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"Evergreen content" is my new favorite term! Wow I love it.

What you should do is create some new content!

The dates aren't going to affect your SERPs at all. Google could care less. Where it looks bad is to the user. Forget about the search engine. People worry too much about how a robot will respond to their site when they should be worried about how a potential or current customer will respond to their site.

Focus on that aspect and the rest will trickle down from their. Google is trying to replicate human searching tendencies while attempting to clean the web up *(cause humans hate spam.) This is why the robot thing works. Get it? Robots imitate humans too! So what I'm saying is: FOCUS ON THE HUMAN!

If I arrive to your site and see the last time you posted new content was 3 years ago I'm going to be thinking "wow these guys are lazy, don't care, or just generally aren't on top of progressing in their field." So yeah. The dates will make a difference. But it might not trick people. It might still be obvious that your content is 3 years old.

The only way to truly solve this is by creating NEW CONTENT that kicks butt!

So there you go.

Well I don't know anything about this "SEO College Tutor" but it sounds fishy to me.

You can have the "key info" in the title and still have it be readable. Also, at the very least you should take me up on my suggestions for capitalization. It currently looks like it was written by a 5th grader. No offense. But you capitalize the first few words, stop doing it, and then go back to capitalizing at the end. Looks amateurish and reads horribly. At the very least fix that.

I'd encourage you to grab some impartial observers (a mom, gramma, aunt, uncle, somebody not good with computers you happen to know) and ask them to look at the SERPs you are targeting and choose a site to visit. Or maybe even ask them to run some random searches and watch how they react to SERPs and what pages they choose to click on. I think that you will find the title tag to be the difference maker (beyond placement of course). What you are doing is stuffing keywords to encourage placement in the top of the SERPs. That's what the "SEO tutor" is having you do. That is not necessarily going to work. There are plenty of ways to rank well and still have an attractive title for your end-user.

I've seen it work both ways. I've seen a page sit at number 1 for the desired keyword results and get no clicks. Why? Only answer I have was a terrible Title.

I'm glad you are going to test both methods. That's a great way to approach things.

Keep in mind with your SEO Tutor.. You need to take every factor into account with SEO. There is no perfect way of doing things. My way isn't perfect, their way isn't perfect. You need to find your own truths somewhere in between. You seem to be working towards that so you should be alright.

But boy I have to say my gut tells me that this alleged Tutor has a few things mixed up...

Well maybe a mobile version. But from the desktop I can't seem to get to it. Anyway if the site can be recreated in HTML with the same look and functionality, why does she want the Flash site? Mention the speed factor to her as well... Site takes far too long to load.

I know I've told you this before and I'm becoming the Title-Tag Police around here but you can do so much better with that. There are several things that drive me crazy from a users' perspective with your title:

1.) Keyword stuffed.. Seems like a robot wrote it; not human

2.) Capitalization. Sometimes you capitalize the first letters like a title would and sometimes you don't. This inconsistency makes your page look amateurish and drives my OCD grammar-police brain crazy!

Just trying to help... Good luck!

Nope I would do exactly what you're thinking. The engines won't care about this. For example, if you wanted to name the file apple-apple.jpg I'm sure there would be no repercussions. So yeah, go for it!

You know I may have been partially wrong.. Some of the pages are being indexed and text as well. It's certainly not doing any favors though and the navigation is rough to begin with. I can barely see the pages in the nav bar.. Maybe tell your client that and it could help.

But looking at this shows me that not only does the question mark not matter (to answer your original question) but there is a bit of crawling going on:

http://gyazo.com/c13a1988a5a7d02a4661bf9a658c3c63.png

Well the HTML site is redirecting to the flash site as far as I can tell. And the URLs are all goofed up and silly. Oof. You got your work cut out for you here, especially if the client is unwilling to change as you're describing.

Anyway because there is nothing but a Flash site here, Google is not crawling it and it's not being indexed from what I can tell. I grabbed a couple strings of text and ran a search for them and the site didn't show up. The homepage is indexed, but it will never appear in the desired SERPs as you already well know...

Your client would really hate me because I'd be trying to convince them to change their entire company name. I realize this is a localized business but there are 3 different "sweetlightstudio.com" websites that all look the same to me. Now I know there are cities at the end of each one but I guarantee you a large portion of potential customers get confused and end up on the wrong site and then say "wait I don't live in San Francisco what the heck is this" and leave.

Well good luck with this one! Ha!

My tips for the letters involve politeness and humanity. Be human and explain what has happened in a professional and concise manner. I wouldn't start with threats. Nobody responds well to that.

