You do lose some, but I believe most of the link juice will flow if you 301 redirect the page. I'd probably do what YouON suggests and leave the page intact with useful links to elsewhere on your site.
Best posts made by Alex-Harford
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RE: Contest Page Generating Links
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RE: Any hard evidence of social media in Google's algorithm?
I've seen evidence that social helps get new pages indexed quicker, but I don't have any of the links to hand.
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RE: Title tags missing
Are the titles relevant to the page content? Are they well over 70 characters (or really short in some cases)? It is possible Google has changed the title display on the SERPs if any of those things apply. They sometimes use a H tag, ODP listing, anchor text from links or some content within the page...if they're only showing the keywords in your case I'd guess the titles might be too long.
If it's only started to happen recently perhaps they're doing some testing...
Here's a useful link: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35624 - Google also say they might change the title tag if the same title is used multiple times across a site - something I missed! There's also some info on preventing the use of ODP data in tags.
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RE: Does page speed affect what pages are in the index?
An SEO who thinks adding thousands of useless pages will do a website good? Get rid of them, or (preferably) get them re-educated!
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RE: Please have a look at the SEO of our site
I'd focus your H1 tag more towards a phrase you're targeting - something like 'NLP Training in California'. You can also optimise your images more - calling the header image something like nlp-institute-california will help, as will adding to the alt tag.
The On-Page optimiser within SEOmoz PRO is excellent, you should run your pages through that.
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RE: Google+ for photographers
If your pictures get shared more than links then it's still worth doing - it could lead to an SEO benefit as it's spreading your name around, and maybe Google will begin to associate you as an authority in the world of photography. Perhaps people will put your name into a search engine after seeing one of your photos, or maybe you'll have a Jeff moment! That would be cool.
I read somewhere that photos get liked and commented more on Facebook than links because with links people are clicking away from Facebook, so when they go back they forget to interact again. I can agree with that - and that people are sometimes unwilling to click away from Facebook. The same probably applies to Google+.
I'm an amateur photographer myself so maybe I should see what's going on with photography on G+...
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RE: Mega Menus? A good or bad idea for link juice.
The 100 links per page limit isn't much of an issue these days. As long as Google can crawl your menu links (e.g. the menu is not hiding behind JavaScript) and you don't have hundreds and hundreds of links, it should be fine. Other than that you should do whatever is best for the customers rather than thinking about the search engines; personally I was a little overwhelmed by some of the menus on your site, but then again I hadn't taken note of what your site was selling, so at first didn't know what I was looking at.
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RE: What is the value of english links with foreign language anchor text for a foreign site?
It'll just look spammy. Exact matching anchor text seems to be becoming less effective anyway, and Google is good at looking at the context links are placed in, so if a Spanish link is inserted into otherwise English text that will probably look dodgy. And if you're targeting Spanish search engines, links from other countries have less value anyway.
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RE: Is article spinning necessary?
Article spinning is terrible. As is anything that adds pointless content to the web. My mantra is to only add content that is valuable to a user or users somewhere. Take Marcus' advice.
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RE: Social shares: A ranking factor or not?
If you follow someone on Google+, content they share will be biased higher in your search results, if you're logged in to Google yourself and don't have personal search results disabled. That's the only definite. Here's more: http://moz.com/blog/using-google-plus-to-appear-in-the-top-results-every-time-whiteboard-friday
As for showing other social signals on OSS - they're a useful metric to know, and will probably become more of a ranking factor in future. Shares from established Facebook/Twitter accounts with lots of followers will probably carry more weight.
See Moz's Ranking Factors survey for more info: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
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RE: Would This Be Highlighted as Duplicate Meta Desc?
If the rest of the content on each of those pages is unique and valuable I don't think you should have a problem. I did something similar with the meta descriptions on a website about a year ago as that was the only way at the time to programme them in the time available, and they weren't picked up as duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools (Search Improvements > HTML Improvements).
If you have the resources to make each description completely unique I'd say go ahead, but otherwise I wouldn't worry too much about it as long as the same cut-copy approach isn't taken with the rest of the content on the page.
