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Got it in mine and as soon as I did, reported it to tech support as spam.  Got to help keep the moz a spam-free zone!

How big is your site?  If it's only a few pages, sure, duplicate content there could have an impact.  But in reality, I expect your site is not primarily made up of keyword phrases that either of those pages would be optimized for, and that you have more than a few pages.  If so, any "negative" aspect would not be severe.

Having said that, it really is best to just use a robots meta tag set to noindex,follow (my preference instead of blocking completely in the robots.txt file.

Fraser,

The first thing I recommend is getting Tweetdeck (which I use) or HootSuite to better manage your participation and reading.  Saved my sanity.

There are many great people to follow.  You've got a great start, and dignan99's additions are also top notch.

@TheGypsy is killer when it comes to technical SEO

@StevePlunkett is one to pay attention to regarding deep info

@WilReynolds tweets great industry links

@rustybrick is always coming out with industry news and happenings

@kim_cre8pc is a must-watch for user experience related stuff vital to SEO

@Kikolani is a fount of information related to blogging, which is a big part of SEO

I could go on and on.  Since you're needing to take it slow, start with these.  Then when you're ready for more, let me know.  I'd be happy to provide many more.

In addition to Daniel's response, I'll offer that having the same description on every pagination version page is not helpful, though if there are enough unique products on each page, and each has a caption and or price, and you optimize each product thumbnail alt attribute, it's not necessarily a duplicate content thing as much an annoyance factor for some users.

Ideally it's best to have a unique description on every page, or only have the full text description on the default category page.  Be sure however to append every page Title, URL and h1 with "Page X" as an additional way to communicate both the uniqueness of each page and for users to know where in the pagination sequence they are.

I'll also offer this - have you set up a Bing Webmaster account for the site?  Two things why this is important.  First, Bing can show you problems their system encounters, and second, I've had countless sites get more pages ranked in Google than Bing simply because a sitemap.xml file was not submitted through the Bing Webmaster system. Bing has a more difficult time discovering content and pages than Google does.

Next, I'd look at site validation - is there any glaring problem with the site's markup?  Bing puts more emphasis on markup than Google does.  I've seen client sites get a bump by fixing markup.

Nick,

You're in a difficult situation, to say the least.  iFrames were a safe bet a couple years ago, however Google has gotten better and better at discovering content contained in previously safe environments within the code. And they're just going to get better at it over time.

The only truly safe solution for a long term view is to change strategy drastically.  Find quality news elsewhere, and have content writers create unique articles built on the core information contained in those.  Become your own news site with a unique voice.

The expense is significant given you'll need full time writers, however with a couple entry level writers right out of college, or just a year or two into the content writing / journalism path, you've got a relatively low cost of entry.  The key is picking really good talent.

I was able to replace an entire team of 12 poorly chosen writers with 3 very good writers, for example.

The other reality with that is needing to lose all the scraped content. It's got to go.  You can't salvage it, or back-date newly written content around it, not in the volume you're dealing with.  So you're going to have to earn ranking all over again, but through real, value added reasons.

I'd offer a slightly different perspective.

If you create lots of content that supports a higher level page, many of those supporting pages might very well not ever garner any external links.  Yet they very well could offer tremendous value in boosting the primary page's value from an internal linking perspective as well as an inbound link perspective.

For example - if you want to be known as THE AUTHORITY on all things related to widgets,  you'd be wise to have many second and even third tier content pages within your site structure.  The vast majority, if not all of the inbound links would point to the higher level pages exactly BECAUSE you've got all that depth.

To add to EGOL's perspective, which I agree with completely, I contacted tech support on this topic the other day - according to Miranda, we're actually supposed to get a thumbs up automatically - not getting one currently is just a minor bug in the system.  So don't feel bad.

On the other hand, I actually don't give myself thumbs up for the reasons you state.  but once it's automatic, I'm not going to mind getting them as it'll be a level field and everyone will get them.

Hi Pashmina!

The best recommendation would be to Initiate a DMCA Take-down procedure.  Essentially it's filing a notice with their host that the site is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which should get their host to take action more readily than simply contacting them.  It says "we're serious and will pursue this".  The same notice should go to the site owner if you can get valid contact info for them.  You can read about this more and see a sample notice here http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/07/06/sample-dmca-take-down-letter/id=4501/

Note that the infringing party does not have to have a 100% complete copy - only that they go beyond "fair use" of a minor portion of content.  If we're talking about major swaths of content, look and feel, it's pretty cut and dried.

Beyond that, it's really best to contact an attorney who specializes in digital law.

For individual articles, that's generally much more challenging because there's so much scraping going on.  My take on it and now common thinking within the industry by some notable people is it's not worth going after sites that scrape when those sites scrape from multiple sources.  They're usually impossible to find valid contact info on, and Google does a "fair" job at discerning origin source.

To help in that, Google's got their new article origin tag, but the best thing to do is to ensure content links to other pages within the site (most scrapers fail to strip that out), and include a standard paragraph at the closing of every page's content about the content being original information located on Domain.com (without making it a link so it's harder for scrapers to strip out). Or even better, also including the company name.

