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What I'd recommend are:

1.  you could set your author and tag pages to be 'noindex,follow' - so search engines will still visit them, and follow the links through to the posts, but not actually index the potentially duplicate content on those pages

2.  make sure that your category pages are just showing excerpts of your posts, instead of the actual full post.

3.  determine your canonical url structure and stick with it

There's a really good blog post that covers this topic actually:

http://www.kidnapcustomers.com/how-to-make-a-website/wordpress-seo-duplicate-content-noindex-nofollow/

(Moz staff edit: see my answer below for resources that currently work -Dan)

Also - the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast is really good for helping to deal with these kinds of issues.

Hi there,

I asked this same question last week and got really good opinions from some of the members here.

Blog commenting can be risky if you'll just use it to optimize your keywords. However, if done right (written properly and with value), this is an effective way to build keywords, and credibility, online. If you're giving out comments that are useful, sort of like this Q and A here, then readers actually listen. Plus Google will also see how authoritative you are and will probably credit your site for it.

Here's a case study of one SEOMoz member, who have found out how blog commenting can still be effective Post Penguin. This might help you decide whether to still pursue that strategy.

Cheers!

BBB is one of those things that most business people have a strong opinion about (either for or against).  From a pure SEO point of view, I consider it a very strong link.  Here's why:

• From a pure SEO link perspective, the directory has a very high DA and MozRank (by far the highest MozRank of any of the directories recommended by SEOmoz)

• the directory is exclusive.  You have to be a business owner to get listed.  This prevents someone from listing 5 or 10 near-spammy sites, which crowd some other directories.

• they are very exclusive about linking out.  It's kind of annoying, but if you don't pay them again next year, you're link will be gone fast!  It ultimately ensures that they are not linking to businesses that are no longer operating.  This increases the overall trust of the directory.

• the average consumer feels warm and fuzzy seeing a BBB banner, and viewing the businesses profile on the BBB website.

I think I paid something like $300 or $400 for it, so maybe the price varies depending on your region and business type?  In any case, I'll continue to renew with the BBB every year.

Stay away from domain names containing brands.  After your hard work in building up the site, it can just easily be claimed by the brand holding company.  You'll need to turn over the domain to the brand holder without any compensation.  Even worse, you could be subject to a huge fine.

You can learn more about the process by which a brand holder can seize the name here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute-Resolution_Policy

What an interesting choice of career path Aidan.

SEO is like a religion as what most people in the industry say, and so you have to provide a strategic plan of your own.

Providing them a summary of what you have accomplished, from the tools/methods you've used (analytics, keyword research tools) to results (SERP placements and conversions) could show how serious you are with your work.

You have to constantly update yourself through forum sites or SEO blogs with the latest news and issues, especially when another Panda or Penguin update strikes.

There are a number of blogs out there from SEO practitioners and experts that can guide you through just like here in SEOmoz.

So good luck with your new endeavor!

Rand wrote a whole post a couple of years ago about when to go domain vs subdomain vs folder.  It covers things pretty well from a technical SEO point of view:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

When I read your question, it really seems more of a business strategy question, rather than a technical SEO question.  The one consideration is that - would franchisee's take a stronger ownership in their business and their territory if their business was represented by an individual domain name, rather than a sub-folder on a main website.

If you could see people going out and networking, and putting a domain name on a business card, they could probably acquire a lot of local business links in this way (Chamber of Commerce, etc) that would in the long run boost the brand awareness of the main franchise.

Giving each franchisee their own domain name might also help with local rankings, if you can get a domain name that includes both the business function and location in the name (for example PittsburghRugCleaning.com) - since exact match domains still get a boost over other domains that don't.

On the other hand, putting everything as a subfolder or subdirectory would be much less work from a hosting side of things.

Article Submission was a good tactic years ago but I think that the recent Google updates have limited their effect on getting good rankings. That doesn't mean that it can't work. Some folks are still doing it and have observed that article submission works sometimes for a few months. This tactic sometimes work in the short-term but an algorithm change can wipe your rankings achieved through submitting an article to a bunch of article directories, article portals, article resource sites, etc... Then, there's the issue of duplicate content  and the submission sites can essentially cannibalize the traffic that you could have earned.

