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So I had asked this question a while back in a previous thread and thought I had the correct answer to it, but just actually heard differently on a webinar by Dr. Pete.

Basically, we have a large number of domains that just replicate our website. Some are brand names, some are exact match keyword domains, some are clever plays on words. This is a tactic that our marketing department thought was a good idea. Obviously its not.

My question is - Some of these domains actually have a significant amount of link value coming into them. How people found them I'm not sure, but nonetheless, I want to try to take advantage of the incoming links somehow if possible.

Dr. Pete recommended against 301 redirecting back to our main domain all at once because that would be a signal to Google that something fishy is going on.

This is what I was going to do, but now I'm really not sure what to do now... If possible, it would be great to get Dr. Pete in this thread to get his comments.  I wasn't able to get an answer on the SEO in 2012 Pro Webinar.

You  may want to check out the Beginner's Guide section on linking

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development

Looks like a good start to me.

The content strategy is solid. Just be sure you're creating good high quality content that people will want to read and share. You'll probably see the most results from linkbuilding. You may want to work in a social aspect as well. Twitter and Facebook are great ways to spread your content like wildfire. The 2011 rankings report showed a strong correlation between Facebook shares and rise in rankings.

One thing you may want to think about is instead of thinking of this as an SEO campaign, think of SEO as something you constantly do, assuming you have the resources to do so. To me, campaigns are like diets. If you "go on a diet" at some point you'll probably go off of that diet and gain all the weight back.

If you "do a campaign" you'll at some point reach the end of that campaign and your rankings will start to diminish.

Could you just handle this on the end state page - i.e. where the redirect points?

Welcome to example.com, formerly example2.com - etc.

Yea, that's on the list to do. The site is about halfway finished so there is still a lot of errands to take care of such as that. Sitemapping is something I haven't done a lot of in the past so I'm not fully aware of all of it's benefits.

So to be clear using that method I can generate a sitemap that will create every possible page that can be generated from those parameters, then they'll be crawled?

Is there anything additional I can do to ensure they are crawled? I suppose I could do a writeup of each product over time in our blog and link to them that way.

Hey guys,

I've got an issue with a site I'm working on. A big chunk of the content (roughly 500 pages) is delivered using parameters on a dynamically generated page. For example:

www.domain.com/specs/product?=example - where "example' is the product name

Currently there is no way to get to these pages unless you enter the product name into the search box and access it from there.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless we find some other way to link to these pages they're basically invisible to search engines, right?

What I'm struggling with is a method to get them indexed without doing something like creating a directory map type page of all of the links on it, which I guess wouldn't be a terrible idea as long as it was done well.

I've not encountered a situation like this before. Does anyone have any recommendations?

This is a great idea. Probably gonna use it

Sounds like some questionable SEO, but I'm not surprised it's getting them by. I haven't seen a big focus on penalizing this type of activity. In fact, I used similar tactics at my previous position (against my will) to help my company rank for a few cities we didn't have offices in, but wanted to target. I didn't go as far as creating standalone pages for them, but I did target the keywords pretty aggressively.

The footer links probably aren't helping those pages rank very well as footer links have been devalued recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have a good amount of backlinking to them. They're probably also taking advantage of a very good amount of on-page optimization.

You've also got to keep in mind since they're using exact matching in their URL to rank for those keywords, they're probably not doing too well trying to rank for other keywords for those pages.

That said, sadly this kind of ranking activity will probably persist for another couple of years. Google seems to have bigger fish to fry right now.

A better suggestion would to be to try to optimize for your cities using other methods such as blog posts, unique pages, listing those cities in on-page areas of your site, and trying to get link partners to link to you in those areas.

I think you mean canonicalization.

With the way your permalink structure is set up, no, you don't need to tag your posts with an exact match of the title. You're already going to have an exact match of the title in your URL.

In fact, I wouldn't ever recommend doing this. If you match the title of every one of your blog posts with a tag you're going to have a unique tag out there for every single blog post, with just one article in it. That's not very useful if you ask me and is definitely going to cause duplicate content issues.

I tend to think of tags as more of a way for my user to navigate my blog - which is what they're really meant for. If I click a tag (unless a blog is really young) I expect to see want to multiple articles related to that tag so I can read more about that topic.

One last tip - Check out theYoast SEO Plugin for some help with Wordpress canonicalization management. It really helps when you're using tags and categories - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Sounds like more of a user issue than an SEO issue really. Personally I would let them choose. You don't know what language someone is going to prefer. I'd go for the root domain.

If you want to disable comments you can do that in the discussion settings. There is no need to mess with any code.

Check out Yoast SEO plugin for canonicalization in Wordpress. That'll make sure all of your SEO is going to one page. Wordpress notoriously duplicates pages when you use categories.

