Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If two paragraphs are the same and the rest is unique (as long as it isn't just a one sentence news item) I'd consider it unique content and NOT use a canonical tag. How long are the news items? I don't see much of a problem if they're of a decent length and not just a couple of lines.

Mike, This is best practice on all sites. Forgetting about the links for a minute; you have two versions of the same page (in search engines eyes) so the first step is to do exactly what you're asking and consolidate into one. The next step is to ensure your URLs end with a trailing slash because if you have www.url.com and www.url.com/  you again have two different versions. DD

And a user's money still spends the same on the site, whether or not they came through a link that is or is not followed. Sure, would be great to have it followed, but I'd much rather have the link there and it be nofollowed than to have no link at all.

Just a note; when I added the facebook plugin to my wordpress install it slowed my page load time dramatically. Make sure to check yours doesn't do the same if you decide to go the facebook route. However, I did notice a large increase in comments once I enabled the plugin. (I assume since the user didn't need to login - even though I didn't require an account to post on my blog, I figure most people are unfamiliar with the wordpress commenting system) I used: http://www.webpagetest.org/

Hi Paul, did you find a good way to automatically do the trailing slash redirect?

It's a good idea but I would suggest that you really want that as part of your main domain rather than a subdomain. Any links pointing at it wouldn't be helping the main domain. Now I don't know enough to suggest a fix, but a quick google found me this: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5e5e79427977d86a&hl=en I've never used mod_proxy, but apparently you can use it to have a different ip address for a subfolder. I believe it's ProxyPass Directive that you're after. Hope that helps.

I agree with you and thank you for your answer but at the same time i am more worried abt the structural standpoint - as i responded above to one of the replies - use the example with the hospital A hospital may target very general related keywords but then it may offer very specific services and programs that are all indirectly related. Now those programs are very niche related and specific for certain types of surgeries and services offered, they contain a lot of information and can be expanded way above the 10 pages mentioned. Now the question is what do you do in that case? You'd rather have 5 sub folders divided in other 20-30 categories and subcategories? Or you would rather have them structured in a better way on a sub-domain? What would be your choice in this case?

I don't know what happened to the url. Sorry about that. Try copying this and pasting it into a browser window: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3579234.htm

I would like to monitor my competitor's link building. I give your tool 5 competing urls and then the tool accesses some backlink database to tell me (1) the number of newly discovered links for each url that day (like the MajesticSEO backlinks chart when using fresh data), and (2) lists the new links along with the estimated mozRank or something (so I can see if they got any really important new links). The goal would be to (1) keep tabs on competitor link building campaigns, and (2) identify places I should ask for links to maybe get similar links to what they recently got (ala the Competitive Link Research Tool at SEOmoz). Another cool one would be something to tell me which keywords I should focus on among those I've optimized pages for. For example, if I have 100 pages optimized for 100 different keywords, the tool would go fetch the estimated traffic for each keyword from Google. Then it would estimate how much traffic each spot in the first 10 or 20 spots of the SERPs would be worth in terms of clicks (using the studies that show the 1st spot gets x% of the clicks, the 2nd spot gets y% of the clicks, and so on. Then it would lookup my current Google rankings for each keyword. Finally, it would give me a sorted list of ways to improve my organic traffic by comparing my current ranking with a targeted ranking (user-defined, perhaps) and say: If you moved "keyword 5 from its current spot 8 to a target spot 3 you would increase your organic traffic from this word by 200 clicks/day" (or something like that). And then repeat for every keyword. The reason I want this tool is that sometimes I find myself optimizing a long-tail keyword where even if I get the #1 ranking I may only get 5 clicks/month. Even those are possibly very highly targeted, the time spent achieving that #1 ranking might be better spent getting a #3 ranking for a keyphrase that has 1000x more traffic. A tool to help me prioritize time vs estimated reward would be helpful.

Hey LJB, I remembered I had read about the update schedule and found this google calender Linkscape update schedule: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule I believe the changes appear pretty much right after an update, but I am not really sure on that. Hope this helps!

Quick follow up- Due to my ecommerce cart, I'm not able to modify the canonical tag on invdividual pages.  However, Adams other suggestion to use webmaster tools was great and I tried that.  I went into the site configuration settings and then clicked on parameter handling.  Google had already detected the setCurrencyId parameter, so I changed it to be "ignored." Hope that helps someone.

Well, there we are then. I made this video yesterday, had fun doing it, but I guess that's all it is, just a fun little diversion. Thank you for your candor. I certainly did not expect this to be the cornerstone of our marketing efforts, just hoped it may have some value. Clearly , it does not. Video, like all things in life, takes a lot of work and experience to get good at. Again, I appreciate your feedback. This is why I come to SEOMoz, no B.S..

Thanks for the valuable feedback, Craig & Mathew. We shall update the content to be relevant today and start submitting.