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A suggestion would be to collaborate with them on titles, etc. With us, we are an agency and have to take care of clients. We know we are going to use a given url and typically the title tag and H1 are all created ahead of time. We can make contextual changes in something like an H1 to add clarity, but title tags are just too important.  So, I would work with the creative type by giving them boundaries: here is the title of the page we need: Here is the first and second heading - what can you do that will make these dance???

The Seomoz search bar does a great job. Take a look at the SERP control panel and use a custom search profile. More information on that here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-personalized-search Altenatively add this query string to the end of google.co.uk /search?q=widgets&pws=0&gl=us This is using google.co.uk to search for widgets in the United States. q=   any keyword (multiple keywords need to be seperated with a +) i.e  q=blue+widgets gl= location you want to search -   gl=us would be correct in your case. There are many other ways but I find these the most useful. I hope they help.

Hi Big Zee, You might want to give Buzzstream a shot. Their tool is working great in my opinion to keep track fo the links your team is building. You can add a site (via their "toolbar addon") and assign somebody to it who is responsible for the linkpartner. So before you would like to contact a specific Web site you can check within Buzzstream if the Web site could already be found within Buzzstream. This will also tell you if the specific  Web site is already linking to your Web site. We are working for two years with their tool and with the growing size of our team it's very useful. We never contact a link which is in Buzzstream twice. I know Raventools also got something related to Buzzstream, so yo might want to check them out too. Hope this helps!

Ah - how could I miss this! Thanks

We use Pingdom to monitor a lot of client websites. It is great, because we receive SMS messages when something is wrong. The detailed reporting, iPhone app and abilty to monitor http-statuses is exceptional! http://www.pingdom.com/

In short, provide less internally linking to less important pages. This approach is the best method to conserve link juice and allow it to flow to other more important pages. You describe pages which are near duplicate and have keyword conflicts. Ideally those pages should be removed. If they must remain, they should be canonicalized to the primary page you want to appear in SERPs. Some sites offer the following links in the navigation: legal, privacy policy, terms, about us, etc. You can conserve link juice by not including those links on every page, although there may be legal or other reasons you want them on all pages. You could consider a single "Site Info" form of link which presents a page links to your privacy policy and other pages.

I don't have the answer. While I would be interested in hearing feedback from others, I highly doubt anyone has gone to this level of detail in any proper testing. URLs are a ranking factor, but a low one and this focus goes past the point of any realistic difference. I am willing to bet either way would never make any difference at all in a ranking determination. You are talking about 1 component of 1 low consideration factor. It's a 0.001% type of thing in my opinion. Take a look at the Google.co.uk results for "care hire london". Notice you don't find the exact match URLs anywhere on the first page. If you go to the lengths to acquire an exact match domain, you have to receive exceptional rankings to make it pay off. Notice you don't even see the "carhire.co.uk" nor the "carehirelondon-rentals.co.uk" until the second page of results. If you put this type of focus in ensuring you have the best quality site design along with world-class content, you will be on the first page of SERPs with or without the EMD. EDIT: I'll go a bit further and add my private question from last month because I think it will help you as well. I carefully examined two results from a blog article Rand shared. Every single SEO indicator to which I have visibility tells me the #2 article should outrank the #1 article, including the URL. When I look at both results without knowing the ranking outcome, I would have bet with confidence the #2 result would beat the #1 result, and I would have been wrong obviously. There are ranking factors to which we do not have visibility to or otherwise do not understand. Again, I agree you should have good domain names and URLs, but there are other more important factors which deserve our attention. http://www.seomoz.org/q/re-rand-s-blog-the-best-kept-secret-in-the-seomoz-toolset

I have observed some strange switches between home page and landing page on our site which kind of goes towards your theory. However I am not convinced that Google consolidates PageRank in any other way then simply by following links and mathematically assigning it throughout the site. All duplicate pages flow PageRank and pass it to the rest of the site in the same way they receive it. Sometimes Google will block a page which is seen as duplicate. That page will not show or pass any PageRank or anchor text value to other pages (dead end).

Ok, it sounds like there is more going on here then just seo. You have to consider your brand, what's best for your customers, and the over all branding of your website. However, this is an seo question so I will give an seo answer. If I were you, I would target the product pages. In a page you have much more "on page optimization" options. You can use: Tile Tags, proper Urls, H1 tags.... you get the point.  If you try to use one page to taget to many products, you are going to dilute your on page optimization. If your home page has more authority, use it to target more competitive keywords, and maybe just one or two products... and then you can  link to your other products.

The easiest way would be to add a disallow line to your robots.txt file. From Google: To block access to all URLs that include a question mark (?) (more specifically, any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by any string, followed by a question mark, followed by any string):``` User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*? More info: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156449

Cheers Ryan.

Yes, +KW1 +KW2 will trigger the longer keyword match, but it may be beneficial to include the 3 word version if you're seeing a decent volume and getting lots of clicks. Likely the longer one will have an improved Quality Score and save you some $$

It would appear the majority of your clicks occur when site links are shown below your adword rather than standard adword presentation; 905 vs 944. Also that site links appear on 75% of occasions that you ad appears; 6216 vs 8091 with the site links being absent on only 1875 occasions. Your sitelinks are appearing often which is good and as expected have a higher CTR and a lower CPC. However the CPC should be lower as a higher CTR should increase your Quality Score and reduce your CPC...

You can colour code all you competitors (and your keywords) in AWR, so this may help you do this. Otherwise you can set up multiple campaigns with different sets of competitors and campaigns.

If all /home directories should be removed, and they all correlate directly to the same URL without the /home then the best means to correct the issue would be a single regex expression to redirect the URLs. Once you add the redirect Google's index should be cleaned up in about 30 days.

That's quite good.  The test is certainly no joke.  I'd say they are already way better off than 90% of the "professional SEOs" in this business if they understand the fundamentals that SEOmoz stresses in that test.

I'm pretty sure this won't work....Google will still treat those as separate domains. What I saw 2 years ago was pretty compelling evidence that ZERO domain authority was transferred between subdomains.  More recently, I've seen examples where it seems that this has changed a little, and SOME of the domain authority was carried over....not sure how much, but the examples I saw made it seem like it'd be in the 10% to 40% range. Now, let me throw out a suggestion your IT folks might not have thought of:  you may be able to appear to host all your content on your www subdomain, even if the content itself is physically hosted on separate servers.  All that's required, really, is that the main domain's servers implement reverse proxy for the other domains. Slingshot SEO posted this article on reverse proxies a while back, and it's definitely worth a look.

I'm going to chime in with what David said. Think about a number of impressions that is statistically significant to you. And don't add the exact match of a kw query until it hits that number. Or delete the exact matches that don't have that number of impressions. This makes for a lot easier organization and analysis in the long run.

Great - thats extremely helpful thanks