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Can't you make your own private index in Copyscape and compare content against just that?

If you're comparing a lot of pages 1to1 though, I guess that would be tedious.

Compare and merge feature in Word? Not really going to work how I suspect you want though.

Yeah, private copyscape index if it's only a few pieces.

I assume you're looking for one that would query their SERPs?

No longer exists The old SOAP API doesn't allow you to sign up and there's nothing to replace it.

I looked for the same thing recently and was a bit disappointed there was nothing.

Are you asking for the code to redirect index.html to / ?

This should work (put the whole thing in your .htaccess and replace example with your site)

RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

However, you should also change your internal links to point to the redirected version (/) and not /index.html

Hah! Well, yeah, effectively.

As I say the linkscape crawl isn't as effective/deep as Google's so you'll need a couple of higher profile links to get picked up.

Certainly getting more good links can't hurt

I've got a six pack in real life.

Shame it's 2 litre (70oz) bottles. Fat fat.

Anyway, yeah, I only see 6 packs now too. Sites that had 12, 10 and 8 are all reduced to 6 when I search.

Fairly happy with that to be honest and it was too much real estate.

UK for reference.

is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url.

No. You'll end up with a mess of a site. See - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes?

As stated, no that wouldn't solve it, but this is the sort of thing canonicalization is for. If you can get to product A via site/colour/product-a and site/brand/product-a then the canonical tag is to tell search engines that both of these pages are the same and then you state which is the 'official' one. Same situation if you had site/brand/product-a?affiliate-id=12345.

Is there a better way to handle this?

Must be I assume that each page is it's own entry in your CMS, rather than there being an identical entry for each path into it. As you said each page should reference itself on the desired absolute URL (and not the one displayed), how you determine what that is and impliment it site wide though will depend on your CMS and require a bit of planning.

Depends how competitive, but around 3 days if you're lucky and the search matches

Usually I only see our stories in there for 1 or 2 days tops, but then again smaller and smaller sites run with the story and our results get replaced with the same story but more recent updates.

If you become the authority on that story (ie, lots of links and references) I would imagine you could stay in there for longer, but alas, never seen it.

Seems SEOmoz is adding an unnecessary http at the start of both our links

Actually a pretty neat feature of the Q&A forum is that you can mark answers as helpful (which highlights the post in green and gives the person a shiny 3 MozPoints).

There should be a text link saying something like 'This answered my question' with a tick at the bottom of their posts which you can click (at least I think that's how to mark them, I've not asked a question yet :D)

Ha ha, maybe

I think it's something infinitely less planned out and they simply rushed this change out the door without understanding fully what it would do to the SERPs.

Although I do think you're right that in a few months (in what will be claimed to be a second Panda sweep) that things will go back and only the very worst offenders will stay penalised.

Very reasonable observation.

I think that some of the exclusive rank tracking software will continue to operate though, so won't really affect me.

You mean you have the links hidden using js and clicking 'more' expands the hidden content section to reveal the links?

While search engines can execute some js the list of links is effectively always expanded to the bots.

The only issue would be if the hidden section didn't actually load until the 'more' button was clicked (maybe if you instead used ajax or something) then they'd not be able to see the links.

Only thing to really worry about is if you end up having hundreds of links on the page.

For a reasonable facsimilie of what bots see you can put the page into - http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php - and see what links it can pull out.

Ha ha. Brilliant.

I would like to see Whiteboard Fridays go back to this format. The more thumping horror-techno and flickering images the better!

As Eric and Saibose have said, this is a duplicate page issue which needs to be resolved using a redirect. You also need to redirect non-www to www.

However it would depend what kind of server you have as to how to fix it

If you have a Linux server use .htaccess and put this in

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^aboutaburningfire.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you have a Windows server then I dunno how to change it in IIS, your host should be able to help (NB: You're probably on a Linux server :D)

I don't know. I very much like the idea and to couple it with HTML5 elements, like

<header>and

<footer>, but (although I've not read everything extensively) it doesn't seen to cover every kind of website (specifically the gambling ones I work on).

There is a casino tag, but that's for a location rather than a site. I could mark up the promos as an offer, but that's not really what it's for. I could mark them up as articles, but again it's not a great fit either. And again same with product.

I really only think it'll be useful for categorizing pages which may be shown on differing SERPs pages. Otherwise it doesn't seem to be a particularly good idea to use it as a big ranking factor when not all sites can use it.

Certain elements like 'mainContentOfPage' and 'mainImageOfPage' and 'signifcantLinks' may count (and are the sort of thing all sites can impliment) but for every tag to carry a weight... I'm not sure.

Of course I may just be trying to convince myself of this as implimenting these tags on dozens of sites is not going to be fun.

</footer>

</header>

Thumbs up and helpful answers always appreciated

I think it's a good idea and may open up some content syndication options that were discounted before (as per Dunamis' post) however I've not see the rel tag do much for me.

Tagging links to SM sites as rel="me" has not helped those pages get into the SERPs for my brand (though I've not been super consistent with doing it), rel="nofollow" obviously had the rug pulled from under it a while ago and I even once got carried away and tried linking language sites together with rel="alternate" lang="CC" but didn't get the uplift in other language version sites I hoped (though it was a bit of a long shot to begin with).

I'm just wondering how much value this is going to have. I still like it in principal and will attempt to use it where I can.

Oh, I've seen it being marketed as such, I just don't think it will ever get the traction required to be treated as a gTLD by search engines.

It's all just marketing spiel - http://www.cointernet.co/frequently-asked-questions/general-co-faqs#q5

I'll do a search but I don't think I'm wrong (though have been proven otherwise before :D).

Have you tried adding &pws=0 to the end of any search query. Does that make a difference?

Even though you're logged out, Google knows

Then I shall eat my words and go back to finishing that article