Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Cody,

You're not alone in your situation.  Most anyone who has an in-house SEO role will most likely face the same challenges.  There are probably a lot of great articles out there, and others will probably weigh in here.  I'll offer a couple things for you to check out to at least help.

What I offer is as much about your need to understand their point of view, so you can provide intelligent, reasonable and high quality reasoning that speaks to their perspective.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wake-up-suzy-wake-up-managing-seo-client-expectations/19730/

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-is-a-team-sport-part-1/20206/

And I'll leave you with this:

While SEO should not be the ONLY factor in design, development or content writing, without it, a business could potentially be missing out on vast new business opportunities. When SEO is not integrated into the site process from the beginning, it's just as likely to mean that work needs to be undone or redone if it's going to meet search engine requirements.

As much as developers, designers or content writers may THINK they know about SEO, only a true SEO expert can offer the critical insights and recommendations necessary to make all the difference. And when we're talking about the difference between being on the 1st page of Google results or ending up two or three pages down, we're talking about things usually only the SEO professional would even be able to remember or know about.  Especially since search engines change their methods on a regular basis.

Bottom line - asking an SEO expert to step in after something has been done means lost opportunities, increased design'/development/marketing expense, and more.

The only value article marketing ever really had from a long-term perspective was to boost article marketing sites.  They're the only ones who could ever possibly win.  Except even Panda has slapped most of them now as well. 

It's a quality win all around.

Of course there are those that would argue against such thinking.  Which is fine by me.  Let them continue living in the illusion.  The rest of us will continue to drive quality and relevance.

I wouldn't even pause to think. I'd just immediately do the 301 redirect.  The fact that both versions are reporting as many links as they do is an indicator of serious link dilution.

Fixed the link so you can read the complete article. The key points:

Press Releases should not be primarily for SEO - the link value is minimal at best except in rare situations.

They do offer, however, many other valuable benefits, even if they are "online only", because they are a perfectly accepted form of communication as part of a comprehensive marketing mix.

There are many, however one that consistently comes to mind would be the work I have performed for a mesothelioma law firm.  Mesothelioma is one of the most challenging markets imaginable.  It's known for it's cut-throat, black hat, gray hat SEO tactics because every conversion can lead to millions of dollars, and because there are only a couple thousand new potential clients every year.

For the longest time, it was also one of the top targets for adSense sites - every click on an ad could lead to $40, $50 or more for the adSense site owner. The PPC aspect at one point reached a height where each AdWords click cost up to $100.

I was given charge of this particular site in November of 2006.  At the time, the site was buried with it's best placement on the 15th page of Google, and at the time, they had also been completely banned from Yahoo.

It took three months of completely revamping the entire site, and dealing with an ugly inbound link profile to get them onto the 1st page of Google for any critical keyword phrases.  Since that time, with all the changes at Google, it's been a roller coaster, yet we have many many important and valuable phrases on the 1st page of organics at Google, Yahoo and Bing. We use only the purest of white-hat tactics because if Google ever does really go after black hat the way it's used in this particular market, I can be sure my client site won't be harmed.

They flew through last year's MayDay update, the Caffeine update, this year's Panda update and all the smaller ones in between.

And they've been able to help many families who have family members who have been stricken with mesothelioma cancer, who have found my client through organic and PPC methods.

Just to add Anthonys response, I wrote an entire series of expose' articles on them last year, and lots of discussion took place on Sphinn throughout last summer.  While they did make several major changes to how they operate after I exposed them in a detailed manner, the core of their business has not changed.  Bottom line, any company that either pays them for the right to display an "award" badge, and any company that displays an "award" badge even if it's not paid for, is a tainted company.

Companies like TopSEOs are pathetic marketing ripoffs.

True. And it IS fun watching the 90% out there with their fishing gear, their custom fishing trawlers, all set to catch fish, then throwing nets into the water where the holes in those nets are bigger than almost all the fish in the ocean

I always recommend clients implement either noindex/follow on sort methods, or block sorting altogether (the first choice being preferred).  If there are specific sort methods that consistently provide valuable conversions, these can be considered to be set up as a separate "evergreen" link on the site, but where you would need to add unique content to the page - enough to ensure it reduces (as much as possible) the duplicate content factor.

I use PRWeb.com and opt for the premium service ($360 per release - or you can get a Vocus (PRWeb's parent company) business plan if you send out releases frequently - good savings.

I also don't abuse the various options you can set up with each release for SEO but instead choose the ones that make the most sense for proper relevance.

Ideally, if you have the resources and budget to afford it, yes, it's best to work on making real connections with actual editorial desks at various channels and organizations, because that's where the golden nuggets are that will most likely lead to coverage.

