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Clearly seems like a bug with your SEOmoz bar (or whatever you are using) try to uninstall and restart it again!

I pretty much agree with EGOL and in January 2011 I did a small research on it and find out that domains based in ‘-’ hyphens are not really ranking higher for competitive keywords. I believe if one have a choice between keyword.com and key-word.com then I would always prefer him to go for a domain with keyword.com

There are some other problems with hyphen based domain names that includes branding, loss of traffic and more…

I agree with Alan and furthermore, I believe being an ethical SEO, your Job is to build quality links from relevant resources… in that case your job should be to build as many quality links as possible to make the link profile look natural… the more natural your link profile would be the more credibility it will have in the eye of Google and other search engines…

I believe you should continue with the current domain and start building quality links on it.

In terms of SEO there is no extra advantage of it! And at the same time this sounds a bit difficult. In my opinion the domain name should be short, simple and easy to remember instead of all this shortcut tactic…

Its Meta description that we use for SEO. You will find the below given code in the for Meta description!

your content" />

Copycsape.com is a good place to see how much your content is duplicated with others…

If I would be at your place I might never have considered duplicate content as a problem because of the following facts:

• I am the original source of the content
• Google is smart it can guess who the real content creator is and give all credits to original content instead of content scrapers…

Mostly this happens with blog, infect SEOmoz blog’s content has been copied on multiple places but I a haven’t noticed any penalty on SEOmoz nor I see scrapers ranking above the original content.

Just looked at the website… didn’t sounds promising… looks like an easy way to increase bounce rate on the blog #notpromising

Hello Nicola,

In my 4 years of experience as an agency SEO I only once accept this challenge and that is because my client was a reseller and he wants to come up on the 1^st page with the brand name of the manufacturer. I believe if this is the case at your end then I don’t think this make you wear a gray hat but in my experience this is extremely difficult in terms of competition and takes a long way to be on the first page.

If your case is not similar to the one mentioned above then I would want you to consider few important things before planning this:

• Trust of your own brand

Think from the angle of a visit that type in your competitor’s key phrases and find your website. After clicking it he/she might not find what he/she was expecting and this is where you will lose your own brand’s trust level.

If people are coming to your website and do not find what they are really looking for then eventually you will lose the trust of your own website/brand.

• Bounce Rate

If people coming to your website from your competitor’s brand name.. I believe they will only increase the bounce rate because of the fact that they didn’t find what exactly they were looking for.

• Killing User experience

This activity might kill the user experience to a higher extent due to the fact that you are taking them somewhere else when they are looking for something else.

I believe shouting out with one company name won’t be a good idea so here is the list of top 25 hosting companies based in UK:

http://uk.tophosts.com/top25-page1.html

hope this helps!

Kevin, while analyzing your competitors and also while building your own strategy, the most important thing that you have to consider is quality.

Usually good amount of links from fewer domains is not really helpful and it is always advisable to earn links from different domains….

I think your first step must be to figure out the quality of domains from where your competitors are getting a link, are they relevant websites? News websites? High authority? And other important factors…

Step two is to design you strategy in which you have to think that can you acquire link from the websites where your competitor’s link is present (if they are credible website this is a good strategy to start.)

You also have to design strategies that allow you to get links from different domains like guest posting, info-graphics, interviews and more…

There is no BIG problem if you add the pages that contain cross domain canonical tag on them. Why?

The reason why I can say this is because Google is not only indexing the pages from sitemap.xml file, Google have their own crawler and they have the ability to crawl and index the website no matter if you do not have an xml sitemap.

Google is very good at (in my opinion) picking the instructions that are available on the page so if you add the page in the xml sitemap, the crawler will read the instructions on the page and will only index the page that contain original content.

I think all you need is a face to face sit with him where you can make him understand the conversion funnel and some examples that short term keywords are hard to achieve in 3 months and have a higher bounce rate. In the meanwhile he will get a profit from long tail keywords…as they might have a low search volume but rate of conversion will is high (show him examples and trusted resources...)

Be a non technical person and use the business language… if he sticks up to the 3 months deadline and is not ready to change him mind then he might is not a good client and he will give you much pain in the longer run… think before you start!

Also, make him understand that SEO is a long term investment so returns in 3 month might not be possible but you people can mutually set some KPIs that he can track on monthly basis to conform that you are worth investing….

According to SEOmoz, ‘Domain Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of entire domains or subdomains, Page Authority measures the strength of individual page.’

Whenever a new page has been created, the PA of that page should be none and then with the time people stated link to it and PA grows with time…

Usually .EDU links are promising links (no matter from a sub page) so I think you should go for it because with time the PA will increase… and this link is surly going to help you in many ways…

I agree with Francisco, if you are an authority website and then you are playing a little bit with article spinning then this might help you boosting your ranking in a short run… but as I am witnessing Google’s eye on low level link building I would highly recommend avoiding it…

If you are talking about writing 1 article for 1 article directory website then I have personally used this and results are kind of positive but to be honest this is not going to give you a BIG boost so I would prefer if you can use your same time and effort in something more valuable…then you should consider that!

To be honest it’s never about number of links pointing to your website it’s always about the quality of links pointing back to your site.

You have to analyze their link profile to see if the links pointing to them are quality or they are just some low quality links to increase the total number of links to the site (this is common). If they are quality then your should put your effort in following the footstep of your competitors… but if you think they are not worth investing links then I would prefer to continue investing your time and money on quality and natural link building…as it is long term!

To get competitor’s link list Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO will work best!

Its simple…

Redirect 301 http://www.mydomain.com/index.php to http://www.mydomain.com and all your link juice value and traffic will move to the index page you want and duplicate content issues will be resolved!

Hope this helps!

good suggestions Ryan! I agree on how great content you can develop... i believe interactive blog that update on regular bases and have its RSS shared on different places can help him increase targeted traffic and natural links pointing back to the website.

I know where you are coming from David but to be honest i don't think Google will look too depth in to it and on the other hand you cannot stop (even your competitors) to build links on your redirected domains... so its better to play safe! (My opinion!)

I would redirect all the domains to the primary domain and make sure they are done via a 301 redirect.

Here, if from Primary domain you mean to say the main domain then i might disagree you here because if you are going to redirect tons of website to the main website... this is a clear indication to Google that i am taking all the domains and pointing it to one place so that i can eat as much traffic as possible which is not really a good strategy in Google's eye!

That's true! also do not act like a network.. Google hates it!