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RE: SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_localisation#Language_tags_and_codes
Australia isn't listed there but it's en-AU. It's necessary if you want to help Google recognise the sites are targeted to different countries, as Ryan mentions language and spellings differ slightly in various English-speaking countries.
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RE: What are the best solutions to exclude internal traffic or visits from the people in an office?
I favour using a custom filter to add an IP exclusion. If you use the opt-out plugin or add those lines to your hosts file, then you're not sending data to ANY site that uses Google Analytics. For that reason I've never used it. The link here says the opt-out plugin is available for Firefox, so I guess you open the link in your preferred browser.
SEER suggest more options here, including use of a cookie and excluding the ISP instead of IP: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/best-ways-to-exclude-internal-traffic-in-google-analytics
Another option could be to serve anyone internally with a webpage that doesn't include the GA code, using server side script to pick out the IP range for example.
And just for completion, Google's instructions for excluding internal traffic: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034840?hl=en-GB
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RE: Value of URL Changes
There's always a small amount of authority lost through a 301 redirect or canonical, but as long as you set the 301 redirects up correctly I wouldn't worry about it. It should benefit your site in the long-term.
I've overseen a few site migrations where unfriendly URLs (e.g. /product.php?id=1234) were replaced with friendly URLs (e.g. /category/product) and more often than not, immediately after the migration organic traffic and rankings remained consistent or improved. I think there was one where traffic and rankings dropped in the short-term but then recovered to a better level within a month.
If you go ahead with the URL change and 301 redirects, keep a crawl/record of your current website, then when you've completed the redirects, crawl the old URLs to see if they're redirecting as you expect. If they're not, fix them as quickly as you can.
I agree with Tom in terms of the URL structure and breadcrumb trail, though I am a fan of short URLs, so I'd shorten some of the category names when used in your URLs e.g.
/transport/air
instead of
/motors-and-transport/air-transportAlso be aware that
/transport/air
is different to
/transport/air/- so make sure only one version exists - with or without the trailing slash.
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RE: Optimising multiple pages for the same search term
Did the other page rank anywhere?
My view is to not do it - you're just confusing the search engines over which is the most important of your pages for that term. And instead of competing against your competitors, you're competing against yourself.
Take a look at this post from a while ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization
Rather than something generic, you could think about the longer-tail for your homepage - something like 'cheap designer glasses' might not be as competitive but could still send a lot of relevant traffic.
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RE: Best five links to get first for a new website
I'd say a DMOZ link is worth applying for but not worth a bead of sweat if you don't get accepted/moderated.
It's the overall variety of a link profile that counts. If you get links naturally you'll have a mix of follow and nofollow, URL-match, branded, non-branded anchor text and some keyword match thrown in, homepage links and deep links, social and non-social...
I like the phrase "If Google did not exist but the Internet did, where would you get links?"
In answer to your original question, I agree with Doug. if you're offering a product it's a good idea to offer it to influential bloggers that your target audience visits for free, in return for an unbiased review and link. But if you're just starting out don't go for the biggest bloggers as they probably get inundated. If your product is great the most influential will pick up on it through some of the 'smaller' blogs.
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RE: Content Discovery Plaftorms; like Outbrain or Taboola
I haven't tried them myself but a friend who has used Outbrain told me they're good for getting lots of traffic and social shares to a particular article, but they haven't seen much of an increase in conversions or average page views via them.
It all depends on your content, where you place it and what type of traffic you're trying to attract. The cost-per-click is low for Outbrain so it's probably worth trying.
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RE: Singular vs plural SEO
You can optimise titles for both. It's best to have your prime keyphrase near the beginning of the title - and make sure the title is not too long.
The way you suggested does make it look like you're just stuffing the keywords in for the sake of it though...again it depends on your keywords but something like this would look more natural with the downside of not having one of the phrases nearer the start:
"Green Apple seller: the best Green Apples"
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RE: Too many links on my site
Lots of quality, unique content is good for SEO. The warning will be specific to each page, do you really need so many links on one page? The 100 limit isn't firm, it was a guideline Google mentioned a few years ago, but their crawlers have become much more sophisticated since then. I think there was a suggestion that Google wouldn't crawl more than 100 links per page, or wouldn't pass PageRank on to the 101st+ links - it's not such an issue any more.
Check out this blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many