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Thanks for the help guys! I made the recommendation on the 301 / job closed.  we'll see how it plays out.

Hi Rick, I just needed the same kind of data for a book I wrote, so I know a few resources that can help you, although I'm a bit uncertain if they meet all your needs. http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/ http://www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts http://www.slideshare.net/randfish (update - forgot this one - Rand usually has tona of data in his slidedecks, so if you bother clicking a lot, I'm sure you can find interesting stuff in these ones too) Hope they can help you a little. Best, Thomas

Assuming these companies are closely related in market you might just get away with 301 redirects. Is it perhaps possible to port the actual content on domain B to domain A (for example blogs, news items, events etc.), pretty much anything that has heavy backlinks? You might want to give the 'top pages on domain' tool by SEOmoz a go to see which pages are most important to conserve link value for.

For now we are still "included' and get some nice traffic. But most results are on page 3 instead of the first page and 4 to 5 grouped together. Looks like some penalty tools are correct; they say we have a penalty of -30. Google sitemap learns that daily more pages are indexed but the number of searched where they appear are almost non existent.

Thanks Keri for your advice

Yes, it might take time to get removed from search, but crediting the base page will start with the first crawl after implementing

One of the reasons why keywords in a domain name work so well are because when links and references are made to the website, the keywords are typically the anchor text that are in the links.  So, you get an extra advantage beyond even the semantic benefit of having the keywords in the domain name.  You'll have less worries in the anchor text link building violations because you can build more links similar to the keywords in your domain. However, it appears in certain verticals, there are more benefits for the exact keywords in a domain.  Check out attorney phrases for example.  Do some research by checking out specific verticals and you might get your answer in terms of how important or how valuable they can be.

This is called 'pagerank sculpting'. It was used in the past to make sure the links that didn't have nofollow received a larger amount of link juice (as the link juice that was passed by a page was split by the number of links back then). There was a 'recent' change in the way internal nofollow links are treated, that renders this practice pretty much useless nowadays. Read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

I think you need to implement a 'canonical tag' on this page. Check out Rand's post on it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

Hi barry, If you use these PLR with a standard spun, it will eventually have a negative effect. (especially after the scraper update and the panda) I would do large scale spun (paragraph, sentences)

As Loudogg says, with a 301 redirect you'll be fine, although you will experience a slight loss of link juice through the 301. Further losses can be avoided by ensuring (as much as is possible) that links are directed to your destination page, so they don't go through the redirect. I'd definitely make sure to implement a rel="canonical" directive, and focus on being consistent.

Appreciate the response. I couldn't agree more with focusing time and resources on the site itself and other quality backlinks. I really just needed some reassurance so I can focus our attention on what is more important. As mentioned, this question arises from a co-worker (who doesn't understand SEO) doing some research and reading a forum response from last fall about using these "content farm" sites... Initially, I told him that it was a waste of time, but everyone seems to panic when they find a new median source to use without consulting me or doing the research.

Hi Jeff and Mozzers.  The UBL, Universal Business Listing, is the access point to get into the Axciom directory which is a trusted directory.  The UBL also lists your business on mobile applications like OnStar.   Although you will want to manually claim your listings on many of the places that the UBL says they place your business info, the Axciom listing alone is worth it, IMHO.

I think the 3rd option is a good one to go with? Just make sure the site.com/store is optimized like a traditional homepage. Since you are not changing domains I don't think redirecting all pages in option 1 is worth it like you said. Option 2 is good because you can really control the page, its layouts, and text/links for super optimization but the work will double because it is not linked with your CMS. If I were you I'd probably choose #3