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I know this is a bit of a difficult one to answer but would appreciate some opinions.

Hello, We need to find out if links that we setup, which are older than 12 months hold any value? Do new links hold more value than old ones and therefore should we let the old links become inactive? If we do let the links become inactive after 12month will that effect the PA/DA of the site?

Hello, We need to find out if links that we setup, which are older than 12 months hold any value? Do new links hold more value than old ones and therefore should we let the old links become inactive? If we do let the links become inactive after 12month will that effect the PA/DA of the site?

Yoast is great as David Defoe says below.

The canonical HTML tag could be used to specify the proper canonical homepage URL.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Hi Ryan,

Yes the Link management system is a custom development. once we have it working for us as an agency we intend to white label it and release for others to use under license.

Only credible related sites! we have been down THAT road too many times!

We too use link builders in India to build links for us across 60+ terms for various clients and managing them is a nightmare.

We recently embarked on a project with our developers to create a Link Management system. The system allows a link builder to log in and 'Post' a link, which is then crawled and checked a number of times over the coming weeks. New links that are found are then confirmed and reports can be produced by client/link builder to show how many new links have been established, thus how many we should pay for. We also linked into SEOmoz API to grab the URLs PA/DA scores so we can monitor quality.

Our clients can also log in and monitor their link campaign progress, which saves use a time consuming report at the end of each month.

My favourite part is the Link Atrophy report which highlights links that have dropped off/disappeared since the last crawl. It gives me an error code for each link to say why the link wasn't found, such as 404 for the linking page is gone, 500 for server error and others for the link just isn't active anymore.

Its proving very useful and a fantastic time saving tool. Not bad for a weeks worth of dev time.

Thanks for your response. You make some interesting points regarding your competitors ranking despite the Dupe content.

Really appreciate your input,

Regards

Aran

Hi Simon,

Sound advice, after a few days of head scratching I worked with the developers to create a new routine that generates page titles as products are added to the site. There are way to many products to handle it manually so the programmatic approach is a must.

We have managed to vary the page titles enough with the data we have to generate 'near' unique page titles and meta descriptions.

I just wondered how others may do it.

Cheers for your input Simon.

Regards

Aran

EDIT: correcting my typos

Hi Mozzers,

Here is a dilemma I thought I'd put forward and see how you guys would handle the situations.

I'm working on a comparison website on which many of of the product names are very similar. There are circa 2000 products, of which many have similar names. Here are a few of the product names for example;

• Airsprung Enigma 5ft Mattress

• Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress

• Silentnight Double Nova 6ft Mattress

The Product name has been used in the page title of the product pages as show below;

Compare Prices on the Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress

SEOmoz is highlighting these pages as having Duplicate Page Titles (and meta descriptions as a similar approach has been used).

How would you handle this situation?

Cheers

Aran

I don't blame him one bit. Its a pain in the proverbial to get PHP running on IIS.

Popular/most commonly used Microformats!

Only used once and I abandoned it as it never gave me any actionable data, but youtube has a Tool similar to Adwords tool, only it focuses on Youtube rather than Google.

https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool

Looks like correct usage of Divs to me!

For some of the phrases I'm currently working on all of the top ten SERPs have the phrase in the URL. Not saying its a factor but I wouldn't like to leave it out of the equation just yet.

My best tip for shopping sites is to ensure your content is unique and well written giving as much genuineinformation on the product as possible. I always like to include bullet points to highlight features too.

Allowing customers to rate and comment on products is a great way to build up some awesome UGC on product pages.

Both of these options will help SEO and potentially help conversion too.

Including social sharing buttons for people to FB Like/Tweet Products cant hurt either.

Done and I'm in. Nice work!

I've never personally used a IIS based blogging platform, though I've heard dotnetblogengine.net is ok.

You can run Wordpress on a IIS system with PHP enabled, though it can be tough initially to set up and get it running.