And finally, theory has it that scraper links might actually not be a bad thing for those scrapers that leave them in, since a lot of scraper content actually does rank

That could be.  Then again, how do some brands become so well known for their brand identity?  By including it everywhere human eyeballs are.

While it's true that in the overwhelming majority of situations, sub folders are the best solution, I'm going to say that purely from the very limited information shared so far, having sub-domains is far better than having full-blown individual domains, and though not necessarily as good as sub-folders, its still better than the current domain model you have.

It needs to be executed REALLY WELL - with extremely careful thought and consideration given to navigation and cross-domain linking.  However, simply by having subdomains, you instantly let every prospective visitor understand they're all part of the same root domain. That alone boosts your trustworthiness in a BIG way.  And Google does a fair job now at understanding (and in turn providing SOME ranking value) to the root domain from subdomains.

Just don't link to every other subdomain from every other one.  Because that will instantly KILL your SEO.

The single most important content is on those pages you want to rank in the organic results - pages you want people to come to.  Blog content can SUPPORT that, however only as a secondary reinforcing means.

Unique paragraph based content on every category page, product thumbnail captions should be on all category pages.  Individual product pages should have unique descriptions - neither found anywhere else on the web and also more than a handful of bullet points - the more content you can get on product pages, thats unique, the better.

This is why ratings and reviews are so popular on product pages nowadays - it's an additional (but should not be the primary) way to get more content on product pages.  Through user generated content (UGC).

I could tell you to just wait until next month at SMX Advanced - I'm on the "Google Survival tips" panel.  However that wouldn't be very helpful here now would it?

Here's the issue - 1.  If you could find a way to increase site visits by 10% to 20%, and if a reasonable percentage of those were to convert into customers, would that be worth the time and effort to at least consider how to get better rankings in Bing and Yahoo?

Of course there are no hard and fast numbers that can be applied to all sites in every situation, however it's my perspective, and thus why I recommend to clients, that the ability to focus on how to improve Bing rankings not only increases potential customers from a new source, it actually improves Google rankings for deeper content.

Among several tactics, 1 that I find the most simple to check for - how many pages do you have indexed at Google, and how many are showing up in Bing?  Quite often I find clients have submitted sitemap.xml files to Google but not Bing.  Bing actually has a more challenging time discovering pages on a site than Google does, and this one action can sometimes boost not only the total pages Bing indexes, but in turn, increase existing indexed page rankings.

And then there's the (currently unlikely) possibility that Google collapses.  Then where would you be?

The specific concept is that when you have a blog in a sub-folder, any links you get to that also inherently bring value to the root domain. As you add content to the blog, you add content to the root domain, etc.

When you get links to a sub-domain, it's treated as a separate site, not in the way it does with a completely different domain name, but definitely less value in those factors than a sub-folder.  There are times when a sub-domain make sense, but usually only if the content runs along one niche across the larger site's spectrum or you're targeting a different audience.  If it's a completely different audience, splitting it out can be of value.

.orgs and .edus do not rank higher just because they're .orgs. or .edus.  They rank high when they are truly worthy sites that have content of tremendous value and earn trust signals on a large scale naturally as a result of the quality they offer.

.orgs rank when they're purely focused in a laser-focus type way on the topic central to their non-profit mission.  They earn links simply by offering some significant positive contribution to the world.  They earn social media mentions for the same reason.  People who care about the topic the site focuses on naturally want to share that and point to it and discuss it.

First of all, that web address is not working so there's no way for anyone here who might have guidance, to be able to review anything.

Beyond that, if you're in a worst case situation, and you absolutely believe a new domain name is called for, yes, you can migrate the content of the old site over.  However if you perform "301" redirects from the old site to the new site, some people have made anecdotal claims that doing so carries the bad link signals.

In that scenario, when the new site launches, the old site needs to be blocked from indexation to prevent duplicate content issues.

The other major issue I have found is sites are more likely to take a major hit for any high level flawed SEO if other aspects of SEO are also severely flawed.  So for example, if the site was already weak on-site or over-optimized up to the edge of acceptability on-site, that site is more likely to have been nailed in a Penguin type update.

So that then begs the question - is the content you want to retain truly high quality and strong enough outside of the off-site signals? From topical focus to topical depth to internal linking methods and so on...

One source I forgot to mention - ThinkStock - a one-stop source for royalty free photos that come from Getty, Jupiter and iStock - we had an annual subscription there at the last agency I worked at.  For $200 a month we were able to download 750 photos a month - that's $3 a photo.  It was a superb way to build our own library of thousands of legally paid-for stock photos.

Just to be sure, I went and gave a thumbs up to your question, then refreshed the page.  Your score went up a point.  Hang in there, keep participating and it should go up over time.

Adding to Seth's response - not only do I agree with him completely, the other factor is how many potential visitors still, to this day, click on those old links only to get 404'd?

John,

Believe me - we all understand how frustrating it can be, and how difficult it can be to go with the patience path.  So I totally feel your pain!