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The SEOMOZ PRO tools can actually do that for you. They crawl your site looking for duplicate content (and other problems) and then give you a handy report.

Wordpress.com is a whole different beast from the Wordpress software. WP.com uses the WP software and shoves it into a shared hosting environment. So you can't do most things you can do elsewhere.

If you are using your own domain, just move your blog off WP.com and host it yourself. You can retain the same URL structure doing this.

If you're using myblog.wordpress.com, you're a LOT more limited. My suggestion would be to do a poor man's 301. Copy your content to the new blog, then gut the old URL and put a link to the new URL. This is not the preferred method but it lets you keep your traffic and still pass some SEO. Since it's not duplicate, it will eventually cause your new page to rise and the old to fade.

I've never been a fan of the whole PR-as-primary-SEO method. PR was intended to "get the word out" to as many sources as possible. It's paid off for us in a few instances because a local TV station has picked it up a couple of times and given us a TV story (with an accompanying website article, although not often with links). As far as SEO... it's a lot of work for little reward. Since your PR is likely identical to many sources, it would indeed be pared back in the SERPs where only one would count and the rest would be considered duplicate.

In short, I wouldn't run a mass PR solely for SEO reasons (especially not as a reliable source of links). PRs can get quality backlinks, but only as a bankshot. Instead, I would put the PRs on your sites and see if people will link to it. If it's well written and interesting, you could get some good one-way links. I am willing to bet your competitors are not doing PR for SEO.

301 is all three at once. .htaccess makes it crazy easy to make all your blog posts 301 to their new home.

Canonical is only when you want to keep both URLs. It lets you suggest to Google which duplicate content will will the index race. 301 is always preferable since it removes the old location and points to the new.

I agree with you. Keeping a second site with duplicate content makes no sense. Just 301 two.com to one.com (preserving URLs like two.com/widgets redirects to one.com/widgets) and you should have no problems.

Advertising has nothing to do with indexation. Google actively looks for domains (they are a registrar after all) and spiders them unless you explicitly tell them not to (i.e. robots.txt)

I don't see any reason why not. An area tag with an href element should show up as a link to Google and I've not seen anyone state to the contrary.

This article talks about it some. Since it doesn't explicitly state that area tags aren't valid links I think it's safe to assume they work just fine for SEO.

http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/area-tag-seo

A 500 error typically means some kind of software failure in the web server.

What URL is producing the 500 error? Or is it the same URL every time?
You're running Apache so if the web host software isn't set up right, I could see a segfault causing a random 500 error.

301 isn't perfect. It transfers most rank, but not all. It also takes time because Google has to catch up in indexing both the old and new. In the meantime, it's possible your new site gets hit with a duplicate content penalty.

Make sure any link partners you might have link to the new url and not the old.

Look at your traffic before and after. Did the missing keywords bring in a lot of traffic overall? My suspicion is they probably didn't but, still, you probably did lose some rank by not having the words there. As long as your content is solid for the missing words, you should still do well.

Domain age is no longer a major ranking factor. It's possible to make a brand new URL rank well now.

Pursuing the Google toolbar PR is a waste of time. PR is a measure of how popular a page is, not how well it will rank. What good will it do if you have a PR5 page that ranks poorly for keywords?

The question you need to be asking yourself is "What keywords do I want this page to rank well for?"

Ah, I see now (was looking at the server headers by mistake). Yeah, it is returning a 500. Your host will have to fix it for you because it's either a problem with your software or the web server. If they can't, you need to change hosting companies. That's inexcusable for any hosting company to have their software return a 500. And there's something right with the server because the AJAX calls and images are returning 200 (which is normal).

What you're talking about would be an IP ban or filter. I've never had anyone prove such a thing exists. At worst, someone hacks a server that is shared hosting dozens of sites and does something to directly attack Google. In that case, I would assume Google would ban the IP from incoming traffic but not from outgoing (like a bot).

Google ranks domains, not IPs. So even if you're shared hosting on the same IP as an adult site, Google won't see your site as related to theirs unless you LINK to them. So your SEO and their SEO are like ships passing in the night, sharing an ocean and nothing else.

They're all plumbing related. It makes sense that they would link to each other.

The main thing is not to overdo your links. If you're overdoing it with your links it could draw a penalty. Sure, you could go for the whole "different class C" approach, but I find that to be slightly grey (if Google didn't exist, would you even consider doing your hosting like that?)

As to your external link building, why would it matter as long as the links are relevant? If I run drainsupply.com, it makes sense for me to link to all your plumber sites.

Just make sure your sites all have unique content. That's a far greater danger for you than link patterns.

Never heard of it but it seems to be a standard PHP/MySQL CMS. That kind of hosting is a dime a dozen.

if you're looking for a full service host they have a page of recommended hosts.

http://modx.com/partners/hosting-saas/

I recommend having the format

Keyword - Brand name

There's two major reasons for this

1. The sooner your keywords appear, the more important they become to the page
2. People will likely be clicking on your title in the results. I want to see the keywords first because they are also highlighted by Google.

Your brand name will still be there, but you want to make your pages useful for your end-users first.

Remember that SEOMOZ simply crawls the web, parses that crawl, and then updates its index. If these were recent links, they might not show up yet. Also, according to Rand's blog, the index has shrunk for some technical reasons. They are working on fixing them.

You need to use a canonical tag to prevent any duplication because, you are right in that the query string will make the pages duplicate.

There is a Magento plugin that will add them to your site. This is the accepted method to avoid the problem.

Google will generally see these as the same but, as Matt Cutts says here, there is a slight preference for the trailing slash

Here are my thoughts on this

• Paying people to do SEO on your behalf, without any prior knowledge of who they are or what they do, is like hiring a perfect stranger to clean your house. You might have a clean house when you get back, or you might find that they have "cleaned you out".
• Ask anyone with Penguin troubles how well automated submission works for them now
• Search engine submission? Really? I paid for a service like that in 2006. I know better now.
• I googled the title of this thread and it came up #1 above the site you're referencing. That should say something about that site...

Are you asking how virtual hosting works or why SEOMOZ didn't report it as duplicate?

When you connect via IP, there's no vhost to use so it picked yours as the default. This wouldn't affect any other site because only one can be served up for the IP directly. SEOMOZ wouldn't necessarily report this as duplicate unless you had backlinks to your IP.

I would still 301 the domains. 302s are a dubious use because the HTTP standard lists them as "temporary" (which means... what?).  A 301 is considered permanent. All the use cases for 302s as a SEO tool (i.e. localized subdomains) seems to have fallen by the wayside as Google now only indexes the target site, not the 302.

It's likely that Google now treats 302 like 301 for indexation purposes (a 302 is not a real page anyways). There were serious problems years ago (see 302 hijacking) when they didn't. I wouldn't take any chances, however, and I would use a 301, which is well known to work.