Google is getting smarter about content analysis so the classic or traditional forms of article submission are fast becoming old hat. We should now focus on real authentic alternatives that can get readership and trust over to our site.

In recent months, I have been focusing on guest blogging as a way to help build up my company's brand, earn recognition, and perhaps get some quality great links back to my sites. The time i used to spend on traditional forms of article submission are now being redirected into doing something authentic.

It's an interesting idea.  There's a very popular blog in the SEO industry that is 'do follow'.  He is very interactive and the comments there are generally good.

Here are some considerations:

• outside of the SEO industry, how many people really understand the difference of 'do follow' vs 'no follow'.  If you're topic is something niche and very technical, the fact that it's 'do follow' may potentially have 0 impact on the type of person that you really want to have leave feedback.

• be prepared to be a firm moderator for the comments.  I think you'll often find yourself on the fence you'll see a comment with marginal value.  I would try to set the bar higher on which comments you approve.

• Facebook comments might be useful.  Since Facebook comments show up on a users wall, and can generally be viewed by friends who might be in the same industry, it might be a good way of generating more discussions.  We've used Facebook comments for a few sites, and have had very little problem at all with spam comments.  The downside with Facebook comments is that the content is stored on Facebook rather than your own blog (though there are some plugins that attempt to address this by download the comments to the blog).

• The SEOMoz profile system is kind of cool.  Once a user has generated enough 'points' - their profile link becomes followed.  I sometimes wish there was a similar system for blog comments.  Maybe there is?

Hi Titan -

I'm not an SEOMoz employee - so I can only speculate here.

From the blog post on Raven Tools - they made the comment that the reason they decided to stop offering the rank tracker is because they failed an audit for the Google Adwords API.  Google gave them an ultimatum - either stop using scraped data, or lose access to the API.

From what I understand, SEOmoz was recently faced with the same problem, and they chose to drop the access to the Adwords API, instead of giving up access to the scraped data.  This is understandable, since SEOMoz's tools focus exclusively on SEO - while Raven offers a a wide range of services - some SEO, some PPC, some Social Media, etc.

So, I would be surprised if SEOMoz would stop offering the rank tracker.  Though I really have no inside knowledge about this at all.

I think the SEOMoz rank tracker is an internally developed tool.  Raven tools, and a lot of other SEO tools in the industry used a company called Authority Labs.

http://authoritylabs.com/

Rank tracking is the only thing that they do, and from what I've seen, their data is a bit better overall, if you're just looking for rank tracking.  They also do daily monitoring of keywords, which is a bit overkill from my perspective - but could be useful if you're in a very competitive niche.

There's actually a tool inside of Google Webmaster Tools that lets you specify how they should handle crawling your URL parameters.  It's under 'configuration -> url parameters'.  It should tell you there if they are having any trouble to crawl your site or not, based on the parameters in your URL.

Google has actually just released a video about this topic today - and it would probably be worth reviewing as well:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/08/configuring-url-parameters-in-webmaster.html

You could use a wildcard operator in your robots.txt to deal with this.

Something like this should work:

Disallow: /subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=*

See here for more details:

http://sanzon.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/advanced-usage-of-robotstxt-w-querystrings/

Low cost usually means low quality so one needs to weigh the risk of hiring cheap labor for the content of your blog.  The post-panda environment does not look kindly to low-quality content and Google has incorporated machine learning ensure that it could accurately predict what the humans would judge a low quality site.

You have to find writers that can provide value for your money. Finding a person with good writing skills that is willing to work with your budget can be a challenge.

When dealing with a site that sources writers, one needs to ask questions that would ensure that the writer would provide what you truly need. Make sure that both parties have a clear understanding of the job that needs to be done. One would need to communicate with a prospective writer to see if he or she will be a fit for your needs. Ask for sample articles so that one can judge if a writer's skill is adequate.

Hiring a free-lance writer would probably be cheaper but riskier. Hiring one that works for an outsourcing company can be pricier but there will be measures that would help to ensure quality for the content of your blog.  An outsourcing company would usually have customer service that will resolve any complaints or misunderstandings between a client and a writer.

Hi - i don't use blogger, but generally my policy for image alt text is to make the alt text relevant to the article that I'm embedding the image into.  For instance, if I wrote an article about backpacks to consider buying for a trek to the Himalayas, I would probably mention the brand name of the backpack, and that it was for a Himalayas trek.

