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Personally I would be looking at ways to make the title tag more unique to the location. Google is always on the search for spammy pages and if I saw loads of pages with the same (or very similar title tag/content) I would look at moving those pages down the rankings.

You want your title to have the most relevant keywords fist - in this case the focus would be the country (as this is the most unique part of the title). Hope this helps.

Hello,

Content sliders are nice to have but most allow you to slide through a series of images (with the text embedded in the image). I've recently been using AnythingSlider (http://css-tricks.com/anythingslider-jquery-plugin).

This allows you to construct a slide using HTML, that can be crawled by search engines.

The method I use is I set an ID for each slide (eg: id="slide1") and use CSS to apply a background image to each slide. I then set position:relative for each slide in the CSS and add in any HTML I want into the markup for the slide. If I want to absoutely position elements on a per slide basis I can do (this is because position: relative is applied to each slide in the CSS).

EG:

• Welcome to my first slide

  This is the contents of the slide

The CSS could then be applied as follows:

ul#slider li { position: relative; }

ul#slider li#slide1 { width: 960px; height: 300px; background: url('/images/slider/slide1.jpg') no-repeat; }

ul#slider li#slide1 h2 { position: absolute; top: 125px; left: 50px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 1.8em; }

ul#slider li#slide1 p { position: absolute; top: 135px; left: 50px; line-height: 1.5em; font-size: 1.2em; }

More information can be found here: https://github.com/CSS-Tricks/AnythingSlider/wiki/Usage

Agreed. Where possible its always better to expand an existing domain with higher authority than it is to create a new website.

Ahh yeah my bad, ignore that bit. I think you'd still want to make a subtle change to each post so WordPress can set the date updated flag on the sitemap to today, that way Google will put a higher priority on the content when indexing your site.

This is why I mentioned it might be worth my while re-arranging paragraphs from the articles, maybe adding some relevant images and changing the content slightly to avoid any cross domain duplication problems.

I might go ahead and do as Highland is suggesting, I was hoping that wasn't the only way to do it.

I would probably re-arrange some of the paragraphs (or add some more content) to the old posts and update them in WordPress, this then makes the content different to what Google has in its index.

I would then use the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin to regenerate your sitemap. Since you've updated and added new content to the posts their last updated date would have changed so Google will probably see this as revised content. I would submit to all major search engines as your first port of call.

In terms of the "link juice", I would say that Google will still count links to the article as a ranking factor, but because you have noindex the content wont appear in search results. So the content will have a fairly good page rank (possibly) but its being held back by the exclusion of the search engine index.

Now that the setting has been changed and the sitemap / content has been updated you should start to see the results in the search results in due time.

You could also add a few new articles of content to the blog and publicise that over social media to help get back in the game a bit quicker.

Thank you both for your replies.

Highland, I was hoping to eradicate the sitename.wordpress.com blog in the coming month. The blog in question only has 3 articles at the moment so I'm not sure if I should just move the articles to the self-hosted blog; amend the content slightly (so the article isn't the same as sitename.wordpress.com), delete the wordpress.com blog and let Google and other search engines re-index the page on my self-hosted blog... or would this cause more hassle and possible penalties?

Sorry Dan I probably should have said before that the domain I'm wanting to redirect to is an existing site with pages already setup etc. I don't have access to the DNS and I have to contact BT through their online form and wait 3 days for them to get back to me per DNS change request so that's not a viable option, but I appreciate the information provided, it was certainly worth a read.

Hi All

I started a wordpress.com blog with a few posts on it, and these have been shared using social media so links to these exist on Facebook and Twitter.

I've decided that its going to be better and more effective to have the blog on my primary domain.

How would I setup a redirect from the wordpress.com blog to my self hosted blog? Normally I'd write a .htaccess file but I'm unable to do that over at wordpress.com.

I can't even see an option to install plugins, otherwise I would have used the "Redirector" plugin.

To be honest, all you need to worry about is the SERPs. I would recommend doing a few changes to pages that currently aren't ranking very well in the SERPS, and leave the well ranking pages alone for the time being. If you start to see your site or individual pages slowly falling down the rankings then that's the time to revisit those pages and fine tune them.

The worse thing you can do is suddenly change things on every page and though no fault of your own your site falls down the rankings because you changed its on-page SEO.

I think picking 2 keywords to optimise content for per page is more than enough to put you in a good position on google, anything more than that and I think you're probably trying to optimise a little too well, which is the whole point of this update.

Hi Cyrus,

Maybe I wasn't very clear in my previous comment; I know using website templates on multiple domains won't cause you to get a penalised by Google, but the article that was linked to said, Google has changed the algorithm to look at the layout of a web page and this didn't make sense to me.

This is why I mentioned changing your on-page optimisation to ensure you at least have different content on different domains that use the same template.

Slightly off topic, but I wanted to say that I thought your White Board Friday was really good (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/stop-optimizing-and-start-creating-whiteboard-friday), you covered a good topic and explained it really well.

Correct me if I'm wrong but surely adding more internal links to pages on your site with different keywords would dilute your overall link value, and therefore you're actually doing yourself no favours anyway?

Hi Alex,

I agree with what you're saying about distracting you from the content of the site, but if you've reached the footer chances are you've already read the important information on the page.

Links in the footer tend to be the boring Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, Contact Us and maybe a few social media links, and lets be honest we don't immediately visit a site and expect to see that information in our faces or in the main navigation or above the fold.

It's a shame that there aren't more tools or extensions available that will allow us as website developers to optimise our site and code to help users with more diverse accessibility issues.

I think this goes back to the days where people sued to have a whole bunch of spammy links in the footers of their sites and changed the colour of the text to match the background of the footer in an attempt to fool search engines and get higher up in the rankings.

I can certainly see why its an accessibility issue for users using screen-readers to navigate through the web. Sometimes I view my own website using Lynx on my Linux command-line to see where I can improve my website accessibility.