Welcome to the Q&A Forum

In general, I think it's good to have RSS feeds for a site.  It's a good way of reaching new viewers, who might only come across your content in a reader or a syndicated version.  Also, lots of social platforms have an option for including an RSS feed - so if you interact on the social platform - people you are interacting with would be able to see some of the most recent content from your site.

Google doesn't count RSS feeds as duplicate content, and is generally smart enough to figure out the original source of the content if it was republished in part somewhere.

I've never had a problem on creating a large number of redirects on a site before.  It's something that happens quite a bit, for instance if a site is moving to a a site to a new domain or a new CMS, where it can often be very difficult to exactly recreate the same URL structure.

There's no limit to the number of redirects, just the number of hops.  If the site had existing redirects in place, you might want to update those existing redirects as well, to point to the new final destination.

hmm - I think it is what it is.  The products you're selling are things that people need, but are fundamentally not that interesting.

I think the strategy of incentivising people to leave reviews is a good start (WEbucks).  If you're able to generate enough UCG this way, you might consider not showing the same comments on both of the pages.

It looks like you're using a generic Meta description / keywords for both of the pages.  You should be able to customize this inside your templates to use something more relevant to the page.

It looks like the descriptions are shared by other sites across the web.  Ideally you could figure out a strategy generating something more unique here.  Maybe by you could find a way of highlighting some of the best comments left specifically about that particular product in question?

Looks like it's only been about 3 weeks since you've registered the domains.  You probably just need to wait a bit longer, and the other site will catch up.  A couple of tips would be:

1.  Explicitly create a robots.txt file.  I just feel better doing this, even if I'm not add any special conditions / restrictions to it.

2.  Register your sites with Google Webmaster Tools

3.  Build more good quality links to your sites.  500 plus pages is a lot for Google to index for a brand new site without any authority.  The more good links you have to your sites, the more pages Google will index.

Hay - thanks for those links.  I do remember reading those Webmaster Central posts a while back, but hadn't used that technique in practice ever.  I think either of the techniques requires good cooperation from your syndication partners to implement.  I think in practice, it may not always be easy to have a syndication partner add meta tags specifically for a page of content they are publishing.

In terms of which one is better - I really can't say.  I would guess that a nonindex plus a link would probably be more explicit, since in that case, the search engines don't really have to decide which is the real canonical version - since there's only one page of content existing.

Also, the way they describe cross domain canonical sounds kind of wishy-washy ---> "While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

It seems like two different issues to me.  If your content is syndicated on a 3rd party site, Google is saying - ask your partners to no-index the content and provide a link back to your original source.  That way your original source will rise above all of those syndicated sources (on many other places around the WWW) to be the highest ranked page

If you are optimizing your own site, they are saying be careful to avoid duplicate versions of the same page within your own site, coming about as a result of canonicalization problems.  Canonicalization problems on your site make it appear you have lots of very similar versions of the same page on your own site.

I think I can see how you got confused here - since they are talking about the topic of duplicate content in general - which can be caused either by syndication (publishing one page of content across many different sites) or canonicalization issues (where the same page of content on your own site appears on several different URLs).

Hope that helps!

Amy - a few ideas here:

• you might be dealing with what's called 'keyword cannibalization' here.  It helps to have a clear plan of what keywords you'll be focused on for every page on your site.  It's tempting to stick a bunch of keywords on every page and into your meta tags for every page - but sometimes less is more.  Just focus on the 2 to 3 keyword phrases that most accurately describe any page.  Make sure those keywords show up in some form in the title and H1 tags on the page.

After you do all of that optimization, I also like to run a tool like the Screaming Frog Seo Spider, to see if there are any pages across the site that have exactly the same or very similar title tags.  If you have more than a few pages, it can happen very easily so it makes sense to go back and double check that later.  You can sometimes discover two or more pages on your site that actually have very similar content.  In a case like that, pick the better one, add any relevant content and 301 redirect the old page.

• in terms of linking, you can go a long with just by doing good internal linking.  Try to make the links to your pages match the target keywords as much as possible.  For inbound links, a large portion of your links will naturally be brand links to your homepage.  Focus as much as possible on 'good' links, from vendor partners, industry associations, and trusted blogs.  There are lots of strategies for getting these kinds of links.  They require some effort / outreach - but will serve you much better in the long run than a few hundred irrelevant forum links or directory submissions.

After that, make sure you've signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, submitted a sitemap, and make sure you don't have any issues with slow site loading or canonicalization (where the same page is referenced with slightly different URLs).

Hope that helps - without looking at the site too closely, that's the best advice I can give.

Hard to say - but I see the following potential issues:

• there's really not that much to say about a piece of furniture.  It would be hard enough to craft one really good sales page for a walnut sleigh bed, let alone, original and interesting pages about that product 5 times.  Eventually you're going to be creating thin content for the lower priority of those sites.

• product names usually end up being used for the title tag and the H1 tag of an ecommerce product page.  Given that you're products are being named the same across all 5 of the sites, and that they are all running in the same ecommerce software, that's going to leave a pretty clear footprint that the sites are all related.

