Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Bottom line, you cannot make data available online without offering a means for a user to grab that data.

You said you "don't wish to make it easy" so I will share some ideas:

• EGOL's suggestion is good and not that hard to implement. I am not sure if your site requires registration but you can set it up so guests can view a maximum of ?20 member pages or whatever amount you deem to be a reasonable number.

• There are more complicated methods by which you can establish a script that will block any IP or user who pulls too many pages too quickly.

• The real challenge is your sitemap. If all that is required is the company's name, your sitemap is all someone needs. In this case there is simply nothing I can think of you can do.

• If the sitemap isn't a challenge, another idea is to present the data in a method that is not easy to read. You can leave the description information in HTML but present the company name in Flash, for example.

Bottom line, if you want to rank well, the site has to be easy to crawl. If the crawl data offers enough information for others to steal, there is simply no reasonable method that can be used to prevent automated tools from grabbing it.

Google shows 1000 monthly searches for either of those two variations of the phrase. I looked at both searches and was surprised to see that much variation in the results. I would suggest optimizing your page for "personal trainer minneapolis" but if you can add other variations such as "Minneapolis Personal Trainer" and "Twin Cities Personal Trainer" throughout the page. Go for one longer but very high quality page as opposed to two separate pages. It will provide a better user experience and hopefully better ranking as well.

Make sure you have your Google Places page set up as those results are performing very well.

** Does having our primary keyword a part of our URL give us an SEO benefit? **

Yes. You will receive a benefit on all searches using that keyword.

Your current URL already has "parts" in it. By adding "rv" to the URL, your ranking will be boosted on any search for "rv" and especially for "rv parts", but you will not do as well for "parts" without "rv" anymore.

what is the best way to keep any credit we have built for our original domain?

If you decide to make the change, you should use a 301 redirect. All traffic and links will be redirected from the old site to the new site. Your links will retain 90%+ of their value for the new site. When possible, update the links so you can keep 100% of their value.

Where did you hear OSE might "soon close it's doors to most of us"? Do you have a link? Have you asked any SEOmoz staff to confirm?

Google is fine with swear words. Your ranking will not be affected.

On the other hand AdSense has rules against excessive profanity. If you are dependent on AdSense income you should take that into consideration.

Also be aware that "surf safe" settings can cause your site to be filtered. Since you have an adult site you would already be filtered so the swear words would not impact you.

My suggestion would be to first focus "Personal Trainer Minneapolis" with the title and H1 tag with the goal of earning a #1 ranking.

My recommendation is after you achieve the #1 spot, try adjusting the title to either improve CTR or to capture additional rankings on alternate keywords.

I would recommend blocking pages such as privacy policy, terms of use, legal, etc. It is unlikely these pages would ever bring traffic to your site. Even if they did, it is not going to be the quality traffic you desire.

In robots.txt you can add

Disallow: /pages/privacy/

substitute your local path for /pages/privacy/

The best practices for a shopping cart would be the same as any other web page. Each cart software offers varying abilities to natively conform to SEO best practices. Many popular carts offer extensions to bridge the gap between the software design and the changes necessary for improved SEO performance.

If I were in your situation I would request control over the URL, page title, header, text, alt text, etc. All the normal SEO factors. If the web developer is not willing to provide you access, then ask the developer to make the changes. Either the developer will likely not be happy with making so many changes and then grant you permission, or the site owner wont like paying a developer to make text changes and he will request for you to be given access. Either way, the result is the needed changes are made.

My best suggestion would be to inquire on the X-Cart software forums as to what SEO extensions and customizations are available.

it would make the most sense to optimize the homepage for 'NYC apartments'

I agree.

If I may ask, why do you desire to rank so well for "Platinum Properties"? If that is your company name, most people who search for you will find your site whether you are the first result or the tenth. I would recommend focusing on the other two pages you suggested.

Home page: NYC apartments and another variation of the phrase such as "apartments New York" or whichever key word phrase you feel would be best.

Page1: NYC Apartment Rentals and another variation of that phrase

Page2: NYC Apartment Sales and another variation of that phrase

For the title tag, any change can affect your current ranking. You can make no change and your ranking can move up or down based on a variety of factors ranging from Google changes to how your competitor's rankings change.

Have you considering moving your company name to the end of your title tag? You would want to improve the first half but a fast example would be

<title>NYC Apartments Rentals and Sales | Platinum Properties</title>

Does anyone have feedback regarding Inbound Writer? http://www.inboundwriter.com/wordpress

I normally do not use such tools but a new client is presently using the tool so I would like to hear from the community if they have any experiences to share.

Thanks!

You can do almost anything you wish on a "noindex" tagged page. You are telling the search engine bot to exclude the page from the search index, so the page should not affect your ranking.

The reason your site's # of pages is a factor, is your overall site is viewed as a whole. If you have a basic site with 10 pages, and there is a problem with 1 of the pages having duplicate content, then 10% of your site is affected, and this can impact how the search engine views your site. If your site hosted a forums with 10k pages, then that 1 page would represent 0.001 of your site, so the impact would not have any real effect.

