Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Aggie! Glad to see Matt Cutts addressed it directly.

Thanks Tuzzell, just what I was after.

TL;DR: I am writing copy for some web pages. I am duplicating some bits of copy exactly on separate web pages. And in other cases I am using the same bits of copy with slight alterations. Is this bad for SEO?

Details: We sell about 10 different courses. Each has a separate page. I'm currently writing copy for those pages.

Some of the details identical for each course. So I can duplicate the content and it will be 100% applicable.

For example, when we talk about where we can run courses (we go to a company and run it on their premises) – that's applicable to every course.

Other bits are applicable with minor alterations. So where we talk about how we'll tailor the course, I will say for example: "We will the tailor the course to the {technical documents|customer letters|reports} your company writes." Or where we have testimonials, the headline reads "Improving {customer writing|reports|technical documents} in every sector and industry".

There is original content on each page. The duplicate stuff may seem spammy, but the alternative is me finding alternative re-wordings for exactly the same information. This is tedious and time-consuming and bizarre given that the user won't notice any difference. Do I need to go ahead and re-write these bits ten slightly different ways anyway?

Do you know of any service businesses (ie not software or SaaS) that uses video marketing effectively?
Especially any company offering more than one service. Just for example, a training company of any kind.

Literally anything that comes to mind will help me so, so much. My Google-fu is failing me on this one.

My boss wants me to register a domain with a US company.

However, most of our customers are in the UK. Though I would host any future website using a UK hosting provider, I don't know if registering the domain with a US provider would make any difference SEO-wise?

No problem. I know how hard it is to start in the deep end. Best of luck.

Hi there

A few thoughts on 'electric bike':

You've got a huge amount of keyword cannibalization going on. Have a look at your title tags - you've got 'Cytronex Electric Bikes' at the front of most of them. That's some of the most important space on your site's page, it needs to be used wisely. Put whatever keyword(s) each page is targetting there. You'd be better off having something like:

Electric Bikes | Cytronex

Electric Bike Reviews | Cytronex

Light Electric Bikes | Cytronex

etc.

Also, you're in a very competitive niche - a search reveals lots of highly SEO-ed pages. I can't imagine you were getting much traffic when you were at 25-ish anyway. Your boss needs to understand dropping from page 3 to page 7 is nowhere near as bad as dropping from 1st position to 3rd - at least in real revenue.

You do have some links from some relevant sites. But your inbound links could use a bit more keyword rich anchor text on inbound links. I've had a look, and your inbound anchor text is mostly your brand name. In an aggressively SEO-ed niche, that's going to hurt.

Google Adwords estimates a million global searches a month for that term. That's high and that's why the competition is so high. Nobody can reasonably expect you to compete with agency-managed sites, especially if you're new to this.

How long have you been looking at this drop? Big changes, especially in the lower rankings, aren't that unusual. All the more so in competitive (ie highly spam-ridden) niches. You're at the sharp end of algorithm changes. You'll need to measure this for a longer time before really freaking out about it.

So my main advice would be to get some better anchor text links. You're getting some good media coverage - see if you or a PR person can get a few anchor text-rich links in from good sources. That'll make a difference.

You should also definitely try targetting some less competitive terms as well as getting rankings for 'electric bikes'. Targetting the entire site at that one term isn't likely to help.

Have you considered adding a blog, a resources section (etc) which can contain some easier keywords? 'Best electric bike', 'fast electric bike' etc. You already rank well for 'lightest electric bike', you could try picking up some variants of that. Much fewer searches, but a lot better chance of ranking.

Being fast seems to be a Unique Selling Point for your bikes, so I'd target anything related to that - 'fast electric bike, power electric bike' hard.

Also you don't seem to have any of the synonyms for bike - pedal bike, push bike etc. - anywhere on your site. Your customers may use that language so so should you.

I actually solved this problem with a very similar solution - using the address markup at schema.org

Thanks for putting me on the right track!

It worked! The map is gone. Looks like Google really does pay attention to those schemas.

Hi Miriam

Thanks so much for taking the time to look so thoroughly into this!

If it's something I'm stuck with, I'll just accept it - for very similar relevant 'london [keyword]' searches I don't get the map.

That said, I'm hoping that specifiying the London address on that page with schema.org tags will prevent Google from displaying the map.

Just in case anyone finds this in future: I've tried adding the address markup here http://www.schema.org/PostalAddress

There's an unusually clear explanation of how to use this here: http://www.schema.org/docs/gs.html

If you have a basic understanding of HTML (esp div and span tags) you can learn how to do this fairly quickly.

I didn't know about rich snippets; thanks.

Hi Miriam

Thanks!

Our actual physical office is in Brighton. In London, we rent out a room. This room  belongs to SOAS, a university.

My company is based in Brighton.

We run courses in London.

If you search 'london business writing' in Google UK, you get this:

http://i39.tinypic.com/35me3qs.jpg

Lolwut. Google is placing a link for a map to our Brighton offices beneath the second result.

For a London-related keyword that links to a page for our London courses that contains an address for our London venue.

We are registered on Google maps as being based in Brighton; we also have a map of our Brighton office on our contact page. But obviously, this is not relevant to this search.

How do I get rid of this map for this keyword?

Thanks for your reply!

Thanks for responding!

Anyone know if hyphens affect the SEO value of keywords?

So is:

Sandwich-making course

Worse than:

Sandwich making course

I'm talking about in titles and body text.

I already know that too many hyphens is a bad idea in URLs and domain names.

We're going to add a new forum to our website.

We don't anticipate very large volumes of users.

I read somewhere in The Art of SEO that forums should be 'built in bbPress'.  I'm very much a programming novice so I'm still trying to get to grip with the basics of forums.

I'd be grateful to know the main SEO considerations (however basic) that I should tell my web developer who is building the new forum.

If your keyword website ends up getting to an appreciable size, you will have to try and buy the unhyphenated version of www.keyword-accountants.net

Whoever owns that, assuming it's parked, may hold you to ransom for a very high price. My company is in just that situation now (the thread I recently started on this may be of use to you: http://www.seomoz.org/q/close-url-owned-by-competitors). So just keep in mind that if you want optimal SEO, the need to get the unhyphenated version will become more, not less, pressing over time.

Keep in mind that if you're sending a bunch of links to your keyword domain, those are going to be worth a lot less than if you send them all to your branded domain. Generally speaking, splitting your SEO efforts between two sites for the same company is a bad idea.

Daniel's suggestion would be the best, in my opinion, if you're dead set on using the keyword site to host content. Really, though, you'd be a lot better off putting that content in a subfolder of your the branded site and 301 the keyword domain (again as Daniel suggests).