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Hint Hint: Those redirects starting with /ugc/ pointing to /blog/ are stored somewhere, right ?

I agree with Zach and I would suggest going with the other option you already have in your head.

"We could instead offer pro bono services to a small business with a limited web presence – that would be useful to her, and constructive.  But I'd like to have a better understanding of what signals Google looks for when deciding whether to index a website in local search, and see whether possible to dupe those algos."

In my opinion, that's the best way to go. @Zach, thanks for posting those links. I will check out your post.

Now, that's a good point Keri. Does that mean it "might" be coming soon ?

"there's not a category for looking at all YouMoz posts that have been promoted to the main blog."

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905&page=ts.cs

Nadejda, I would suggest you file a DMCA complaint as well as send an email to the website owner/whois email/contact info. Also suggest reaching out to the domain registrar with a copy of the DMCA as well as to the Hosting company. 8 out of 10 times, this works. 1 out of the other 2 times, the offending site stop ranking and I was okay with that and then the last 1 was a bit of a struggle, took almost 2 months to stop ranking, but Google did identify it as duplicate and drop them in rankings.

Mark

Are you blocking all your bots to spider these erroneous URLs ? Is there a way for you to fix these such that either they don't exist or they are not duplicate anymore.

I'd just recommend looking from that perspective as well. Not just the intent of making those errors disappear from the SEOMoz report.

I hope this helps.

I agree with you one hundred percent Dr Pete. Thanks for your detailed insight. Always helps

Is Google showing an old page title you used ? Something from DMOZ or Yahoo Directory maybe ?

What I think it could be is that Google is using snippets of text on your page to generate the Page Title / Meta description to make it more relevant to the keyword you are searching for.

Let me know what you see.

In that case, I would not worry about it. Your domain/website will continue to rank for your Old Brand Name (unless it's a generic keyword). If it's a unique company / brand name, I would not worry about it.

Moreover, you can have an about us page detailing this transition on how Brand A became Brand B, just to make sure.

I hope this helps.

Would you just have a 1 page website or still operate as is, just with a new Brand Name ?

Great. You are good then. Nothing to worry. Pagerank on those paginated pages is Good.

Joseph

First of all, there's business value in doing that right ? Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing it. Right ?

Now having other websites browse your website in an iFrame, I'd say yes, the browsers and the bots know it's your website they are browsing, it's just the frame around it that's from that other website.

I would research to look into if there's a way for you to make it into some sort of a White Label (Powered by) kind of solution. Are you providing this solution for free or for a fee ?

You'd also have to worry about ease of implementation etc so I understand why you are considering an iFrame because from an implementation perspective it's probably the easiest route. Honestly, I would think more from a business perspective and do it if this means more business or branding for you.

I hope this helps. Maybe, maybe not.

What would happen to Company A's domain ? Is it going to be hosted with a page describing the acquisition and then linking to Company B ?

Yes, by using rel=prev,next, you are telling Google that these are paginated. I wouldn't worry about the fact that they have pagerank. It's flow of link juice internally and that's totally fine.

The question I have is whether you have a View-All page ? The reason I am asking is to understand if that could be causing you any duplicate content issues because if you do not have a canonical and you have a View All page, then all your paginated pages are subsets of your View-All page and you might want to think how you are handling that.

See:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Follr, Great question.

It's not a manual process for any Search Engine to evaluate sites/domains when whois registration, nameservers etc take place. So I would not really worry about #1.

From my experience in handling this exact situation, as long as you 301 redirect Company A to company B (if Company B's domain is what ends up being used as the only/primary website). If there are products / categories being transferred from Company A to Company B, then if you can setup 301 redirects for Red Widgets on Company A to Red Widgets page on Company B, you should be good. When you 301 redirect the domain name for Company A, which would have all sorts of brand backlinks and history and age in the SERPS, I have seen them transition over to the new domain.

So in this case, even when there's no mention of Company A in Company B's website, companyB.com ranks for Company A's branded keywords.

I hope this helps.

Thanks Mat for a copy of their email.

I did not see that email come in. But that's a big change. What does Raven have to say about it ? Any other vendors using Adwords API facing similar issues ? Knock Knock Moz team.

Are you facing any ranking issues on your homepage / author pages ? Do you even want your author pages to rank ? Considering your answer, I'd suggest adding a noindex tag on your author profile pages, specially since you only have 2 authors.

Wordpress is like any other CMS. The same problem of SPAM exists with Google's Blogspot. Spam is everywhere and I don't think the Search engines are trying to use "What CMS are you using" to decide if you are SPAM.

I would not worry about getting penalized "Just because you decided to use Wordpress as a CMS/Blogging platform".

There are tons and tons of great, high authority, ranking websites made with all kinds of CMS platforms including Wordpress. So, I would say there's no merit to this.

Google's Matt Cutt's own blog is Wordpress Powered if that helps

What happens when you add a new article by Author3 ?

/blog/author1 is a list of 4 articles

/blog/writer2 is a list of 6 different articles

/blog/writer3 is a list of 1 article?

/blog is a list of recent 10 articles (the 1+4+6 from the two writers), /blog/page2 getting the 11th article ?

If this is the case, I would not worry too much about it. Homepage is set to recent articles and each author has it's own page. As you add/update more articles, more authors maybe, it's more different. It's a dynamic blog. A typical structure. I would not worry too much about it.

If you are concerned, you can set a noindex on your write pages.