Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Dmytro is correct - the risk you run isn't a penalty per se, it's that the piece of content will rank on a partner site rather than on your own site. If what you really want is for both pieces of content to rank for the same phrase, or to ensure that your site continues to rank even without partners using rel=canonical, I would recommend making sure that the content on your site is substantially different from the other sites'. I empathize with your desire for a hard-and-fast rule on exactly how different, but whether or not two identical or very similar pages will both rank is really going to depend on the query and the other pages competing to rank for that term. Again, I would recommend making them substantially different - that is, more different than they are the same. Google is now sophisticated enough at detecting spun content that simply switching out some words for synonyms or adding or subtracting a sentence here or there likely won't be enough to keep it from being flagged as duplicate content for a more competitive query.

Might depend of your budget and your country, but in most of the cases (if you spend a lot of money) you have a Google rep. I had a siimilar case before and we had continuous contact with a Google rep. in Chile. Why not move forward calling again and ask for the Google rep. assigned to your MCC/account?

Thanks Lantec.

Page Title is correct in all ways. Browser Title is for the people that don't live/work in your industry. Thats how I choose.

Awesome response Mike, and you're right on the trail of some other thoughts that are buzzing around the team right now. Thanks so much - Tim

Here's some info I found on second and third-level domains.  ICANN does call third-level domains subdomains, and that's where I got confused before. http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faqs/faqs-en http://www.donuts.co/tlds/ http://www.dotanything.co/tlddetail.aspx?tld=Shoes

Awesome - this would be great.  While quite as user friendly as the Moz KW tool, it's a great option - thanks for clearing this up.  Makes sense that it would be free, but a lot of things that make sense are not so. BTW I talked to someone at Moz who said that they are working on a solution for enterprise-use of their tools -- multiple sign-ons or dashboards or such.  Stay tuned, they said. Thanks Vahe and EEE3

Of course they aren't seeing a drop in traffic to comparable pages. Those pages are fighting under their own steam. If you send a customer/prospect to the right page, the first time, they'll likely see an increase in traffic. It sounds like they're talking about 'what is' rather than 'what could be', which in our opinion is likely better. So I guess you could make the business case that incoming referrals are bouncing when they could be buying. Hopefully there's tracking code of some sort on the faux 404 page.

"Foremost, shouldn't we get rid of that embed option on our page? I mean, isn't is stealing from our backlink potential? I can't imagine juice would somehow pass back to us through a Scribd-located doc or embed but I haven't found info affirming or contradicting that." Yes, I absolutely agree that you should remove these. I'd also look for embeds of their Scribd documents and do a little bit of link reclamation and see if you can get a link added to the original content. Can't hurt, right? "And secondly, isn't a Scribd collection a bit analogous to posting videos on YouTube and hoping your page will ultimately benefit from it via clickthroughs, etc? At this year's MozCon I heard a strong argument against that." You could go a few ways on this - I don't think it's causing a huge issue. I might name the Scribd document something different from their own blog post, to try and rank for different variations on the titles.