Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've been confused about seemingly simple things too and the more you think on them, the more confused you get - it's a horrid cycle sometimes.

What I've been wondering about is Stumble Upon etc. If one does put up content here, and other reputable places, does this become duplicate with what's on the original site? It seems like it would to me, but I'm not certain.

My company was recently approached by someone who's done SEO for some quite big sites, promising a top three position within 4 weeks for a competitive area by "spinning".

Thankfully, my boss swiftly told him we didn't need his services as there's no such thing as a fly-by-knight in reality.

I guess it's just about keeping as up to date as possible so whatever we do has a positive lasting impression. Phew!: does take some work though.

If true, that's pretty terrifying! I've not the experience to really be able to talk on the subject I'm afraid, but I've been putting in a lot of effort trying to learn. The idea that such work might be potentially hazardous is certainly a cause for mild alarm.

Do you suppose just playing things as straight as possible will be enough? Our focus is on creating really compelling articles for our blog and a site that's a cinch to use - fingers crossed!

Hmm, that is a bother. Are you not able to edit the permalinks directly for each of the posts? Sorry, maybe I'm just not following, but why create whole new posts?

Hi,

Would it be possible to delete the old pages if they're not serving any purpose?

As a first port of all, I'd install Yoast for wordpress. It's a very powerful plugin that allows for a great deal of control and can sort duplicate content issues by automatically adding in rel="canonical" tags. There's a great a webinar here http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo on seomoz.which also provides a lot of great advice for dealing with archives.

We had too many duplicate titles also, which were created when our pictures were links to themselves - new page but with same title. As a temporary measure, I set up redirects on these back to the posts' page but will go and remove these links later.

I hope this was helpful, if I got it wrong, however, I'm happy to learn!

Thank you, that's what I've done, so that's great.

Brilliant answer, very informative, so thank you.

Hi!

Do you think it better to:

a) have all archives crawled (date, time, category etc.) even though they create duplicate content,. or;

b) disable crawling of all archives?

Ideally, I'd like to set up just excerpts in the archives and have a unique intro for each, but I'm having trouble doing this just now so was wondering which is the smarter option in the meantime?

Thanks very much!

Thank you so much, you're an absolute star!

I know this probably seemed a very obvious question, I just wanted to make sure I had it straight in my head before going down a path.

Hi,

I recently started a very much "learn on the job" SEO position, transitioning from  a copywriting background.

We currently have a wordpress blog up and running (and producing some decent quality content too I hope!) at example.com/blog/ and a sign up page located at example.com (sorry, can't put the address right now) for a site that is being custom built as it's got some nifty software linking to back end systems.

My question is whether the content on the blog will bring SEO benefits to the main domain or whether it'll just be for the blog itself? If the latter, should we navigate the blog onto the a separate page of the main site?

Thanks so much! I'm learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but somethings still get me in a little bit of a tizzy.