I'm not sure where your 404 error is coming from, but I do know that when you play with the code in wordpress you can mess things up easily if you don't know exactly what you're doing. It's happened to me on more than one occasion

Eeek. Sounds like one of those 5 signs that you've got a bad SEO client.

I'd be compelled to ask your client why he/she thinks this is a good business decision. Obviously the sheer quantity of followers you have isn't going to do a darn thing unless those followers are organic and relative to your business. It's just going to inflate his follower count artificially and add no value to the business.

I'd say the risks are worse than the rewards...

Yep. I use all in one SEO pack for meta descriptions. Remember meta tags aren't as much about SEO as they are about creating a compelling cilckable intro when it comes to blogs. Often times Google is going to use your meta content for the text below your title on the SERPs pages. Write some compelling copy there and you'll see positive results.

Yoast is nice too. I find it useful for canonicalization.

This is all assuming you're using Wordpress of course

Webtrends has a pretty awesome tracking tool for Facebook. It'll run you a pretty penny but it's pretty incredible.

http://www.webtrends.com/Products/Analytics/Facebook

If this is one client, unless they are separate business entities, hands down it should be one site. It's A LOT easier to SEO one site than it is three, and your work is going to pay off a lot more as well.

I'm guessing this is because this is a site with a lot of links. The more links you have on one page, the less weight each one of them passes. He's probably just trying to pass as much juice as possible by nofollowing the duplicate links in the images.

It looks ok to me - built pretty well from what I can tell. I pulled up an OSE report on your http://www.minespress.com/category/golf-shirts link and it shows no data. This is probably just an issue of OSE not having data for that deep down in your site.

Here is what OSE will tell you if no data is available for a URL.

No Data Available for this URL

Although our index is large, there are a number of reasons why we may not have data for the page you've requested. These can include:

• Recency of Page Creation:
  Linkscape crawls the web constantly, but we update the index only once every 30-40 days. Thus, pages and links created since the last index update won't be available until we've seen them. A typical timeline for getting a page/site included in Linkscape is 45-60 days, sometimes less for very important or well-linked-to pages.

• Deep Down in the Web:
  Our crawl focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.

• Blocked Pages:
  If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching your URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available)

• No Links:
  the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

If anyone else catches anything that I'm missing please feel free to say so. I can't see any problems though.

Interesting question - Just wondering what the application could be for the answer?

Search queries are going to be done with a keyword, which means the results that are returned are going to be the pages that are most relevant to that keyword. I don't really think you can put a standalone value on the most important page on your site without factoring in Google's primary method of relevance - the search terms.

Perhaps you could tell us what you hope to gain by learning the answer to this question and we can be more helpful to you.

If you're asking if the shift alone is going to affect you I'm not really familiar enough with either platform to tell you if one is better at SEO than the other. But I can tell you this.

The learning curve of the functionality of a new CMS will no doubt have an effect on your SEO if you're not up to speed with how it works and how to best utilize it.

I would advise you to become as familiar as possible with your new CMS before porting over to it. Try to get a trial of some sort and ensre it has all of the SEO features you need. Make sure all of your questions about SEO functionality are answered before you take the change live.

Lot's of good questions in here. I'll do my best to answer a few.

• Most main level navigation on Wordpress themes is going to be across the top, or on the right side with a category widget. The reason being because this is basically the paradigm for blog content. Content appears on the left to maximize the viewing area to how we read (left to right), and main navigation appears up top to make better use of the limited real estate we have to create the site (for things like CTA graphics and such). You'll be hard pressed to find a theme with left-hand navigation, as most sites are migrating away from this structure nowadays.

• Main page navigation is very important to search engines. A link in the main navigation of a site makes a page stand out to the search engines as being quite important, and also delivers a lot of link juice to the subsequent page. Keep in mind you can only have so many links in your main navigation before your user experience suffers. If something is important on your site and you can link to it from the main navigation (such as your main products page) you should give it a link in the main navigation.

• There is some debate about jQuery. It's really cool for nice navigation schemes, but can get sticky as to whether or not bots can read it. Google is taking steps to be able to, and can read it given you use simple enough coding, but if you can do it with CSS, you'd be smart to do so. You don't want to get stuck hoping Google can read your site.

• The thing with footer links is this - They used to be valuable for SEO because you could have a bunch of links on your homepage that would link throughout the whole site. Now search engines are devaluing them because a lot of sites were abusing them. However, they're still quite useful for a quasi site map. They're used now for more of a user experience thing than an SEO thing.

• Also always always keep in mind that not all designers (in fact very few) are SEO savvy. Just because you see it in a lot of designs doesn't make it right for SEO.