I don't recall seeing any kind of rule about how long to make the alt text, but based on my usage, my alt texts tend to be between 2 words to a sentence.

Another thing to consider about is that, you're trying to describe why you're using a certain image on the blog you've just posted.  So in that regard, you could use the same exact image on different posts on your site, but use completely different alt text.  Maybe the first post was about a trek to the Himalayas, while the second post was about how to choose a rugged backpack.  In each case, you might want to draw out different characteristics of the backpack, and thus write a different alt text to match the page.

It looks like SEOMoz is using their robots.txt file to specify their sitemaps:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183669

You can probably do something similar:

http://www.seomoz.org/robots.txt

Michelle - we were using the API quite a bit for SEO keyword research, but eventually had the account cancelled by Google - probably because we had a relatively minor Adwords spend in relation to our API usage.  In the meantime we ended up using the SEM Rush api.  It's pretty easy to use and they seem to have access to a pretty deep set of keyword data.

I know other people, including SEOMoz have had the same issue:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/loss-of-google-adwords-api

I tried out a few other APIs at the time.  Bings tool seemed to have potential, but it only returned very limited keyword data.  I think I looked at Wordtracker and another one, but they seemed to be quite expensive compared to other options, based on the pricing model they used.

For what you want to do - link assistant is not the answer.  Keep in mind, just a few good links will go much further than the spam that many auto-linking software programs generate.

There was a really good article in YouMoz the other day about how to create interesting / buzzworthy content for boring industries (like copier services!) - take a look, and think about how you can apply it to what you're doing:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries

Having other keywords will not affect the relevance of your main keyword, as long as you optimize each of your keywords properly. Adding more keyword variation as well as landing pages for those keywords is a good thing because:

1. Targeting more keywords can increase your search traffic.

2. Landing pages with contents that are relevant to the keywords can also increase the conversion rate of your site.

When you add keywords in your content, make sure it will appear natural, like they are part of the sentence structure. Check out this video:

I know its an old video but some pointers there might help you.

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There's nothing wrong with upgrading your site.  In general, I would recommend to update your site, if you have the time to do it right.  Things to watch out for are:

• will every page still have a unique URL?  There are a number of HTML5 based systems which run the entire site on a single URL (look at how Gmail runs for example).  It can be great for an end user experience since the pages appear to load very quickly.  However, such a system would probably make it difficult for all of your pages to be properly indexed.

• assuming you'll have unique URLs - make sure that the new site will use the same URLs as the original site.  If not, plan to put in 301 redirects for all of the existing pages.

• just because you're going HTML5, don't forget the basics.  Use your title tag, H1, H2, etc on the new template.

• after you launch the new site, make sure spiders can still crawl the site properly.  If yes, then you should be all set with your new site.

If I understand this correctly, you are the merchant, and you have some affiliate software.  Your affiliates will come to your software and get these links to use, which are not clean?  You then want the affiliates to have a clean URL to use to link to you?

That's actually done very commonly by many experienced affiliates already.  In terms of SEO, most affiliates that I know set their affiliate links to go through a sub directory link like /go or /jump.  That directory typically gets blocked in the robots.txt file, so that those links will be completely ignored by spiders - so as a merchant, you'll still get the clicks, but won't get any SEO benefit from doing that.

It really is better if you can just use an affiliate program that gives your affiliates clean links in the first place.  The cleaner your links are, the less likely that affiliates will think to cloak the links on their own websites, and use some techniques that reduce any SEO value of those links for you.  For your affiliates, the simpler / easier you make it for them - the better results you're going to see from your program.

It may be a problem with the location setting for your website.  Is your keyword really specific for the UK?  ... such that people from other areas in the world would not search for it?  If the local and global keyword search volumes are the same, it could indicate that all of the traffic for that keyword is coming from the UK, and that's where you're currently not ranking.

If that's indeed the case, you should try to increase the number of local search ranking signals, which could include:

• setting the target country in webmaster tools

• getting links from other .co.uk domains

• including an address and phone number on the site from .co.uk

• move the hosting to somewhere in the UK

There are lots of other hints you can give to Google about the geotargeting of your site.  Probably the first 3 would be a good start.