Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Whether or not you're allowed to copy and paste the article verbatim is something you'll have to determine from the site you copied from, but even noindex wouldn't address the problem of plagiarism if that's what you're worried about as the article would still be on your site.  Basically what you're doing is the reverse of what's in the Google guide on Canonical: _Content you provide on that blog for syndication to other sites is replicated in part or in full on those domains.    _ http://news.example.com/green-dresses-for-every-day-155672.html (syndicated post) http://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/3245/ (original post) So in this case the News site (The Daily Business Review) is the source of the article, and you're one of the sites syndicating what they wrote so you point back to them as canonical. Still the questions you bring up are part of the reason why several sites--HuffPo, The Verge, SlashDot, etc--write their own take on a source article instead of reprinting verbatim when linking back.  It's more of the annotation model I mentioned above.

Thanks for the input. I have never done split testing in Google Adwords, but maybe now is a good time to start. "...Google has gotten better and better at sending multiple keyword results to pages that have clustered semantic relevance; meaning, a page can talk about boat sales in Michigan, focusing on pontoon and sail boats, seasonal watersport recreation unique to Michigan, other localized events, etc and see strong results in each, all delivered to the same page." I agree with you there. A few years ago, I would say we need to build two separate pages, but now I don't think it is necessary. Thanks again!

Hi Brian, Good for you for discovering these. The process I would recommend would look like this: Create a strategy for launching a set of new, excellent pages that cover the basics without needing to cover every possible combo as these duplicate/thin pages are likely trying to do. Launch your new pages. Delete the old ones and say, 'good riddance!'

Hi Miriam, Here is a screenshot. It may not look all the terrible, but Hollywood Hills is nowhere near us (other side of the state), and we've never had anything close to that phone number. It says a bunch of stuff in addition to the screenshot, but the rest of the stuff is just a boilerplate "how to contact us to get this changed" message. Ruben bDCSu9Z.jpg?1

Thanks for the responses, everyone! And thanks for those resources, Miriam. Very helpful!

Awesome, thank you

My agency's website is ranked #1 on Google for small business marketing in a major US city. We get a lot of search traffic, primarily on our home page and contact page. The home page features a couple paragraphs about our agency and a video. Of course there is some information in the footer. With that being said, our website and company has been very successful generating business without lengthy pages. Although I enjoy building long, informative home pages, I don't necessarily know that it guarantees better SEO results (as our company has been ranked #1 for a while with a very minimalistic setup). This is just my own personal opinion, but I think it is generally better to give the user important (quality) information up front and try to reel them in from there. If they want to browse around your site and learn more then you've done your job. If you're really good then maybe they skip straight to the contact page and shoot you an email or call you. I've ranked multiple websites #1 on Google for fairly competitive keywords in large cities. Very few of them were infinite scroll. With that being said I don't think there is anything wrong with that style of design (I make a lot of websites like that, too). I think you should do what ever you think is more visually appealing and works with your content. I think depending on the situation either could work well. Best of luck!

This kind of depends on the size of the site, how frequently Google tends to crawl the site, strength of site, etc. Since this change is part of a larger structural change within corporate I'd ask them for a press release and link(s) from the main site to the new domain in conjunction with its launch.  That will add another additional layer to what you're planning to do: GWT change of address 301 Redirection New links at time of redirection pointing to new site. All three of which will induce further crawling by the engines and help speed up the process. Since you're dealing with mature sites it shouldn't be a dramatic amount of time if you stay on top of it.

Be sure to look in an incognito window. Often times a CMS will suppress the analytics tracking info from being in the code if you're logged in as admin, so you'll just see the non-standard tracking code and nothing else. [Voice of experience speaking here!]

Hi Monica, Many thanks . OK cool Will do Pete

Thank you again Monica. The reviews are definitely be implemented. Good luck!

I believe that our search is already looking at the product titles and descriptions. The issue is that many of our products have similar names. i.e. if a customer searches for whiteboards it triggers any product with the word board in its description. The other issue is picking up similar phrases/ typos. I think Google Customer Search is the way to go.

Using 301 is that standard way of proceeding if you need to change the structure of your site. If done properly, there is no impact on your rankings (always make sure to update your internal links - avoid 301's on internal links). As a rule of thumb, don't change your url's too often, because the redirects can get quite messy after a few years. For the ranking question, I wouldn't know how long it takes, I mainly track traffic, not really page authority, so can't help you on that one. Unrelated to your question, but could have an impact on your SEO: I was a bit surprised by your choice of Magento for a smaller shop. Magento is known for being quite hungry for resources, and normally requires a dedicated server to run on. I sometimes had difficulty accessing the pages. When I did a speed check the final result was ok, but 'time to first byte' was quite long, which could indicate that your server is not really up to its task. Another strange finding was that a very large part of the content that is downloaded are javascriptfiles (65% of total weight of the page) and css files (20%) - you should try to regroup these files & minify them. Also try to tune your caching settings - a lot of static resources could be cached. Full details can be found here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150204_1H_1A91/ - you should also check the Page Speed Insights tool from Google: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhippemamashop.nl%2F&tab=desktop. On your productpages, some of the descriptions are quite short, and maybe not 100% optimised for search (and for your target audience). Additional info is not always correct 'Materiaal: Nee' (Lief sokjes). Try to find a unique tone of voice for your site - you are trying to attract young fashionable mothers - so you probably should adapt your descriptions to that target audience rgds, Dirk

I have hundreds of articles on my site and they range in length between 500 and 4000 words - with lots of photos. My retail pages usually have several hundred words of unique relevant content and they often link to article content (500 to 4000 words) that explains how to use the product, how to select, how to repair, etc.  These are clusters of content around retail products.  In my opinion, it is the best way to rank.... but sometimes your articles will rank better than your retail  --  but, that's OK because we have house ads on those pages to let visitors know that we sell the stuff.

Well, get ahead of your competition! Also, you probably need to ask the sites hosting the dodgy links to remove them. Failing this, collate and them all to the disavow file on WMT.

Google Analytics offers this information if you enable it.  The information is based off of Google's Double Click advertising data.  You need to update your privacy policy and make a slight alteration to your installed Google Analytics code.  This is a free upgrade to your Google Analytics Account. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2799357?hl=en

You can use Facebook graph search to show if there's any interest in your keywords. There aren't many great how-to articles, especially since FB recently changed a bunch of things. However, I ran across this tumblr of actual FB graph searches, which while clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek / funny, it shows a lot of different types of combinations of searches you can use.