Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have just gone to make sure that each post just has one category and add redirects and I've noticed that all the duplicate title issues google has notified me about appear to redirect anyway. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/who-are-the-most-expensive-wedding-bands and http://www.musicliveuk.com/music-news/who-are-the-most-expensive-wedding-bands have duplicate titles apparantly but the 1st url redirects to the 2nd one. I use the redirection plug in but have no redirection set up for that url so I'm a bit confused. And if they're redirecting anyway then why is google flagging up duplicate titles?

Based on the examples, I believe it would be well worth it. As indicated in several areas of SEOMoz, particularly the pro campaigns they list having the keyword in the url. I do believe that the 301's will pass on existing juice, but it will be more beneficial moving forward in the future. On the campaign pages > On-Page Optimization> Moderate Importance Factors <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Keywords in the URL string help to add relevancy to the page for search engine rankings, assist searchers and users in identifying the page's content/topic when viewing the URL and provide value when used as the anchor text of referring links.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Employ the targeted keyword(s) in the URL string of the page. If you're targeting a 2+ word phrase, use hyphens to separate individual words.</dd>

There are mixed opinions on using it on every page, but I think it's very useful on the home-page, for exactly the reasons that @donford suggests. It's easy for the home-page to get a bunch of variants indexed, including tracking parameters. Originally, Google said that canonical wasn't proactive, but they've eased up on that. Worst case, they may just ignore it, but the All-In-One SEO approach on a blog isn't a bad bet. It's just so easy for dynamic sites to spin off duplicate URLs that it's better to be proactive. I've never seen a penalty or devaluation due to using canonical when it's not necessary. I think Bing implied that they may ignore it if they see it too often, but I've never even seen a concrete example of that happening. It's so commonplace now that you'd hear about it if sites were being penalized.

Pleasure

The example you are giving has 130 links in total. The recommendation is maximum 100. Also, the page you link to seems to have a lot of links compared to the total amount of text. I could be seen as a bit spammy....og at the least a bit "linky" Read this blog on the issue: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many Regards, Rasmus

No i dont think it will, as long as the text is natural, then i can see you having that term in your blogs so many times that it will look un-natrual. I really would not worry. this is a good thing to do, of cause even better if you can get external links to point to you with the link text. Only the first link in a page will help, so if it is in twice only link the first instance.

Samuel, I don't think there will be a negative effect unless there is an abundance of these and the page becomes spammy. A couple of cautions would be: "at the bottom of articles" links lower in a page have less value, links in the footer are IMHO of little or no value and tend to clutter everything. Your site has a nice clean look right now and you dont want tons of links all over the place. If you keep quality content and diverse links you should be fine.

I agree with Robert. The first thing I noticed was the backlink profile. With only 1 linking root domain to the desired page, this is probably from internal links within your own site, so inbound links from other sites may be 0. I'd look at building links to that specific page with relevant anchor text relating to 'corporate events' where possible. Hope that helps

It depends. Directories are not all bad. Think about it beyond the SEO perspective - any business should list itself in directories that would bring customers. One thing you should never do is pay for a directory listing - that's a paid link and we all know how Google feels about those. Regarding your competitors, there are so many other factors that could be contributing to their rankings (domain age, keywords in URL, site architecture, unique linking domains, quality of on-site content, social media sharing) that I would not consider the directories as a major source of juice.