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Quick Extra Tip - Work on your site's loading time. I almost left it was taking so incredibly long. This is the best thing you could possibly do to boost your conversions and minimize your bounce rate. Good luck!

Well it doesn't really matter to me which one points to which one as the canonical version, but yes those are duplicate pages and one of them needs to be declared the authority. So it is up to you which you decide you'd like to have listed in Google's SERPs. Whichever one you decide you want listed, the canonical tag on both should point to. So if it's the tennis one you want listed, the gold one should have a canonical tag pointing to tennis and the tennis page should have a canonical pointing to itself.

Make sense? Hope this helps.

It could be spammy, but I like to think that Google doesn't punish infographics as severely as say trash-written articles by English-as-a-second-language "SEOs." Reason being is it makes sense for infographics to sit in many places as some people want to share infographics that may not be entirely relevant to their niche/site/whatever.

That said I'd still be skeptical and if it were me I'd skip the distribution part and handle that on my own. If you want them to create your infographic, that's one thing.. but there are also tons of great ways you can create your own if you have your own facts/data to present. infogr.am, visua.ly, infoactive.co, easel.ly - - check all these out first.

Good luck!

Yes. As Kurt said the DA and link-juice will carry over via 301 redirects meaning whichever site is redirected will benefit the site that it's redirecting to. If I were you I'd redirect to the site that's currently being ranked well in Google as this will limit any fluctuation you may have in the SERPs. Even though the other domain has a longer legacy, if it isn't currently being listed in SERPs for your target keyword then you might be waiting awhile for the whole thing to propagate and sort itself out.

Hope this helps.

How could you possibly have built enemies in the kayak fishing community?! This is bizarre to me but I agree with your assessment.. Any ideas who could be responsible? Nobody else in the organization thinking they're helping by purchasing link packages for cheap? Former members mad? Some bitter competitor (is there such a thing for you guys?!)

This is crazy to me!

Whoops sorry Mike ninja'd me so you have two of the same answers but at least you know the answer is correct this way!

haha

So I'm not sure how dudamobile works in this regard (although I am currently developing a site through their service so this is relevant to my interests) but I do know how canonical tags work.. In looking at the page in question I'm seeing two different canonical tags. One points to the desktop page and the other points to the mobile page. This is a mistake and will prevent either page from being indexed, just as this warning from dudamobile reads. (*PROPS to dudamobile for catching these types of things!)

I can't see the source for your mobile page as it automatically redirects me to the desktop version when I try to access it but basically you want that one to canonical to the desktop site and the desktop site to canonical to itself (or nothing, really.)

But by no means should you canonical the desktop version to the duplicated mobile version of the same page and vice versa. This will cause neither page to be listed in SERPs.

Hope this helps!

OOOOH I get it this is an experiment. Well in that case how can we tell you if you are doing it right? Seeing as how it's an experiment, you are essentially responsible for setting the parameters of said experiment. So if this means that you are going to do on-site optimization as best you can and then nothing but social shares.. so be it. But it's up to you if you're doing it right or not.. ?

Am I understanding now? If so I think this is really cool and I'd love to hear the results of what you end up with.

Be sure to track the keywords you're targeting and how competitive they are from global/local monthly search totals to competitor profiles... That will be very important in this study.

Good luck!

Wow Kristina thank you so much for all of these helpful tips and resources. This is fantastic. You guys over at Distilled are doing impressive work and I'm jealous of all of you over there working for such a fabulous company who gets it.

Yes time is tight on this project.. money not so much. I actually have a pretty decent budget to play with. That said we recently underwent a site re-design and while I personally think we should sub it out and have a professional (with my guidance) re-design the site AGAIN with responsive design, I can not convince my bosses of this. And my main concern with responsive design is that it would take a massive overhaul of our current site and take much more time.

But I'm also concerned with the content. There is far too much content on our current desktop site which I don't think fits at all in mobile. So that was the main reason I wanted a separate mobile site.. the content was to be scaled back, simplified, and streamlined with a much smaller sitemap and much less "blah blah blah." (Of course I feel our main site should be this way too but I digress. I'm hoping that I can design the mobile site with this concept and show a higher conversion rate thus helping my case to re-thinking our desktop site.)

At MozCon Avinash told us all we sucked and showed us how we sucked. His favorite mobile site was motrin's (m.motrin.com) which is a separate site with scaled-back content. I have to agree with him that it's pretty sleek and does the job. Basically I am addressing this from the angle of "if a potential/current client lands on our page via mobile, what are they trying to see or do?" and the answer is most likely far less than the desktop site offers.

Does this make sense to you and seem like good reasoning to stick with the mobile design? I've been playing with the dudamobile builder and it is so incredibly easy that I may just end up doing that and paying them their $9/month to host it ad-free.

Anyway thanks again for the awesome response!

This is a great suggestion, EGOL. Believe it or not I have done this and without getting into too much detail I am having complications with content-creation for my current company I'm doing in-house for. They seem to want nothing but general fluff pieces... This does not fit my concept of creating good original content.

Anyway I digress. This is still fantastic advice. I'm honestly trying to read for the future though.. (beyond my current employer.)