But if need be you can weave in something about reporting the situation to Google and referencing the site where it was built.

The problem is those comments are damn-near impossible to remove... But at least it will stop the bleeding and shut down the campaign. If you can find the source, of course...

I'm more and more interested in this and want to research more to see if writing an article about it is an option. Would you mind sharing your domain with me and a few examples of the poison links? If you'd like to do so privately you can email me at seojesseo at gmail dot com

or tweet me @seojesseo

or respond here.

And of course if I find anything I'll let you know. (no promises!) And I won't use any of your domain info for any sort of public presentations. Thanks

Yes. A link to any page on your site is a link to your domain. Be careful you don't build all your links to one page (or even too large of a percentage) as this could be a red flag to the Penguin algos..

Yes I would worry about this.

Geez this is like the third thread this week about this. I can't believe it's happening so much.

I have a few ideas on how to track down who is doing this and put a stop to it.. I think maybe I'll write a YouMoz blog on it. But really it is all about figuring out how they are doing this.. the answer will most likely by that they are buying links from a mass link purchasing site. When you do this, these link builders usually own about 20% of the domains you're seeing links coming from. (especially if there are article submissions included.. are there?) If so, you can usually find out who the owner is through some sleuth work and some who.is searching, then once you figure out the link-submission company you can contact them to report the fraud...

Getting them to respond becomes the tricky part.

Okay I'm kind of rushing through this due to time constraints but wanted to lend some advice so forgive me if I'm misunderstanding or not complete in my thoughts.. Onwards:

1.a) Best way to control your dupe content is with canonical tags on each of the duplicated pages. Pick which site you want to come up in Google's SERPs and add a canonical tag pointing to said page from each of the three duplicated pages. In this example you seem to want the app.domain page (which I'm confused by the reasoning of..?) but whatever it may be just be sure your canonical tag points to one from all 3.

1.b) Don't worry so much about the sitemaps for any but your main domain. Especially if the other two domains are entirely canonicalled.

side note: I understand the mobile site, but what's with the other two? Why aren't they just redirecting? I think I just don't get "app sites" which leads me to

2.) Loading times. THIS IS A PROBLEM. Figure for every 1 second of loading time you are losing a large chunk of your potential users. I'm not sure how/why/what you guys are up to but I can tell you if this is a website that has a loading screen then you're in trouble. Fix this. It is DEFINITELY without a doubt leading to a higher bounce/abandonment rate. Guaranteed.

Hope this helps even a tiny bit. Good luck!

THIS. IS. FRIGHTENING.

Ugh. I'm sorry to hear this.

I'm disheartened by the amount of people on these forums being attacked by competitors with bad backlinks and fraudulent PPC charges. Is this really the direction businesses are going in the online marketing world?

Sad...

Sorry I have no suggestions. Except maybe to have faith in karma?

Mike is right.

And it's a pretty dang long title. Too long, really. That could be part of what's going on. But in any case I honestly think your title needs work to begin with. Google's is slightly better even.

Make it read a bit more humanly while still conveying the message you desire. Remember this is the single most important line in your entire site as it is what people will click on to visit your site.

Think about what makes people click on your link and why. What are they looking for? Do they want to know that your systems are battery operated? Do they only care about police approval? Is there a better way to condense this and combine the messaging? What about your branding? Shouldn't that be more prominent?

Spend a ton of time experimenting with this title tag. It is so incredibly important.

Awesome! So much to read, so little time.

Thanks again everybody --

Kristina -

Thanks for reaffirming my notions! And that is a brilliant friggin' idea.. "mobile first!!" I LOVE IT!

Alrighty so I'll keep pluggin' away and I'm betting on the mobile site drawing in a surprising number of conversions as a result.. Time will tell! Thanks again

It's really quite simple:

Create your custom 404 page and put it wherever you'd like in your directory.

Go into your IIS settings and right click the domain in question, select properties.

There should be a tab that says "Custom Errors" or something of the sort. Click that tab.

In there is a error messaging option for 404 and it will allow you to set the path of where your custom 404 page goes.

Essentially, this will all be found in the properties of your site in IIS explorer.

Hope this helps!

No problem! Glad to hear you're working on it. I just know that will help your site so very much.

Good luck!

Definitely watch your GWT for any unnatural link penalties incoming and track all of these links as their built in a spreadsheet. If you get a manual penalty notice you are going to need to explain your case to Google in an easy-to-understand and believable fashion. The more proof you can compile the better because I have a feeling they might not believe you that you were not the one creating these links. My guess is people probably use this excuse with them often. (Not that I'm suggesting you are doing this, just saying be careful.)

Keep us posted I'm curious.