• IF you're successful in this, you're going to be competing against yourself in the SEO rankings.  In that case, you'd probably want to consider about how the title tags and the page descriptions are going to look, stacked up against each other.

• given that the sites are hosted on a 'multi-store' system, they'll probably be hosted on the same IP address, which is something that all search engines use as a clue to find relationships between different sites.

Hope that helps!

In terms of post panda / penguin linking, the best thing is to stick with an honest strategy by observing the following rules:

• use cookie crumb style links within all pages.  These are good for usability, as it allows users to know where they are on your site.  They also provide a way of including rich anchor text links on your site

• use internal link anchor text in a natural way.  For most pages, there are several very closely variations of anchor text that fit to a close theme.  For instance, in one case, I link to a certain page on one of my websites the following keywords --> free domain appraisal, free domain name appraisal, free domain name valuation, free domain valuation.  The page in question is very relevant for all of those variations and ranks well for all of those variations.  It just takes a little bit of extra thought to think of these keyword variations, and can ultimately generate much more traffic for the page in question too.

• cross link related pages with relevant anchor text.  There may be related pages within different category pages.  Rich in content text links between those pages provide value to your readers and should not hurt you in any way.

• I think a basic site hierarchy is reasonable to follow.  Pick major categories for the top level links, and related topics below each of those categories.

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

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.

Hi - I usually use the URL format shown here:

http://www.seomoz.org/api/keys

They have a "sample request" shown here, that you can use to get started.  I know they recently stopped supporting the old API format, and it caused a bunch of the scripts I run to stop working.  One of the tricky things about the new API format is the 'cols' parameter, where you specify the data that you want returned.  They added this to restrict the amount of data that is returned.  Before it returned a bunch of data, that maybe users were not really interested in - and so it used more of their server resources and bandwidth.

You can see details about how to use the 'cols' parameter for URL metrics here:

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/url-metrics

You have to add up the bit values for the fields that you want to have returned.  So for instance, if you want only the 'external links' data (32) and the 'mozrank' data (16384), you'd set the cols flag to be 16416  ... (32 + 16384).

Hope that helps ~

You could try adding the pages you want to remove to your robots.txt file.  Since you're not linking to them, and it's very unlikely that Googlebot will index those pages naturally now, this might be a better way of telling it which pages to explicitly not index.

I'm not really sure how quickly this will trigger Google to remove those pages from the index - but they do reference robots.txt on the actual "Remove URLs" page of WMT ---> "Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ..."

For that technique, you'd want to add something like this for all of the pages you want to remove:

Disallow: /oldpage1toremove.php

That should work.  If it doesn't, then I would probably just submit the requests through the "Remove URLs" tool.

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

Hey Itamar!

Kevin has a point, check your content as well, make sure that there is a variation in your anchor text as I've read that it creates additional competition for your page in search results, that is if you use the keyword you're promoting.  Open Site Explorer also is useful in checking those that link to your site.

Good luck!

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!

Hi J.P.

Your Blog title makes a great RSS feed page or value already, although xml declaration may not be required it seems like a great practice in terms of effective indexing. There are tons of free services and tools for managing Blog RSS feeds just like this   http://wparena.com/freebies/top-tools-for-managing-blog-rss-feeds/

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Hi Mike!

Great question here and so for facebook fan page just click  www.facebook.com/insights/ and it will provide details on your facebook edge rank.

I also find SEO quake  really handy that most of the SEO diagnostic tools can be found, even Facebook likes and so I hope you also find tools that could suit your SEO needs the key here is not just being comfortable with your tools but getting the most accurate and efficient results as well.

Hope this helps!

Hi kgoss -

I'm not an SEOmoz employee - but just fyi, here are the IP addresses rogerbot used when accessing my site since the start of 2012:

50.17.63.219
184.72.211.58
50.19.77.29
174.129.177.94
184.73.93.243
107.20.64.186
23.22.26.208
107.22.19.89
50.19.188.211
50.19.195.34
107.22.107.114
107.22.137.134
216.244.72.3
75.101.205.127
67.202.42.32
216.176.191.232
23.20.247.207
216.244.72.9
23.22.48.203
216.176.191.234
184.73.13.203
107.20.11.69
50.17.96.67
184.73.137.220
184.73.22.42
184.72.175.148
67.202.13.192
23.21.33.19
107.22.0.173
107.22.157.76
50.16.164.143
50.16.43.91
107.21.143.222
216.176.191.201
107.20.91.74
50.16.88.111
204.236.213.120
184.73.118.141
50.17.38.180
107.21.150.218
216.244.72.10
216.244.72.11
216.244.72.12
23.22.53.56

Hope that helps.

I'm in agreement with the others. Don't even entertain the thought of using a spinning software to create content for your websites. Google and other search engines have become very good at detecting crap content and penalizing them. Content resulting from spinners are the worst quality, lowest junk crap and would never be good for the SEO of your site.

Your goal should be to do something real and useful. Using spinners to manipulate the search engines worked a decade ago but will only cause your rankings to drop in the present environment. It will also damage to your brand.