Awesome Charles thanks for the recommendation. I literally was standing in a Barnes & Noble over the weekend with "To Sell is Human" in my hand and darn-near purchased it. Only thing keeping me from it was I knew nothing about the man and had never heard of it.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it. I'll head back to the bookstore and swoop it up. Thanks again --

Whatever they have could be bolstered by a true SEO campaign. Local resources and local networks sound like low authority links with little-to-no value.

I sincerely doubt they will succeed with this approach and I can't for the life of me figure why they would care if someone else was building links for them. They do realize I could go out and build links for their site on my own right this second, right? It's not some sort of weird intrusive/sacred ground or anything.... Wish I knew their reasoning but in the end I'd be absolutely shocked and amazed if this campaign succeeded and if I were you I'd respectfully decline knowing I couldn't do anything to help them if I can't even create links as an SEO... ?!

But good luck anyway!!

No problem... what kind of client is this? They want you to get them ranked but don't want you to build links? Those two things can not be separated and you need to explain this to them. That site will never ever be ranked at the rate it's generating backlinks. Period. No matter what Wordpress SEO plugin you use.

Don't expect Yoast to get it ranked. It's just easier to use and more feature-rich, that's all.

You need to convince these guys to let you handle links.. It doesn't make sense to me why they would care at all about this facet. Can you elaborate? My curiosity is piqued.

That's fine, if that's your branding. Not sure why you need the ".com" part unless you're like expedia or somebody who often emphasizes their dot-comness. But guess what.. they don't even include the .com in their title tags.

You're skipping the most important part here though. The branding you stick on at the end doesn't matter NEARLY as much as what you're doing with the rest of the title tag. This is where you get to pitch your page to your potential customer. It is quite possibly the single most important point of messaging on your entire site. Take great care with your Title tags and you'll see positive results.

EGOL said it best. Nobody could possibly tell you this based on the limited information provided.

Sharing your domain and other details (link building schemes/efforts, what you do to market, etc) would help us get closer to helping you. But EGOL's resource is awesome and he's absolutely right. Take the quiz, be honest, discover where you went wrong. If it's not manual, this can still be resolved. If it's that bad, expect a manual penalty to come next.

G'luck.

Couple quick things here:

1.) OSE is showing 3 Linking Root Domains. 3. That's... like... not enough, man. Sorry.

2.) I hate the all-in-one-seo pack. Try Yoast, you'll see a ton of better features for your Wordpress site.

Honestly though, you just need to create some content and build some links. You have very few links at all and the just-discovered report shows zero meaning none of them are recent. Google will not see your site as authoritative until you start resolving this. Also consider launching your Google + pages and all other socials.. Get listed in relevant places (BUT DON'T search for random directories, these won't help.) Only get listed if you truly think a potential customer will come across your link.

Build content, make it great, unique, and authoritative, and gain links organically after shopping around what you offer to relevant niche sites.

Good luck!

HA! Mike you are awesome. I just wrote a long response to this and then accidentally hit Cancel and it's so frustrating.. Dammit.

Basically I was agreeing with you in regards to SEO/SEM books. I met Danny Dover at MozCon as he coincidentally sat down at my lunch table with Evan Fishkin and I immediately said "oh yeah, I have your book it is what got me started in SEO." What I didn't follow that up with was "now your book is sitting underneath my mousepad elevating it so that my wrist doesn't hurt as bad." Still it was implied by him that he knew such a thing would be the case as he made a comment somewhere along the lines of "oh and I bet it's making a wonderful paperweight these days." Point is, SEO books are so incredibly quickly outdated and you're absolutely right.

Still I'm looking for something along the lines of general marketing strategies. Sales, retention, ROI, content management, branding, etc. Something that I can take and apply towards my own online marketing efforts. Ideas for business building and marketing management that are timeless and general... And so on.

Nonetheless I absolutely loved your suggestions and am going to look into all of them. I've been on a fiction kick lately, specifically sci-fi. Last three books I read were Ubik by Philip K Dick, Ender's Game, and Dune. ALL awesome. Ubik was my favorite.

Anyway thanks for the response!

Schema is always a good idea for everything. Far as I can tell.

I need some sort of awesome marketing related book.

It could be SEO/SEM related, it'd be nice if it focused on content creation, or it could just be broad and business-y.

Wil Reynolds got me thinking I'm not reading enough, and I wasn't lucky enough to grab one of his books off him at MozCon.

So now I need some suggestions. It's just too overwhelming searching through these broad keywords for the right book. So if anyone knows of any that might fit, let me know!

Thanks Moz Community. You guys rock.

I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you asking if your on-site optimization is okay? If so.. then yes, from what you've said it sounds decent enough. Hopefully it doesn't look or read too spammy as I'm afraid it might if this has been your focus.

Why aren't there any links pointing in? That's what you need.. Sorta. What you really need is awesome original content.

What you are describing is just a small little piece of the SEO/SEM pie. You need a marketing campaign: brand development, content generation, social presence, etc. Do some more research on what it means to be an SEO in today's markets. You can find a TON of information on this site. Read some blogs, search through the Q&A forums for topics that strike your fancy, read read read!