optimization The overall keyword saturation across the entire page (including header area, main content area,k sidebar and footer areas causes significant dilution. 3.Section Level Sub-Navigation When I'm in this section, the sub-category links do show up within the sidebar Topic link area for this section, yet the whole Topic nav box is way below the fold, which already causes a user experience problem.  Taking the further action of removing that box entirely would cause even more topical and user confusion. 4. Crawlability At the code level, the page I reviewed has 385 links.  (65 of these are purely pointing to archives, and they're only at the code level, not seen by visitors, yet because they're there, search indexing crawlers do see them).  With so many links on a page, it's quite possible that search engines are not crawling your site as efficiently as they could be, which itself could be further harming your sites overall SEO in a way that needs to be factored when deciding which links on a page should or shouldn't be removed. 5.Perceived Duplicate Content Factor All those links in the sidebar and footer - for the most part they're the same across the entire site correct?  If so, that's causing not only a topical dilution issue, it's also contributing to weakness in perceived unique page level content. 6.Sectional Navigation SEO best practices DO call for a section level sub-navigation system up top or on the sidebar, though it should at least mostly be limited to links within that section. As you can see there are many factors to consider before just randomly ripping out one thing because you want the visual space for something else you or someone else in the organization perceives to be important.  It's not something to take lightly because of that very impact you express concern over.

Thanks for the quick reply.  The pages aren't identical.  I've managed to get 100-150 words of unique content for each but it's very dry and not great.  I could certainly do better, but not on each page, only one or two. I think I like the 301 idea.  I 301 the pages, take the old ones down and bolster the content on the master page.

I selectively use nofollows to social media profiles. In some circumstances, I want to build some authority to my social media profiles. However, I don't want to haemorrhage PR by creating 5 outbound links every time I create a post. However, I also follow the WWMD mantra (what would moz do) and they follow links to their profiles...

Pick up the phone. Often solves the problem fast. Sending an email is easy and requires no "on the spot" thinking. Speaking to someone by phone does. Calling just a few of those potential link prospects will have you quickly examining your value proposition (in a good way) since you will likely flub your first few attempts if your offer has no value.

HI Wildner Thanks for the ideas, i was thinking along these lines. Thanks for your input!

That one is over my head

As has been said - natural? Something to consider when link building is the content you have that can be linked to. Then base your prospect hunt in niches with relevance specifically to your content - almost along the lines of treating every page you have as a landing page target. The more relevant your page, the more likely the visitor will stick to your site.

Dear Bary, First i want to appreciate for the articles that you  had send me. They were really helpful. Now in my case the constraint is that we can not change the content and because of this we have 2 issue. 1. We dont want that any of our partner gets cannibalized by the other partner. Actually after we have pointed canonicals the traffic of one of our partner has increased significantly and others has decreased in the same manner like atleast 5 times. 2. If we dont point canonicals than according to this article http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling- legitimate-cross-domain.html what is the LEGITIMATE way of handling it. Regards

Go into adwords editor - go to the ads tab hit make multiple changes then hit add multiple text ads  - you should see a window you can past from excel into - you may need to fiddle with this till you get your excel feed to match up to what you want to do -That  is how you do it.

I went through both sites and noticed that you don't have canonicals on any of your pages. Also don't see any XML sitemaps. If you can only show the businesses that are in that particular area, and remove the ones that are not I would  probably go for that, unless you are doing Local Search as well. I would be curious to see the example of canonical issue you mentioned. Are these Joomla sites? I'm just asking because there are no description tags on anything except the home page.

Yes they "should" be punished. But they probably won't, at least not for a long time. To Google's own detriment they don't act on spam reports nearly enough, which results in spam working more than it should, which results in more spam... and frustrated competition who were playing fair deciding "If you can't beat them, join them". The all the combined intelligence over at Google you'd think they'd figure out that for long term benefits it's best to act on the spam reports instead of just gathering data from them.

I think 301 is good especially if you bought new domains and you wish to pass on the value from your old domain/domains. I did it myself with 2 domains just the other days. Just remember it may take up to 3 months for google to properly move everything and also if you're not moving 1:1  -> every-old-url   to new-urls then you will have a loss in value.

if you included the plural and singular versions of a keyword in title tag would that be considered a keyword repeat ?

Would using rel=author be a good idea in this situation?

If you can't spend money I would suggest Twitter. Ask your followers to retweet your job opening. You might also offer to write a guest post for a local blog that will get in front of a lot of your target audience.