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that's good growth.  I guess as long as my site is going up faster than my competitors it's all good.

Been playing with the historical linking data (nice feature, by the way) and I see a graph which shows the increase in my, and my competitors', domain authority in the previous month.

My competitors have averaged a growth of about 1.6 and I have gone up by 2 in this period which is good, however is 2 really that good for a month? What would other members' consider to be a decent growth? To add context, the domain I have in this report went from 26 to 28. Obviously going from 90 to 92 will be difficult but I have a feeling I should be doing more to grow faster at the lower levels.

Yes, it's the homepage of the site so in the sitemap. I will try resubmitting the sitemap manually and seeing if that helps.

Thanks, Carl

Can I ask how long after changing the Title and Description tags on a website do people have to wait to see these changes reflected in Google? I changed a site of mine a couple of weeks back, pinged the site to google and had well over 5,000 googlebots to the page (not a result of pinging, I get that anyway), yet Google continues to display the old listing.

Any secret techniques to speeding this up?

Thanks

Hi

I am building a new shop with unique products but I also want to offer tips and articles on the same topic as the products (fishing). I think if was to add the articles and advice one piece at a time it would look very empty and give little reason to come back very often.

The plan, therefore, is to launch the site pulling articles from a number of article websites - with the site's permission.  Obviously this would be 100% duplicate content but it would make the user experience much better and offer added value to my site as people are likely to keep returning even when not in the mood to purchase anything; it also offers the potential for people to email links to friends etc. note: over time we will be adding more unique content and slowly turning off the pulled articled.

Anyway, from an seo point of view I know the duplicate content would harm the site but if I was to tell google not to index the directory and block it from even crawling the directory would it still know there is duplicate content on the site and apply the penalty to the non duplicate pages? I'm guessing no but always worth a second opinion.

Thanks

Carl

Hi

I have a couple of ecommerce websites which have both a UK and USA store. At the moment I have both the UK and the USA domains sending me traffic from UK and USA search engines which means that a number of users are clicking a Google page for the store not in their location, ie UK people are clicking on a .com listing and ending up on the USA website.

What is the best way to automatically redirect people to the correct store for their region? If I use an IP based auto redirect system would Google see some of the pages are doorway pages?

Thanks

HI

Anyone know the difference between selecting UK or GB when choosing your engines to track keyword rankings? Is it that one of the options only includes pages from the UK while the other tracks all pages, but from a UK rankings point of view - ie pages hosted overseas will still rank. - if so, which is which?

Or, and this is very unlikely, is it simply that the GB data does not include Northern  Ireland as the UK is technically the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. NI is in UK but not in GB. Nice and confusing!

Thanks

thanks for the reply. I'm more than aware of what it is. how it works and what it is called.

This is more a question about can you make content which is not considered duplicate by using only duplicate content. If google works on duplicate being a part of a page matching a single other then I think you can.

Bit of a strange question here that would be keen on getting the opinions of others on.

Let's say we have a web page which is 1000 lines line, pulling content from 5 websites (the content itself is duplicate, say rss headlines, for example). Obviously any content on it's own will be viewed by Google as being duplicate and so will suffer for it. However, given one of the ways duplicate content is considered is a page being x% the same as another page, be it your own site or someone elses.

In the case of our duplicate page, while 100% of the content is duplicate, the page is no more than 20% identical to another page so would it technically be picked up as duplicate.

Hope that makes sense?

My reason for asking is I want to pull latest tweets, news and rss from leading sites onto a site I am developing. Obviously the site will have it's own content too but also want to pull in external.

Yes, I agree the ideal solution would be to make the content unique, however all being well, I will have about 20,000 threads and 50,000 posts added in a month. The other main reason for doing is it the forum script creates users as assigns posts to them so the forum will also seem to have about 5,000 active users.

Removing the duplicate content would be easy enough, can run an sql query and remove all posts before x date,

Sorry, just thought of something else....

Instead of the no index would blocking google from the /forum/ directory in htaccess be even better? I'm guessing that it would. With noindex we are telling Google not to index the content but it is still reading it. With a block we are not even showing Google the bad content in the first place so it doesn't know there is any duplicate content.

We know that google now gives a penalty to a whole duplicate if it finds content it doesn't like or is duplicate content, but has anyone experienced a penalty from having duplicate content on their site which they have added noindex to? Would google still apply the penalty to the overall quality of the site even though they have been told to basically ignore the duplicate bit.

Reason for asking is that I am looking to add a forum to one of my websites and no one likes a new forum. I have a script which can populate it with thousands of questions and answers pulled direct from Yahoo Answers. Obviously the forum wil be 100% duplicate content but I do not want it to rank for anyway anyway so if I noindex  the forum pages hopefully it will not damage the rest of the site.

In time, as the forum grows, all the duplicate posts will be deleted but it's hard to get people to use an empty forum so need to 'trick' them into thinking the section is very busy.

Thanks for the opinions everyone. After careful consideration of this and on the other thread I posted about my tights website the other day I have decided upon a complete redesign of both sites. Still using wordpress!

The affiliate stores will be dropped from both sites and instead moved to a .net domain. The .net version of the site is design not to rank in the search engines as it will be 1005 duplicate content. If it does rank, then bonus. The design of the .net will be more or less identical to the .com site, save different menus.

