Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Just an idea, if you are part of the same company why don't you redirect the pages from the larger site and point them at your newly designed smaller site?
That way you won't get stung for duplicate content.
If that's not possible I would rewrite all the content from scratch, the problem with rehashing is that sometimes it's often harder, also you can write optimised SEO copy for your new site to help increase rankings and traffic 
The rewrite rule above is not bad practice, it will fix the issue with your URL's
However it is good practice to use the rel=canonical tag on your site additionally to prevent any other duplicate content issues.
In short the rel=canonical tag tells Google which URL you wish to use, preventing Google from thinking you have duplicate content if multiple URL's exist for the same page.
I would have them under one domain, pref something that is branded and not specific to any of your services...
Lets call it "www.totalservices.co.uk" (probably taken I know...)
I would then structure the main pages like this:
**www.totalservices.co.uk/driveways **
**www.totalservices.co.uk/driveway-cleaning **
**www.totalservices.co.uk/patios **
www.totalservices.co.uk/artificial-grass
(etc etc)
As the guys have already mentioned, any links you earn or build to your site will count towards your domain authority... Also link juice will flow through your site "helping" you rank.
By splitting the sites into 3 you are going to be increasing your work load by 3.
Plus by having a branded domain name you will likely get a higher click through rate from the google search results - keyword heavy domains look spammy and "typically" are trusted far less IME.
Hope that helps...
Keith
I use Screaming frog for this http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ crawl your site > generate a site map from the menu, call it sitemap.xml and upload it to the root of your website. Log into Webmaster Tools and submit the new sitemap. Job done, hope this helps. Keith
Hi Hannah,
"I think" I will just leave the .com in place...
I can see a lot more .co.uk's in the SERP's for my keywords but perhaps that is just because I live in England and everyone has bought .co.uk's
I have already done the geo targeting in web master tools and claimed a places page etc.
Thanks for your help
Keith
Those pages are very similar so it's probably throwing the duplicate content switch in SEOmoz, you might want to ignore it in this case.
I would add some more text to those pages personally to aid with ranking, you can position the text over the images with CSS.
Brian, if you 301 the example.com to www.example.com that will get rid of the duplicate URL issue server side. (this will resolve your current duplicate content issue).
Additionally I recommend you add the rel=canonical it will prevent other potential duplicate content issues that may arise and is considered good practice to implement.
The tag looks correct, note the space after the domain in quotes:
Are you using a CMS ?
Bryan, you need to redirect the page http://www.mobilemowermedicsinc.com/index.html and point it at http://www.mobilemowermedicsinc.com
To do this create a 301 redirect using a .htaccess file.
Connect to your server and look in the root of your web server for a file called .htaccess - if it does not exist then create one (make sure it's called .htaccess).
Add the following line to the .htaccess file:
301 redirect /index.html http://www.mobilemowermedicsinc.com
This will fix the duplicate content problem on your home page.
Maybe explain to the client it's not going to rank as well without text and has less chance of getting found by searches (generally speaking...).
I get duplicate content flagging as well sometimes, I check the pages manually when it happens.
Brian, it's the same thing just a different method both 301.
No it would not cover the issues site wide only for the home page.
CMS = Content Management System (an example would be Wordpress or Drupal).
You should still do the rel="canonical" site wide (on each page).
All make sense ?
It's the same thing the rewrite is a 301 it's just using Apaches mod_rewrite to achieve it.
You can use either option, after you have setup the 301 you can check the Apache status code, If you have shell access you can tail the access log file.
If you don't have shell access I am sure their are Chrome / Firefox plugins that will verify your 301 code, or you could use Screaming Frog.
FYI: Opensite explorer (mozbar) is reading the PA wrong for Twitter pages.
Unless my personal twitter page has a Domain Auth of 98 
So don't pay too much attention to the PA score on Twitter pages plus it's no follow any way.
To answer the "not showing in site explorer" question, for a start OSE does not crawl every page on the web, it does a good job of trying but SEOmoz don't have the horse power of Google. The more links you have pointing at your Twitter page the more likely Roger will pick it up, but I really would not worry about it.
Also remember that the SEOmoz index only gets updated once a month, so if your page is new that might be why it's not showing yet...
Hope that helps
I recommend you update each page, note the rel canonical tag will be different for each page. And 50 pages should take you less than 15 mins
The short answer is yes, google have reduced the weight of this (apparently) if i was picking a brand I would probably try to include a partial match for one of the head terms without it looking spammy if possible... (like SEOMoz.org).
Spammy keyword match domains (no1-cheap-car-insurance.com) don't look as pro a branded domain IMO.
Obviously this is only one ranking factor out of many...
Hope that helps,
Keith
The short answer is no, there is no issue with targeting the keywords on each site but you will have to put twice the work in... A better option would be to use the same site and build more domain authority to that site and target some different keywords to increase traffic.
Or are you trying to appear on the first SERP page multiple times using different domains?
Sorry I just read this again, the 301 will fix the URL issue site wide.
Hey Davinia,
Check the screenshot attached, as you can see I searched for "medical call center" and in the first organic result it's parsed the domain for that keyword and made the keywords bold in the domain name.
Google's parse domains for for keywords, it's pretty basic stuff... You don't need to have a hypen (dash) in there as a delimiter any more (although this used to help years ago).
I was not simply suggesting building links to the home page will help (which it obviously will if done correctly), what I meant was there is little point building a page that as the same keywords as the domain and then building links to that page.
As the domain in question has the exact match keywords Wendy can use the home page to rank for those keywords without the need for an additional page targeting the keyword "medical call center".
Keith
Hi Dr Pete, Would correcting the current issue with a 301 and adding the rel=canonical tags to each page be the best option? My thought being any future duplicate content issues that may occur (not caused from this issue) would be avoided.
A branded root domain = google.com, nike.com , apple.com etc any domain that uses a brand name and not a dictionary keyword's like "cheap-cars.com" or "cheapcars.com".
SEO's define a root domain as the domain name on it's own with no sub domain etc so google.com not www.google.com
