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I would imagine most of those domains won't have any link profile or backlinks of their own. In that sense, you are not really doing it for SEO...you are doing it for traffic. Also, if you think about it...when companies merge, domains get redirected. Think Continental.com > United.com in which case there is a massive SEO advantage in doing so. Anyways, long story short, in your case, most of the domains with the domainer won't have any Search Engine history, therefore not much SEO advantage. As you said, doing it for a few domains is okay. At the same time, start building a natural link profile and content that people would want to link to...along with activity in social media...all that would work in your long term strategy and those domains would blend it very well.

That is very useful...good to know...thanks Keri.

I think this is an interesting scenario where a 404 is actually better. 301 might not hurt but looking at the substance value which looks like nil in this case....there's actually no value in doing a 301. Granted that it can only help (and very very rarely hurt), but if it did not help the page itself,  there's no value there to redirect it to the other page and this is that rare case scenario where it "might" hurt to do a 301...so not worth the risk.

Definitely delete and let it be a 404.

Can you do anything at all at the root of your domain..ie myurl.com ? This makes no sense. How can you host a domain and have no control over the root of your own domain name..the one you hosted. Don't you have FTP access ? When you connect using ftp, can't you see the server path for the root folder ? You should. I would check via FTP. I have never seen such a scenario.

Yes I agree they work great. But this topic has been openly discussed way too many times..including directly with Matt Cutts at Pubcon. In short, the effects of EMD have changed a lot from 2 years ago...and it will continue to decrease. It's not that they will get penalized (although in a way they will)..it would basically mean that the "magical" effect will go away but they will still have an advantage in my opinion. Here's how:

Let's say your website is abc.com and keyword is Blue Widgets. If somebody links to you, the link code will be:

Blue Widgets vs if your domain was BlueWidgets.com the link would be: Blue Widgets or Click Here

You see what I am talking about. That advantage would always be there. Having your keywords in every incoming link, even if it's not an anchor text link.

I would be very careful about this. Here's what I would ask you: 1. Do you want both the US and presuming the other is UK site to rank in both Google.com and Google.co.uk ? 2. Is the UK site on a .co.uk domain and hosted in UK ? Is it ranking well ? How well does it perform on Google.com ? 3. Would you have 100% of the products in the same category structure on the .com site ? 4. Would it use the same shopping cart platform ? I would look into whether you can target the .co.uk site for US searches. If not, I would look into each of the above points and see how you can separate the .com site as much as possible from the .co.uk site.

Social Media presence has been actively influencing the SERPS. I have seen the impact both on local as well as global search. Even if the links from those websites are nofollowed or are not links at all, just URL mentions (or citations) they help. So I would just analyze their backlink profile and get better links. Also, are you outranking them for other keywords, keyword variants and other long tail keywords which are essentially beyond their exact match domain? How is your Domain Strength and Page Strength vs them ?

Assuming you are talking about the website in your profile...here is what I would check: Do you have any content duplication between your multiple language subdomains ? Do you have XML Sitemaps for your pages ? Are they submitted via the Webmaster Console ? If yes, what %age of your pages do you see indexed vs how many you submitted ? Have you considered doing an Images XML Sitemap ?

Do a site:yourdomain.com and then do a site:subdomain.yourdomain.com and you should be able to find the pages you are referring to. Doing a site:www.yourdomain.com will only show pages from www presuming non www is set to correctly redirect to www and the preferred display URL is set in Google as the one with www. I hope this helps.

The way I have seen duplicate page titles reported is "Exact duplicates" So if you have 2 pages with Page Title as "Widgets", they will show up as Duplicate. However, if one of them was a Blue Widgets and the other was Red Widgets, they will not show up as duplicate. It's a good idea to work on Duplicate Page Titles, but don't do all the work to make sure Google does not see them as Duplicate any more. Look at them as opportunities to display the correct, relevant information in the SERPS so that user's click through to your website. I hope that helps.

I would ask the following question:

Regarding those 500 redirects: Do you have external sites linking to any of those 500 pages ?
I would at-least identify pages that have external links and keep them if possible.

I would recommend spending that money getting an SEO Audit done and based on the outcome, plan your SEO Strategy. You can try and do some of the stuff yourself and have an SEO company do the rest. I would also spend time educating yourself (specially since you already have this resource handy....SEOMoz.org

I agree. As others have noted, I would worry about your entire link profile. If you are concerned about certain image ads or other advertising, you can always have the webmaster add the rel="nofollow" in which case you are telling the bots not to pass any link juice to the linked site (even though it does pass some value).

I would recommend doing a complete backlinks audit and see what you can do to plan a long term natural link profile.

Definitely. I would also suggest varying anchor texts. Think what would be most natural. Don't always get the perfect links

If that's the case, I would suggest doing a rel=canonical tag on www.tryg.dk/forsikring to your homepage. Essentially, it's like a 301 for search engines but not for the users. The users will be able to come to your homepage, use navigation and or other links to visit www.tryg.dk/forsikring or they can come from external links which are linking to www.tryg.dk/forsikring. But Google will de-index that page and rank the homepage instead.

I hope that helps. The exact canonical tag you would use on www.tryg.dk/forsikring page would be :

My response would essentially be the same for this question as your other question about article directories.

Do the most important/niche directories first. Check/find directories where your competition is listed, specially the ones that are outranking you in the SERPS. But again, don't do just a ton of those directories in one day. I would pick the niche ones, do them randomly amongst other link initiatives.

I am sure SEOMoz is using Google API to pull the data rather then essentially scraping Google that tools like WebPosition Gold do. I remember the days when people used to love WebPosition Gold...the industry has changed so much since then.....isn't it.

For any link building profile, they key is diversity of links. If there are lots and lots of Article Directories, Guest Posts, Niche Directories, Blog Comments....in other words too much of any one linking technique and specially anchor text links is a pattern that is easily detectable and stands out from the crowd. We all know links help. We do need links. However, If you lots of article directory links in your back profile and not much of others, I would look into other oppurtunities.

In your words, every 2 weeks, when you want to essentially repeat your process of gaining links...do it...except use a completely different anchor text, maybe don't use anchor text at all...use the domain name, use the brand and so on. And try to use a complete different technique every time.

Invest that time and effort of the 500 words of content into a very useful piece of content and put it on your main-website or as guest blog posts on industry related blogs.

I hope that helps.

are you saying your homepage is not indexed/cached in Google ? If that's the case, there might be something wrong. There might be a noindex tag, some sort of a disallow to your homepage. Personally, I can't remember seeing a similar scenario where inner pages are indexed and the homepage is not. If it's not ranking but is cached, that's another issue.

Please confirm.

You are thinking right. What would stop all the major brands to go out there and buy the "spammiest" links networks pointing to their competition. How does the competition prove they did not do it.

I think Google dealt with this years ago with the Miserable failure change.... here. They basically altered their algorithm to not give "too much" advantage of links/anchor text from all over the web. In a sense, they created the ability for their algorithm to discount the value of links, not penalize the website being linked to. Does that make sense ? I think what's happening now is not any different...they can and will continue to identify link spam, de-index link networks and manipulative techniques using pattern identification. But if not all, most cases, discount the value of those links...and not directly or not 100% penalize the site being linked to, because then technically a group of people/websites could run a mass campaign and kill any online business. That's not how the Internet is supposed to work...