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If you were planning to use these sites as linking sources for each other, then you would definitely want different hosts for their sites. It will increase the value of the links. The most important thing is giving them each quality, unique content. If the content is considered duplicate by Google only one of the sites will rank. It is really the only thing that can separate two sites that are so similar, aside from diverse link profiles.

We recently changed our domain name to match our brand. I read everything on Google and Bing Webmaster about domain moves. I redirected (301) each page individually to the matching new page. (Ok, we moved to WordPress from html/css and used the HTML 2 Import plugin so there was a lovely list of all the redirects for the webmaster to install on the old website) One thing I did that was bad was made a placeholder page for the old homepage informing people of the move. I corrected that and 301'd the old home page to the new home page. I should have done that straight away. Then I used the Site Address Change tools in Google and Bing Webmasters to notify them of the move. Ours is a smaller site (~800 pages) and site traffic moved with it. I'm checking links now to ask external links to update our info. These articles helped, but there are lots more if you search for Google Webmaster domain move. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6033102?hl=en&ref_topic=6029673

Did you see the post authored by Cyrus Shepard earlier this week (http://moz.com/blog/bye-bye-author-pics)? He concludes there are still plenty of good reasons to use Google Authorship. Assess the quality of the publication you're considering writing for, and decide based on that. If it's a reputable site, I would set yourself up as an author. Look at the recent posts on Moz and other leading SEO blogs. They're still using authorship and follow links. Let that be your guide.

Great feedback! Thanks! Now I am thinking about moderating ALL comments and approve the ones that are quality, and delete the ones that aren't. The submit auto response could say "thank you for submitting your question, you will receive an email once an answer to your question is submitted. So, if their question is bad, then they won' t receive an answer (ever). So basically I filter out the bad from the good and build a high quality Q&A for future users to search through, and eliminate the "thin" and "spam" issue. So, I won't have to delete bad questions, they will never even make it on the site. I just probably won't get much repeat activity from the users who posted bad content that never make it to the forum. But this is not intended to be an online community, it's going to just be a place for quick questions on a specific topic. Thanks for your time in responding to me! I appreciate it! BB

Thanks for your thoughtful response! Cheers!

Hi BBuck, I think I understand what you're saying, and there are 2 separate issues that I see you've brought up First, while there's nothing necessarily wrong with distributing navigation the way you've described, I find from a UX (user experience) standpoint that this is best avoided. Aside from that, I'm unaware of any reason it would be a bad practice. As for the URL issue you mention in the second paragraph, that can be taken care of with 301 redirects / rewrites. Basically, take this example: I have a page that's www.example.com/familiar/general/specific, but I don't want such a long URL. Using 301 redirects and rewrites, I would have the page stay the same, but the end of the URL could be whatever I want, like www.example.com/specific. If you're unfamiliar with how that works, I suggest either hiring a developer to do it (which would take a few seconds per page), or finding a quick tutorial if you have access to your website's back-end. I hope that helps you!

Maybe do half and half. Load a decent amount to start with and then you still have some left to keep a trickle of content coming whilst you create more. If you are sitting on a lot of good custom content you are in a good position.

I agree with Samuel. I also saw a video in which Matt Cutts was saying that they were removing authorship benefits (photo in the SERPs, showing to people in your circles},  for lots of low-quality authors. So, just slapping authorship onto a page isn't going to be a magic bullet.

Are you talking about local results, and having Yelp and Yellow Pages show up in search results for local searches, or are you talking about searching for things like book reviews and directories are in the results?

We try to make sure that we have a different link profile for each of our cllients and that we have the Google Plus page in the clients name.  We have not seen a issue with having all the google plus accounts and google WMT in our email. copyscape.com is a great tool to double check duplicate content and find out what is getting flagged.

Well, I removed the suspect content, and after 2 weeks, nothing. Then I added Google Authorship to each page, and the NEXT DAY the site is back in the top positions for our target terms, and the leads are pouring in. Was it the Google Authorship? It certainly felt like it. But I thought that was not a ranking factor. Anyway, thanks for all the support! BB

I have blocked the Wayback Machine for a client and not allowed them to index the site. I blocked them via the robots.txt and not Meta NoIndex, and while blocking Wayback Machine it did NOT impact the positions within the targeted Google results. Hope this helps.

Monkey wrenches always welcome! Thanks! I'll look further...

I'm going to guess your client got impacted b the Penguin 2.1 update.  It may well not be a case of your client getting penalized however as opposed to the other sites getting rewarded.  I've been up against Findlaw, etc ... they have good links. I have to guess that if we're honest - they have better links that your client and your clients links got devalued in the update.  So it's more a case of the client losing weight than directories being increased in value.