A 301 is definitely preferable over a canonical. I would recommend a simple regex expression to 301 redirect any IP related traffic to the relative page on your chosen domain.

Example: 123.123.123.123/welcome would be redirected to mysite.com/welcome

This can be achieved with a single rule. The code for the rule would vary based on your server setup. If you are on managed hosting, your host can set this up for you.

I think the correct thing to do is pretty clear.

301 the pages from the original site to their new URLs directly just as you suggested.

what would I do with the pages that I have not redirected? Let them 404?

The right thing to do is redirect them properly. Why would you leave any pages as a dead end 404?

How much time and resources do you have available for this project. That answer should be balanced with other factors:

Are the existing links worth the effort? Is this an older site with high quality links?

What is your SEO rank worth? Is the site's sales dependent on SERP? Since you are posting here, I would assume the answer is yes.

With only 100 pages involved, I would do whatever it takes to ensure each page is properly redirected to the appropriate page on the new site.

**This website will not be full of articles though.. it will be an informational website on the real estate firm, what areas they specialize in, what homes are for sale in these areas, and a normal MLS home search. **

Whether you refer to the content as web pages, blog posts, articles, etc. it is all content. It is mostly the same from a SEO perspective.

Any high quality, useful content relevant to your niche can help your site rank . Your role is to choose the optimal keywords for the maximum amount of convertible traffic.

For an individual who does not have a website and is a casual blogger, then using an established domain offers the advantage of a stronger domain authority. In any other case, I prefer using your primary domain.

You want to control your traffic. There are a few nightmare stories where the blog host, such as blogger, closed the URL of a user. In each case the user lost years of value they built up. This reason alone would lead me to always using my primary domain.

Additionally, a key reason for providing a blog is to generate site traffic. If you offer high quality content in your blog, then you want visitors linking to your site, and not wordpress.

In my experience link counts are a meaningless metric. You have twice mentioned having 500+ links. Many individuals can change a single forum signature and gain literally thousands of links overnight. One of those links has some value and all the rest combined have almost no value.

The important consideration is number of unique linking root domains, and the statistics of the pages which link to you. Based on OSE, your site lacks any real off-site support. In looking at your site, there is no social engagement either.

I can point out that OSE can be up to 60 days behind, but you also mentioned you have not done any recent SEO work for the site so I presume that means no recent link building.

I agree with you that your site deserves a better ranking, but you also need to acknowledge there are a LOT of sites out there with good enough content to earn rankings ahead of you, and many with more off-page support. Even this SEOmoz Q&A thread with an exact phrase match only ranks around 500 for the phrase search.

i should state once more i rank very very well in bing

I used to make that comparison but I learned some time ago it is completely worthless. I have repeatedly found instances where I ranked as #1 in Bing and not in the top 50 for Google, and vice-versa. Bing and Google are two separate companies which pull data independently and have completely different algorithms and standards. The results tend to line up only for the best sites.

Have look at page 50 or 60 you will see some that are hard to believe the should be above me

I did exactly as you asked, and I disagree. I already mentioned this Q&A which beats your page clearly on the offpage factors.

At the bottom of page 50 of Google.com SERPs for "a local Perth web development company" is the following result: http://www.exa.com.au/local-web-services.php

It is not a great result. I see link spam on the page along with other SEO issues, but that page also has a DA of 69, PA of 41 and should definitely outrank you (my opinion).

I know this is your site. I know you have put time and effort into the site. My best suggestion is to take a deep breath and a fresh analysis of your site. You have plenty of opportunities. If you wish shoot me an e-mail Ryan@Vitopian.com and I can share some specific action items I noticed. I assume you have noticed many of them as well.

Now it is my turn to agree with EGOL.

I would add one idea. In general I prefer not to share content but it can offer value to periodically share a selected article and gain backlinks to your site.

The most common cause of duplicate content is multiple versions of a URL point to the same content.

mysite.com/blog

mysite.com/blog/

www.mysite.com/blog

Each of the above examples, along with many others, can all point to the exact same page. The issue can be resolved by adding a canonical tag to your page's html. In the tag of your html add

Replace the URL in the example with the URL of your page. Once that is done, run a new crawl report. If you continue to find duplicate content, take a look at the exact URLs and referring pages to help narrow down the issue.

Alex's response is great.

To answer your question, the SEOmoz tool will issue a warning any time there is over 100 links on a given page. I notice your home page is well under 100 links. What is the URL to the page which gives an error?

I would suggest you install the MOZbar. It is an extension that works with FireFox or Chrome browsers and is very helpful for SEO analysis. http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar

Canonicalizing your pages will solve your issue.

You can have a page and present it to visitors with various URLs. What Google needs to understand is which is the primary version of the page. Using your example:

http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html

http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-**Mammut**-cid77.html

You can put the following tag on the pages:

That tag lets Google know that you have a single page which you are presenting to visitors with different URLs. This is a very common practice. For example, you may have a product page and sort it ascending by price, descending by product name, etc. These pages all offer the same content but just presented a bit differently for your visitor's benefit.