Derek

There are hundreds of factors right, so there's no way to know with 100% certainty in advance what the SEO hit would be with the nav change.  Any single change could have a significant impact, yet if all other core SEO factors are optimal, it might not have any impact at all.  Without testing, no way to know.

Personally I prefer to avoid the possible hit when I recommend nav to clients just because I do want to squeeze out every last ounce of value and honestly, if a site really only has 20 - 30 nav links, it's not such an inconvenience to users to have to click a main nav link and then find the sub-nav in each section as long as it's visually presented well.

If the information provided is highly relevant, that one extra click is not going to hurt the site.

And I've got a new client who had not received a manual penalty notice, yet they lost rankings from Penguin 1, so they did a disavow, then a  reconsideration request after only cleaning up a fraction of the mess first.  A week later, they were manually penalized and got the dreaded notice.

This is why its so important to be wiling to do a real clean-up, and personally I just don't see the overwhelming majority of sites being trusted enough as a brand (from brand-like signals) to do things half-ass or in reverse order.

There is also some discussion within the industry that links of that nature have been so seriously abused by spammers that Google now recognizes such link patterns and either devalues them (doesn't give them the link value to pass along) or may even ding the site where all those signature files are.

Georg,

What I communicate as "best practices" to clients is to noindex/follow all on-site search, however you can look at your analytics to determine if you think you're getting enough value out of the current system or if wiping that out will help with long term refinement of your content.  The concept for not having those indexed is many less pages would be given much more strength and weight long-term. .  Unfortunately there's no exact method to determine if this will be the case in your unique situation.

Given that your search results provide depth of content (not just a bunch of links, but actual, relevant text linking to details pages, I'd be curious to see if any of your site, or specific phrases you were previously found for that led to those search pages were hit by Panda.

Adding to what Michael said, I will also say that keyword infused domain names increase the potential for the site being more rigorously held up to the Exact Match Domain algorithm system which means your site will need to be even more trustworthy, overall to avoid getting penalized for attempting to artificially rank for that or related phrases.

I agree with EGOL - you'll get much more long term value going with subfolders instead of subdomains.

While there is some minimal pass-through value with subdomains, they're otherwise essentially unique sites, which means you'd need to apply exponential effort to have each one build it's own authority.

With subfolders and getting links into each subfolder, you get the maximum value for each link into that folder and directly as a result, to the whole domain.

Also, the additional content depth on the main site gives further boosts - every additional folder's content weight carries to the entire site.

That's absolutely the best policy.  Never rely on flawed "might be able to/sort of" evaluations by search engines. And always keep your site's search system out of indexing.

LOL careful Steve - it took me just a couple months of answering questions here to skyrocket from a couple hundred points to "authority" level.  Of course, I did have to provide a lot of answers that were given "good answer" status.  But if that's all it took to get a sig link here...

Then again - if people really did stick around long enough (even a couple months) and really gave good enough answers to rise that way, I suppose everybody would win. Even if most bailed out after they got their link.

Then again - if they did it for the link, they could then possibly revert to crappy answers, knowing that the sig would be there even with crappy answers.

Yeah - before my head explodes, I'll just stick with the "hope they don't offer it" answer you guys gave.

And to add to Matt's reply, not all search engines recognize canonical tags, so if it is a dupe content issue, then 301s are vital.

Ah to have 100% guarantees for anything related to SEO.

Alas, that's not the world we live in.  However, we can apply critical thinking to each choice and with that, we are more likely to be safe from the wrath of Google.

SO - for this question let's consider the following:

A "Noscript" version of a site is designed first and foremost for people who have scripts turned off, including those who have browsers set up for either security reasons or for visual impairment needs.

So if you provide content within a noscript block that essentially mirrors what visitors get when scripts are turned on, you are not likely in violation of any Google cloaking policy.

Cloaking comes into play when you generate content purely for Googlebot exclusively or Googlebot and Bingbot.

So if the content you are provided via that zip file (which I assume you then need to manually cut and paste into the noscript portion of the code) is pure content and not over-optimized, you can proceed with confidence that you'll be okay.

Where I DO have concern is this:

"The daily snapshot files contain UGC with SEO-friendly markup tags." (emphasis mine).  Exactly what do they mean by that specific wording?  That's the concern point.  Are they referring to proper structured markup for reviews, from Schema.org or at the very least RDFa reviews markup?  If not, that would be problematic because only proper "reviews" specific structured markup should wrap around reviews content.

Without enough links to the target page (a mix of keyword variations and generic non-keyword specific), the target page doesn't have enough off-site "trust" as compared to other sites when compared head to head.

yet if all you have was links to internal pages, that too would look unnatural, so always have some of your new links point to the home page.