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I have an issue with some of our press releases ranking above the product page or  for targeted page for a certain keyword because of the inbound links and such a press release can gather. There can be some risk of dup content, depending on how the PR is written in comparison to the pages it relates to.  However, I have found dup to be less of a problem and keyword cannibalization to be a bigger one.

I have to go back in and update anchor text, links, etc. in the press releases to push some of the "juice" through to the product page we want to rank for those terms - definitely messy to undo and work with.

That's always a possibility and one of the drawbacks of personalization for SEO. However, if via third party checkers, if you are going up (from #8 to #2), then there's also a better chance of best visibility via personalization, too.

Ranking visibility only means visibility - people can be more likely to click because they can find you more easily.

It could also do with Google determining that your page is a high quality one, so it now gets more visibility. Or, the number of inbound links has increased, which also influences rank. Personalization could be at play, depending on how you went about discovering the ranking change, so if you want to confirm, check it with SEOMoz's Rank Tracking to get a non personalized result.

URLs - headache! We have a terrible URL structure because of the ways we have to pull data, so this is something that I have checked into, too. Now, I will say there's lots of differing opinions on this. I will share with you what someone from Google said last week at SMXWest: they just want you to know about bad links, they don't penalize you for them.

I'm not saying that's the end-all-be-all answer, but she knows that there's a perception that it can 'ding' you when the reality (according to her) is that they drop 404 pages from their index because they don't serve up bad pages. You have lots of bad pages, less linking ability, less pages to have rank and you can lose online visibility. There's a difference between losing visibility because your overall content offering is reduced by bad links and those pages never having existed in the first place.

There's a good chance there's something else going on -one of the things I adore about this forum is that people here have crazy skills and I have witnessed them uncover an issue the original poster didn't even know they had.

I agree - try Screaming Frog. I use it - and prefer it to Xenu - and it's free for up to 500 URLs or $99 for a license for unlimited. Even with a slower computer it can run in the background (leave it on overnight).

I can't quite follow - output from what?

Are you asking someone else to run a Xenu/Screaming frog of this URL (http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#null  anchor occurs multiple timeshttp://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#U)  and give you feedback on what to fix (beyond the obvious that any 400 and 500 level errors should be tackled first)?

We have this across about 30,000 products (yea, that many). I can't stress enough how much of a duplicate page/title content mess it can become. If your system allows for canonical and pagination it's totally worth the effort.

My two cents? I spent 12yrs in the PR field (and transitioned into SEO/social media) and I'd be very careful to ask the right questions to determine what PR agency to work with. I know - and worked with - few who knew how to properly optimize a release. And, while they did have media contacts, PR Newswire did a lot of the leg work. Pitching a story to a reporter or blogger was really the value the PR person brought to the table. And, link building was never something that was regularly brought up. In the past two months, the majority of the PR pros I network with like to tell me "SEO is dead" which tells me everything I need to know about their understanding of SEO.

Again, I am sure there are plenty of seasoned PR people who have an understanding - there's also lots of agencies who like to sell their services even if they don't have the depth of knowledge. Like any business endeavor, it's just a matter of due diligence to find the right fit.

Freelancers have way better prices because they don't have the same overhead costs as agencies, so that could be a more affordable route.

Shrug - if someone falls for bad advice, they fall for it. Call it a scam or a bad business decision but the outcome can be similar. You don't have to know everything about everything but if you don't know enough then you risk the outcome.

Google will never show its cards And I've never gotten really accurate data from ComScore, etc. so there's only so much you can uncover, eh?

I, too, work with a site that has many (thousands) of product pages and dozens of categories. Over time, the homepage did get the most links and it ranks for the brand - which is fine. What's better for the user is that the category or product pages rank for specific keywords. I mean, for the best user experience, I don't want someone to have to go to the homepage and navigate down a few layers to get to what they want. Links to those deeper pages have helped make them more visible. The more pages that rank for the right keywords = more online real estate and more ways for the audience to find you.

So, it depends on your strategy and preference - and - is it better for the user to go to the homepage or to the product page? And, what's the reason those two would compete against each other for keywords (if that's the case).

All the links into the site will eventually help the domain authority.

We "put up with it" because it's part of every facet of any business. There's always trolls. I mean, at this point if anyone believes that a Nigerian prince is going to send them millions as a thank you for fronting him money via a wire transfer, serves you right for getting hosted. That email scam has been around for years and people still fall for it since a sucker is born every minute

I just went to a luncheon 2 weeks ago that Catherine Roe (Head of Consumer Packaged Goods for Google) spoke at and she said that Google has 1 billion searches a day. This was based on internal data her team gave her (I don't know how recent, but I'd venture to guess she knows the right people to ask).

A few things could be at play: they have their on page content optimized properly (keywords are in the page title and used OK in the proper technical sections on the page). The domain is older than the other sites ranking after it (2007 vs 2009, etc.). And, the keywords aren't highly competitive.

All this means is that you just have to do a bit more than them to possibly surpass. Ex: they only have 2 links - get 10+ for you. Add solid content, update it often enough, etc. and you should be able to surpass. Again, it's not that their site is great - there's just a few things in their favor for right now.

The only other thing I can think of is there's duplicate page content and duplicate title content. If it says true in either of those columns then there's no URLs in the columns to the right of it (headed  duplicate_page_content  or duplicate_title) then I'd contact Moz and work with them. Mine populate fine.

OK, within that Excel file, there's a column header with "duplicate page content" - so, the URL in question will be in the far left (URL) then there's a column that says "duplicate page" (with true/false as the options) and if it's true, then there's another column with "duplicate page content" as a header and URLs in it. Those should be the ones that Moz caught duplicating the URL in the "URL" column - if that makes any sense at all!

No shame! There's a ton of data here and it can be a bit of a needle in a haystack at first to figure out That's why these forums are so helpful!

Exactly. The download gives much deeper data, however with a few clicks that Netlogiq suggested you can find it w/o downloading.

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.

I agree; too many links alone can be overcome. (I know, I live it.) If rankings across the board aren't good then there's something else - maybe several things - going on.