The .com will change from being an affiliate store with some articles and videos tacked on to try and provide some unique content, to being a place with 100% unique content. They will still have 1,000s of unique articles and videos and forum, but this they will server just as a community section and to promote the store. This approach will then allow detailed review on specific product ranges; for example, article on why red tights would be good this winter followed by a promotion of the store where the user can find all the red tights from all the retailers.

This narrowed approach will have great seo benefits too as it will allow me to rank specific pages of the site for specific keywords rather than trying to rank the general homepage for everything.

Thanks for making me question my whole approach. While my seo company moves with the time and is very successful, my marketing company is still stuck in a pre panda frame of mind where it was easy to take a merchants datafeed, put it on your own site and be ranking at the top of google 48 hours later.

yes I will be using the same structure. The site will be an exact copy so instead of being domain.com/store it will be domain.net/store so easily enough to set up the redirects I think, just time consuming.

The server is unix. Was a directadmin system now a cpanel system

thanks for swift reply. I agree with you about the notion of sub domains being seen more like sub folders.

The only trouble i have is that my store has well over 50,000 backlinks in webmaster tools. While it wouldn't be the end of the world to lose these links, it would be nice if I could redirect as much of the link power as possible.

Hi all

Mind it I pick some of your brains for a second opinion on something....

The current situation is thus: I have a fashion website which has over 10,000 free articles and videos, support forums with thousands of posts and user blogs. Also on the site is an affiliate store which is built using datafeedr. The store has about 90,000 products from hundreds of retailers. The goal of the site being a one stop fashion community site where people can get information, chat with other fashion fans and then use the store to search all the fashion sites at once.

The problem I am having is despite endless seo work it is proving very difficult to rank the domain for even terms with low competition (We are used to ranking our clients for very competitive terms, often with several hundred million competitors including government websites, bbc, wiki etc). After testing we have come to the conclusion that it's the duplicate content in the store which is hindering our progress. Despite the exact layout of the store being unique, there is no original content on the product pages.

There, we have decided to remove the store from the current url and on to it's own site. The question we have is would putting it on store.domain.com still hinder the main site? I recall reading that google are considering the subdomains and root domain as one these days, or if we were to put it on samedomainname.net would google then consider us to be sending users to another website?

From a branding point of view I would favour the store.domain.com approach but the .net approach could be easier.

Finally, if we were to move the store we have about 45,000 pages indexed which would all return 404's so I guess it would be best to set up 301 redirects from the old url to the new?

Many thanks

Very true. That said, CMS has benefits for web designs. Many times we have built wordpress and joomla websites for clients using an off the shelf template (telling them we we doing so). For your small local business who want a website they can update themselves without having to to employ a designer they are great. Also a great cost effective solution for clients if they are happy to use an off the shelf template

Thanks for the feedback gents. Am working my way through the list of issues highlighted in this thread (bar the one about not using wordpress hehe). A lot of the html issues on my site were probably caused by myself. My html knowledge is less than good hence using wordpress and also frontpage 2003 to edit code.

Rest assured that my company's proper web design work is done by people who know what they are doing, likewise so the seo (my main area). I like to keep my hand in and potter about with site ideas every now and then, I normally make them myself because I do not know until they are running if they will return enough revenue to justify me using employees to work on them.

The focus of this site and another very similar, but more generic fashion based www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk is to try and combine an affiliate site with a community based site which is full of videos, articles, advice etc. From a web marketing point of view we know people do not want to buy a new dress each day, however it doesn't mean they are not interested in reading about dresses several times a week when bored at work. The USP of the fashion site generally is that a woman can shop all the UK's leading fashion sites at once rather than having to go to all of the sites listed here http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/retailers/ individually.

The key from an seo point of view of showing Google that the sites are more than just affiliate stores.

Oh, on a side note (and also funny but depressing at the same time) the moz crawl thought this of brighttights.com. Note, it only looked at 10,000 pages which is about 25% of the total.

Errors - 602

Notices - 24,973

One of the major issues I have is duplicate page titles. This is because of the category. Let's say there are 200 pairs of black tights. I have 33 on each page (11x3) and thus would have numerous pages. Because the category pages are dynamic I cannot rename them tights page1, tights page 2 etc so they all have the same name, Tight, despite having different urls.

I am not too fused about getting all 10 pages of the categories indexed so I may be worth telling google not to bother indexing them but still following the links on the pages and indexing the products themselves.

Thanks again for looking at my site.

I have addressed the redirect issues. A plugin was installed to redirect all not found queries to the homepage, this was because the url structure on the store was changed and products which are indexed in google are no longer on the site. I will spent some time properly and set up proper redirects for each page in the htaccess. This is also the reason a few categories were redirecting to the home page.

This will sound very bad from someone who runs an seo business but I completely overlooked the alt text (oops). Working on getting this fixed now.

I will review the general html errors and see what I can come up with. I don't normally make websites but thought I would do this one to try some ideas while my staff worked on other work. That'll teach me!

Eeeek wish I hadn't asked now!, only joking, thanks for the feedback.

I know what you are saying about wordpress, the trouble is that we use an extra supplier to manage the datafeeds and they only work on wordpress so that's an issue I may have to look into.

Not sure why that category is taking you back to the homepage, the others work fine so I will play with that and see what's up.

thanks again