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Hi,

Duplicate content means the pages are the same!

Use link rel= canonical

If your not sure how to implement it read this post it will explain everything for you.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Most social bookmarking websites are "no follow" so they won't pass on link juice anyway,  shorter links also provide a better user experience and click through rate.

Hi Gabriel,

i believe that Google can handle missing meta descriptions relatively well and will read the page content to create one, however you will miss out on personalizing them to boost click through rates.

I would prioritize fixing the duplicated page titles and content over everything else, even then i don't believe it will make a huge difference as i removed about 2000 errors and warnings from my site a while back and i haven't seen a huge change in traffic or rankings.

Kyle

HI Gareth, Your robots.txt should look like this; User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: rogerbot Allow: /

Direct Download link for top 500 sites worldwide.  Based On Domain Authority.

http://www.seomoz.org/top500/domains/csv

I wouldn't think this would cause you to drop from the search results, check to see if anything else has change.

If not try removing the category keyword from the post and see if you rise again. If you don't rise, work on creating content to build links.

I don't think you will get "slapped" as long as your category pages are not listing loads of your posts where the titles is also shown, because that might look like keyword stuffing if it appears 10-20 times in a H1 tag.

Also it might have negative effects, because if your using that keyword for every page then their all going to be competing with each other in the SERP.

Hi,

It looks like you or someone working for your company have been taking part in some very black hat techniques, which would be why Google is possibly punishing you. To get your site ranking well i suggest you look at your link profile and remove the links created using these black hat techniques, once you have removed as many of these as possible create quality content to attract high quality links back to your site.

I also noticed your keywords are targeting locations so you could create specific landing pages for each of these locations with quality content about the location.

Hopefully if your work on these areas you should see some improvements, but never take the easy route and use black hat techniques it will only hurt you in the long run.

kyle

Hi steve,

You can use OpenSiteExplorer to track links coming in but be aware it usally updates every 30-40 days so don't go firing anyone before it updates!

You can also use SeoSpyGlass which is the same thing as Opensite, but it tracks the links in more detail.

kyle

Hi Bob,

If Seomoz is picking up errors that Googlebot isn't then it could be something to do with your robots.txt, maybe you have it blocking one part of your site for Googlebot, however rogerbot isn't blocked so it is picking up errors that Google can't reach. I also believe that Rogerbot is a little bit more strict as well so this could also be why.

For the 301 problem it seems like they haven't been installed correctly, if you can access URL 3 and 2 without being sent straight to URL 1 by your browser then the 301 has failed.

Kyle

Something doesn't sound right here, i think anything that you need to change your IP for is maybe not the best thing to be doing in the first place?

I'm not sure duplicating your content everywhere is a good idea. Try to keep your content as unique as possible.

Hey Tracy,

Yes i think it would be a good idea to start from scratch if the bad links cannot be removed, because they are only going to effect your site more and more with every Google update.

You should check If the 1500 visitors a month are returning users then they can be made aware of the domain change and you can keep that user base, however 1500 unique visitors a month would suggest that you have some good rankings somewhere so i would check to see where there being referred from and if its a particular link on a website perhaps contact them to get it changed for your new one.

Also make sure you get your old site De-indexed so there are not any duplicate content issues if you wish to keep the content you already have.

Hope i helped!

OK so i have recently started working for a finance company in a very competitive niche. There current SEO guys are doing article exchanges with keyword rich anchors and our rankings are steadily falling since panda/penguin.

Our link profile is not great with around 95% of our links coming from keyword rich anchors and low quality sites. (article submission sites, and 301 domains).

I have tried to explain we need to create quality content and integrate with social sites better and stop the spammy article exchange techniques which are no longer effective.

They think these techniques are the best because you can see a link to our site instantly without having to wait for links to come in from linkbait, tools, articles etc etc.

How can i explain to them this is not helping us without them saying "Well this is what is getting us links" and being ignorant?

Thanks for any replies!