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You are correct they have little value,
It would be a good idea to place them on your own site instead, only that they are probably copied onto many other sites by now by screen scapers and you would not get credit for being the original.
You can try copy scape to see if they have been copied http://copyscape.com/
no dont point links at them, point the links at your own site instead.
My advice don't do any link building let them grow organically, and grab the occasional quality opportunity.
One of my sites was hurt by penguin update, I have been too busy to do anything about it. it had a lot of footer links from clients and a lot of forum signature links. I finally removed a lot of them and my site that used to dominate and had dropped off the radar came back to life this weekend almost as well as ever so their is light at the end of the tunnel.
Google does not stop traffic, only affects your ranking, you say that your main keywords have dropped only a little, but your long tail has probably dropped a lot.
dont redirect all pages to home page, SE will dissmiss them,
also remeber all you are doing is redirecting links, if there are no links to teh page them you will not gain anything.
if there are links, i would look at the link text for each link, and redirecte to a page relevant to the link text not the page it was pointed at, as that no longer has anythingto do with the link.
If you have no links pointing to a page then it has no PR at all. It will also have no PR unless it has a outgoing link, see the original algorithm.
yes put the internal links in
see http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
i think that page is misleading, this page is clearer
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
Dont use a canonical, if the have different tlds, only if they are in the same tld.
This video sums it up, you should at least localize your site,
if you have a US a UK and AU site, all in english, this is ok, but you should have currency and date formats to match.
I would get rid of it. I would expect that the links pointing at those sites are seen as part of a the same wheel. tiding up the sites will not fix the problem if that is the case.
Theo and nick give good advice.
One more thing, DA and PA are logarithmic, so if you are 40 and your competitor is 60, the difference between 40 and 50, is ten times as big as the difference between 30 and 40
WMT can take a long time for anything to update.
but the search engines would have that change by now in there index
1. REWRITE the new url to the old url, unless you have reworked your code to read the new urls.
2. REDIRECT the old url to the new one, incase you already have links to the old urls, you dont want duplicate content
3. you need to make sure that all internal links point to the new url, you dont want un-necessary redirects as they leak link juice.
If you are using IIS server, this is so easy todo, just a few clicks, see half way down page
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/microsoft-technologies-and-seo-web-development
It depends how quick you want to get a penalty.
Any link you can go out and get in numbers is very unlikely to be off any value, and may get you penalized now or in the future.
Search Engines are simply not interested in these sort of links.
The did not say that was for rankings, only for WMT, but it would inddicate that to me.
Many will say different by i belive in most cases therre is no difference
GWMT have said so http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2008/01/feeling-lucky-at-pubcon.html
So has matt cuts see comments
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/
Also if you look at a lot of site links for a root domain they include subdomains
Example
So it is my belief there is no difference
sitemap should show daily, but only for pages you intent to change daily. I got the idea from a Matt Cutts video, that they only honour the sitmap if they find it to be reliable. if you say daily but never update the content, then its not going to work.
i dont think the tld matters for SEO, but for conversion domainname.com is best IMO.
As for mini sites, is your main site #1 for all its major keywords? if the answere is no, then dont spread your efforts. it is hard enouth to get one site to rank.
i would rather go for product.domainname.com that way you will still get benifit for any links.
also if I really wanted to get things right, i would build the pages manualy, not use wordpress or any cms.
CMS is good for a blog, but has too many seo problems for a home page or landinmg pages.
No really, in robots you can block one of them, but that does not stop people from linking to both.
By far the best is not to have 2 urls
next is a 301,
then a canonical
and last would be to use robots.txt
i work with windows server not linux, but i would say it is the encoding, try saving it wirth different ecoding
Try saving as UTF-8 or ASCII, you can do this on the save as dialog box
go to yout iis server control panel look for url rewriting, if it is not there install it using web platform installer.
then it is a simple ass picking it from a list.
You can also do it in code, using a class inherting the httpmodule this intercepts request before reaching website.
But the easiest way is using the URL rewriting as i suggested.
If tyou dont have access. plonk this in your web.config, change from mydomain.com.au to your own domain
<system.webserver>
<rewrite><rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^mydomian.com.au$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" mydomain.com.au="" {r:1"="">http://mydomain.com.au/{R:1}" />
</action></match></rule>
<rule name="LowerCaseRule" stopprocessing="true"><match url="[A-Z]" ignorecase="false"><action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}"><conditions><add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true"><add input="{URL}" pattern="Scripts" negate="true"><add input="{URL}" pattern="Content" negate="true"></add></add></add></conditions></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite>
</system.webserver>
You do run the risk of changing the meaning of the page if you add content relative to new keywords, I would include a new page. it depends on the keywords and the content of cause.
Adding keywords to the url would not be enouth by itself and changing the urls would mean you would have to do a 301 and a 301 leaks link juice.
If you want to rank for car rentals, i would have a seperate page for it, i would not 301 back to homepage there would be on no use of having a different url in teh first place. it would be in fact leak a bit of link juice as 301's leak link juice.
If you havge a lot of content for car rentals i would go for the sub domain. I have always prefered sub domains to sub directories but 2 recent development have pushed me further that way.
1. google WMT now count links from sub directories to a root directories as internal links and assume ownership of sub domains simply if you own the root domain, unless the sub domain has been verified but somone else.
2. Site links for a root domain include pages from sub domains.
In my expirences link juice flows freely from root to sub domains and back if you have stronng internal linking structure from sub domains to root domains and back..
No, you should change your internal links,
A 301 does not pass all the link juice, so you should avoid them.
With internal links you have the power to point them at a new url or remove them, but with external links you for the most part do not have the power to change the link, so them it may be necessary to use a 301.
Many people over use them, they use them willy nilly.
It is just telling you that you have canonical tag. It is good to know as a cononical tag that is wrong can do harm. so just knowing that a page has one, can alert a webmaster.
Assume you see a canonical tag in a page that you dont remeber puting one, you look and it is pointing at a different page, you then relize you had meant to put in in another page but had put it in the wrong page. if you were not alerted it could of stayed for years doing lots of damage.
Image you find that all pages have a cannonical, you find that you had put a canonical tag in the master page and now only one page is in the index, seeing this in the notices can alert you to this early
Thats why it is a notice noty a error or warning.