Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We had the same issue! There was a lot of desire to optimize everything, which, of course, is nearly impossible for that many pages and content that can be so similar. So we shifted our strategy to focus on the right pages, knowing that as pages got much more niche Google would still index them for very specific terms. With our focus on harder/broader terms, we were able to craft what we wanted for more competitive terms and also, like you, spend time focusing on things like rich snippets.

Are you doing any A/B testing, is that how you're changing out colors and such? That's been really interesting for us, same with changing the call to action wording.

Wanting to use long tail keywords is not really the same thing as keyword stuffing. You're just using anchor text to highlight the long tail keywords ("hiking shoes") that best describe your product vs. stuffing a page to an un-natural level with just the word "shoe" in an obvious attempt to rank for the term.

So I wouldn't fear stuffing penalties, although...depending on how crawl-able your new search page results will be, then be prepared that it can change what page ranks for what keywords unless you use a robots.txt or something to block/control search engines from accessing it. Ex: dynamic pages competing against the actual product pages for rankings for the long tail keywords.

And that's not the same thing as a penalty, that's just possibly what can happen when you make changes to content.

Whenever you have crawl issues, the SEOMoz help team is the place to go. They're the only ones who can look into your account to see if there's an issue or such. (And they are really nice and quick to respond.)

I agree; it's open for interpretation. However, each also has their own community behaviors. To repeat the same thing across all three, well, then why would I bother reading G+ if I can just get it with Twitter? Think about the user's perspective/

It may be more worthwhile to read up on social media best practices to better understand the expectations of those social communities so you can tighten your strategy and execution.

http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/

http://mashable.com/2011/04/28/14-best-practices-for-long-term-social-media-success/

http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?searchfrom=header&q=social+media+best+practices

If you block with robots.txt link juice can't get passed along. If your canonicals are good, then ideally you wouldn't need the robots. Also, it really removes value of the social media postings.

So, to your question, if you have the tracking parameter blocked via robots, then no, I don't think you are getting the link juice.

http://www.rickrduncan.com/robots-txt-file-explained

When I want link juice passed on but want to avoid duplicate content, I'm more a fan of the no index, follow tags and using canonicals where it makes sense, too. But since you say your URLs with the parameters aren't being indexed then you must be using tags anyway to make that happen and not just relying on robots.

To your point of "are you sure":

http://www.evergreensearch.com/minimum-viable-seo-8-ways-to-get-startup-seo-right/

(I do like to cite sources - there's so many great articles out there!)

There's a few thoughts on this one: many say keep it brief (70-100 characters). Others say it's part of content and should be the length needed to best describe/support the image. (For example,  since blind people use software that reads the image text to them, what might they need to be able to 'get' it?)

Focus on being brief and reconsider how wordy you are being if you hit more than 12 words.

Can't stress enough how much I agree about it being a bad investment and that just because there's people in the circles it doesn't mean any of them will stick around once it changes hands.

It's a limited solution. It can get visibility fast and possibly drive traffic. It can also (unintentionally) interfere with your site - for example, a product news release could do well and the product page on your site could rank lower. So it also depends what the CTA is and what you want to rank best.

Even with good content, you need a way to get it out there to get visibility which is what a service like this can do. Then again, it can also do it for not really great content.

It looks like the only content on the pages you shared that's different is the basic job info in the grey box, which is why it'd be flagged as duplicate; the majority of the page info is all the same.

It's not a surprise and it's not that uncommon. I wouldn't see it as a huge performance problem; most every site has an issue similar to this - it's clearly not black hat.

Use the SEOMoz rank tracking tool (http://ranktracker.seomoz.org/) for objective - non personalized or influenced - ranking results.

Adwords employees are also intentionally kept segregated from the SEO side of the business, to try to reduce perceived conflict of interests (according to my Adwords rep).

You'll probably get way better - and more in-depth - information by reading some articles on reputable sites, including SEOMoz, like SEO5 mentioned. I doubt there's enough room in one of these forums to be able to post the full POV on each of these to give you the value you are looking for.

In addition to Moz, check out http://searchengineland.com/ and http://www.searchenginejournal.com/.

I try to not leave content along for "never" as it's good to watch page performance. Since search engines change their algos and keywords can grow more competitive, I don't feel the need to constantly update my content for "freshness," but I do look at performance and change if I'm not getting the results I want. I'm not a news site, it's not a blog and we aren't always adding or changing products, so I take freshness with some grain of salt.

Because a page works well at a certain place in time doesn't mean it always will and being proactive can help keep it steady.

Luke - quite the project you get! I admit, I usually stay away from books since they can get out of date pretty fast for this subject matter, so here's some websites to check out:

We've recently invested in Eloqua for our marketing automation, which is probably too big of a tool for many companies, however they have great email campaign resources. http://www.eloqua.com/resources/

And, Marketo is sorta similar to Eloqua: http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/

This site has some great examples people post for A/B testing, so there's usually good learnings you can gleen: http://www.abtests.com/ and implement.

I also like content Hubspot creates: http://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing-automation/ & http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-automation-information/

Hope that's a decent start!

H1 is a tag search engines use to help identify what your page is about. Using "overview" for all H1 would imply that your site is about "overview." (Ok, I'm dumbing it down a little bit, but I'm doing it to make a point.)

The more specific an H1 tag can be to the content of a page, the better. It's easier for search engines to understand your page and it's a better user experience (how valuable is "overview" all over the place?).

I don't think the two have anything to do with each other. If there's not much - or any - competition for keywords, than ranking without trying is't unusual. And sometimes you think you don't optimize but do optimize, just not as best as you could. If you have a page, and there's content on it, and Google indexes it, it's going to associate it with keywords of some sort. I have pages that rank for things we never intentionally optimized for, either.

Great points; we have top nav and it's never proved to be an issue. I'm working on a project where we've migrating from left to top nav and I anticipate issues because its a change for the user experience and we've already trained them on a different nav.

You know, it's hard to say because it could be apples to oranges of what your site is about and what that site you shared the link to is about. You have to design for your audience and fashion/manufacturing/educational/travel, etc. all have totally different sets of user expectations.

Rather than compare yourself to one site to mimic it, it may be worth looking at UX data and CRO tips and other factors to help determine what to do: http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/544-conversion-rate-optimization-tips/

I'm working on something similar right now and have a few random thoughts: I'm not a fan of using the same content; aside from duplicate content issues (and nobody wants to deal with those messes), what's the value for end users? Why read the blog if it's going to be on the site? Or, why have a blog if you're going to put the same stuff (even if it's only some of it) on the site? Obvious, but for a successful blog it's critical.

Linking from the blog to the site, etc. makes a lot of sense for SEO/link juice and there's plenty of benefit there.

It's not a one-course-of-action scenerio. I've been building the business case for how we should handle ours since our site technology doesn't allow for hosting a blog. Sometimes it a bit of the lesser of  the evils, but ultimately there's still plenty of good to get from it.

Now, I'll preface this by saying I don't know what documents you may be looking at vs what I have access to. I see duplicate links from SEOMOz, so you can get to it.

For example, when I log into my SEOMoz campaign information and click on the red errors box, then the duplicate content box, there's a selection of duplicate URLs right below the chart. My current one is indicating it caught 29 duplicate pages of content for my Spanish signs product section, then I can see all the URLs listed out that it sees as duplicates.

Granted, SEOMoz only crawls 10,000URLs at a time, so for a major site like mine that's only part of what we have, but it's an indicator of stuff we need to fix. I download my campaign report into a CSV file and there's columns in that identifying what's duplicate, too.