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Referencing this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/06/google_cans_11m_dot_co_dot_cc_sites/

Curious what the ramifications of this to SEO (improve rankings over spammy results, etc) and to hear thoughts on this.

We currently use Sharethis, but I've noticed many sites using Addthis for sharing. Is there any preference or reason to use one more than the other?

heh, the las vegas and casinos are just my example, it has nothing to do with cities or gamblin'

My site has writers, and each has their own profile page (accessible when you click their name inside an article). We set up the code in a way that the bios, in addition to the actual writer photo/bio, would dynamically generate links to each article he/she produces. Figured that someone reading something by Bob Smith, might want to read other stuff by him.

Which was fine, initially.

Fast forward, and some of these writers have 3,4, even 15 pages of archives, as the archive system paginates every 10 articles (so www.example.com/bob-smith/archive-page3, etc)

My thinking is that this is a bad thing. The articles are likely already found elsewhere in the site (under the content landing page it was written for, for example) and I visualize spiders getting sucked into these archive black holes, never to return.

I also assume that it is just more internal mass linking (yech) and probably doesnt help the overall TOS/bounce/exit, etc.

Thoughts?

Thanks for the reply! It's definitely tough to kill content (especially when you paid a writer to do an interesting story or event coverage). So using your suggestion, I looked at a minor section, thats new, but has suffered over the past 30 days.

130 articles 
73% bounce
73% exit
1m TOS
26k pageviews
of those, 35 articles have 100% bounce rate, under 10 pageviews, under 1min TOS. I assume applying a simple metric such as this, site wide, and unpublishing articles that fall under this category, would help clear the brush away from the newer content?

After watching the white board friday re: Panda 2.2, it got me to thinking about old content.

One of the sites that I work with generates 3-10 new articles/day (movie reviews, interviews, guides, event previews, etc) and has been doing so since 2005. Now, they have almost 10k articles, 7k of which are indexed.

The quality of the content varies, and much of it is dated (movies, events) much of the amount of older content gets 0-5 pageviews/month, made in the days BEFORE the site was using Google News + social tools to spread the word (and backlinks). Note that those older articles also of course tend to have 100% bounce, and small/zero TOS.

Is this hurting the site? With 75-100 articles/month being published, I want to make sure they get maximum exposure. I'm also concerned that crawlers get sucked into the site chasing down old BS content, and that is hurting it as well.

What to do with this content? Should I unpublish unpopular, dated content and get it off the internet? Or, do I leave it on, but NOINDEX it so Google won't crawl it?

A client wants to relocate the majority of his niche news site, www.example.com, into a c-level domain on the same domain (news.example.com).

Right now, almost all the articles are populating in Google News and generating traffic, thanks to the site's age, content and its newsmap.

With the relocation, 80% of the files pulled into Google News, will now be news.example.com/tech/article-sample, as opposed to how they have been historically, www.example.com/tech/article-sample. Will that break Google News auto submission process, hurt their google news positioning, and require them to reapply for consideration?

Secondly, a good chunk of landing pages (30+) and articles (3-4k) will be relocated to the new news.example.com domain. Everything after the .com/ will of course remain the same, but the c-level will be new so essentially, a new URL. I know that redirecting will lose some pagejuice, but since its a c-level, its going to be basically like moving the urls to a brand new domain?

Quick question: I want some pages that will have canonical tags, to show up in internal results for a Google site search that's built into the site. I'm not finished with the site, but is it correct to assume that pages with canonical will NOT show up in internal site search results, when powered by Google?

I have a some experience in this. I added a directory package to an already up-and-running site, utilizing eDirectory (http://www.edirectory.com/) and we kept it on the same domain (ex: directory.example.com). Overall, aside from a few hick-ups, the installation and implementation went well, and search engines are crawling the directory. The tough part is to make sure that your template on the edirectory, matches your site. This was easy with navigation and not so easy with banner ads, but we eventually got it looking good. Depending on the size of your site, expectations of your directory and resources, you may want to consider diversifying the hosting of the directory onto separate (virtual) machines, but that's of course up to you.

The one thing I did want to mention is that when creating a directory, especially if you're considering charging for ANY aspect of it, is thinking of it from a visitor prospective. Why would I want to pay (or spend time uploading to) a directory to host info/images/etc I could do elsewhere, or am already doing elsewhere? Having a niche site might negate that question, tho. Good luck!