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Thanks, Keri. No, it's a hand-built blog. No CMS. I think the googlebot is doing a good job of indexing my site. The site is small and when I search for my content I do find it in google. I was pretty sure that google worked the way you describe. So it sounds like sitemaps are an optional hint, and perhaps not needed for relatively small sites (couple hundred pages of well linked content). Thanks.

Mike, This is best practice on all sites. Forgetting about the links for a minute; you have two versions of the same page (in search engines eyes) so the first step is to do exactly what you're asking and consolidate into one. The next step is to ensure your URLs end with a trailing slash because if you have www.url.com and www.url.com/  you again have two different versions. DD

I think people may be misunderstanding your question and thinking you want to make a feed of your content on your own sites. You're wanting to create a feed of content you've written and published on several different article directories / databases so I think Yahoo Pipes will be a good bet: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ . I should mention though that the reason these aren't indexed is probably more to do with the quality of article directories and the content found on them. Google doesn't tend to think very highly of them and I personally wouldn't build links using this type of site these days. Just my two cents. Good luck!

I just looked up for a few examples, see attached images. DISCLAMER : I didn't do SEO for any of those websites and those results were returned from google.CA from Quebec, a province where french is commonly spoken in Canada. May be the fact that fr.wikipedia.org has lower quality content and lower domain authority makes it easier to outrank.  Still, websites that outrank it are far from being well optimized. iXSUT.jpg saJda.jpg E94dr.jpg

Thanks, David. I thought I had read that meta keywords were still used by Yahoo or Bing (definitely not Google). Is that not true? Does it harm anything to have the meta keywords if I just leave them as-is (since I already have them), or should I pro-actively go remove them?

Do not waste your time using the meta title, we've run experiments and found no boost whatsoever using meta title, just focus on regular title tag, links, and fresh high-quality content. It does NOT matter where in the tag your title tag is, but personally we put it right after the opening head tag for a good practice and to have a cleaner code layout. But, it matters NOTHING. Good luck!

Diversity is a sign of quality and will be a positive flag for GoogleBot. Having same head title, h1 title and h2 can't be a good sign nowadays. I recommend you make a SEO / CTR optimized HEAD title and a more verbal and more informative H1 title. At least make it slightly different. This won't make a huge difference although

Yes Mike, the trick is that whenever someone reposts your article they link back to the original version. That can be embedded in your content, or they will also get that from the in your RSS feed.

Thanks, Keri. Great pointers. I didn't know Google had been doing 'title altering' for 6 months. Looks like they're using internal link anchor text to substitute new titles if they are related to the query. I don't really like them changing my carefully crafted titles but it's also true that I don't know if their change is helping or hurting my CTR in the SERPs. Hmmmm...

If you're using wordpress or a CMS of some type, look for posts and tools related to that particular software. The SmushIt tool is available as a wordpress plugin, and it will compress pictures on upload, and will compress (on demand) pictures in the media library. I use Irfanview for batch resizing images (in the same directory).

I'd like to know the answer too... Our page is an e-commerce site, and Google sometimes gives the duplicate content reports for pages that don't match, but haven't got much of unique content. Thought maybe you solved the problem?

Hi Mike, It was an error in our most recent release, it should return in the next release. Casey

Boy, this is a tough question because it varies from site to site, page to page, and keyword to keyword. We publish new content every day and much of it is exclusive to our site. Beyond that I focus primarily on creating content to capture long-tail traffic. To begin with, I would ask myself the following questions (which you may have already done)... What keywords are really driving your business? Have you pinpointed which keywords are most likely to lead to conversions? Make sure you are building links for the keywords that lead to revenues...not just visits. Of the keywords pinpointed in #1, what does the competitive landscape look like for each? Be sure to prioritize which keywords/pages you are working on based on a combination of potential return and level of competition. What links do your competitors have? Is there an opportunity to catch up by getting the same links? Second, there is always an opportunity to combine content generation and link building. Try to identify content other sites need or are lacking. Create that content and then reach out to let the site owner know so they can point visitors to the page. Finally, to avoid the huge time suck (or to manage it), consider scheduling link building time and content generation time throughout the week to help yourself be focused and efficient. Jot down content ideas and/or potential linking partners whenever they come up. Then on during your scheduled times, work through your list of ideas / sites. All that being said, there is no 'right' answer. Link building and content creation are both difficult tasks that take time. Which reminds me...have you considered hiring an intern to be your content writer? Just another idea... I'm pretty sure this doesn't answer your question, but I hope it helps.

I have heard that a low PR page on a high PR site will gain PR quicly when linked to, and since only the first link is going to point to your site and you have 2 links to play with, why not.

Mike, what type of structure did you end up using for your blog? Do you have any interesting insights to share, either with us here or in a YOUmoz post? Would love to hear them!

Just seeing this post now.  Does anyone find it ironic that NYT drops a follow link to JCPenny in the article?

It still takes place, and can be up to a page apart in ranking a site for one keyword and capitalized and lowercase as well lowercase results were 1,450,000 and uppercase were 2,430,000 that's kinda offputting since for many keywords, it's going to be a matter of preference of a user on how they will either uppercase or lowercase a search term. It's sad 3+ years later it's still the norm.

Every page should be constructed in a Google compliant structure and optimized toward specific keywords and user behaviors.