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Awesome! That did the trick -- thanks for your help. The site is no longer listed

Yeah. As of yet, the site has not been de-indexed. We placed the conditional rule in htaccess and are getting different robots.txt files for the domain and subdomain -- so that works. But I've never done this before so I don't know how long it's supposed to take?

I'll try to verify via Webmaster Tools to speed up the process. Thanks

Awesome. We used your second idea and so far it looks like it is working exactly how we want. Thanks for the idea.

Will report back to confirm that the subdomain has been de-indexed.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll definitely have to do a bit more research into this one to make sure that it doesn't have any negative side effects before implementation

We have a plugin right now that places canonical tags, but unfortunately, the canonical for the subdomain points to the subdomain. I'll look around to see if I can tweak the settings

Hey Ryan,

I wasn't directly involved with the decision to create the subdomain, but I'm told that it is necessary to create in order to bypass certain elements that were affecting the root domain.

Nevertheless, it is a blog and the users now need to login to the subdomain in order to access the Wordpress backend to bypass those elements. Traffic for the site still goes to the root domain.

Hey Andy,

Herein lies the problem. Since the domain and subdomain point to the exact same place, they both utilize the same robots.txt file.

Does that make sense?

Is it possible to block an entire subdomain with robots.txt?

I write for a blog that has their root domain as well as a subdomain pointing to the exact same IP. Getting rid of the option is not an option so I'd like to explore other options to avoid duplicate content. Any ideas?

That's good advice. I may have over-optimized just a tad

Thanks Paul, just the answer I was looking for. I may throw the variation on the page as well as I have only used the original term so far.

Perfect, I'll make sure it's optimized correctly. How much is too much when it comes to keyword usage?

So I have created a page for the term "denver buick" but the next largest search term is for "buick denver." Should I create another page focusing on this keyword, or optimize one page for both? It's hard to come up with unique content since they are the basically the same term.

But most importantly, if I make this new page, how do I incorporate it into the site architecture?

Thanks!

Is it hard to get a page to rank for a particular term if the majority of the anchor text pointing to that page is different from your chosen term?

Thanks for the detailed response. I checked Open Site Explorer and looks like we should be using the www.

Also, I believe that we have some print ads that use www -- good thinking!

We just had our site redesigned. Previously, it was indexed under www.suss.net, but now the developer has it at suss.net with www.suss.net 301 redirecting to suss.net. Is this bad for SEO?

Hi Yumi,

My question is really asking "If I take down the 301, does the mean that the link juice is no longer passed?"

Thanks,

Kyle

So I know that a 301 will pass the majority of link juice to the new site, but if that 301 is taken away what happens?

How original does content have to be? I mean say we have a page for Denver and one for Colorado -- The services we offer will be exactly the same. Do I basically just need to make sure I'm not copying and pasting the entire page? What if there is 1 paragraph that is exactly the same?

We are located in Denver, Colorado. I want the majority of the site to be focused on Denver keyword terms but I also think we should branch out to other cities around Denver, as well as around the keyword "Colorado."

What's an appropriate way to do this? I've seen site that have a page for every city in the area but it looks terrible and doesn't really fit into the site. How do I cross link to these new city pages (I don't want them in the main navigation)?

I get why you're confused -- it lies with the presence of our old site and the permissions we have to change content.

So we're not just taking the site down for maintenance upon completion -- we're pointing the domain to a different server (both domains will be pointing to different places). The main question for me is how to do this smoothly?

But, mostly I just needed confirmation that the developer's idea wasn't the best one and reading your responses has helped me understand this a bit better.