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I hope Lewis doesn't mind my replying. You've sort of hit the nail on the head, a nofollow link looks exactly like that first bob marley link yes. That rel="nofollow" is the key.

It's not totally useless though, it does have substantially less value, but a search engine will still follow the link, it just doesn't apply the same metrics and credit it would to a normal link.

A nofollow from a reputable source is worth having, even if it's not ideal.

The link from Ziggy Marley is a nice follow link and should be very helpful.

Tom

Bob Marley Tees and accessories sounds good, but failing that (if there are space issues) Bob Marley Tees would work well.

As for the image, yes put those urls behind appropriate text, it's by far the better option. URLs by themselves pass on only a limited amount of information, the anchor text reinforces that considerably.

Everyone starts somewhere.

You want the anchor text to be your keywords, simple as that. Failing that Zion Rootswear is nice because it could help indicate that it's a brand. Using the url as anchor text is close to being your last option.

Hope that helps.

You will be doubling your workload, essentially starting a brand new website from scratch in the same niche. I feel I need to make that very clear.

You asked about efficiency and that's pretty much the core of what I'm talking about, subdomains are inefficient.

Niche subdirectories are by far the better option.

It's a good idea but I would suggest that you really want that as part of your main domain rather than a subdomain. Any links pointing at it wouldn't be helping the main domain.

Now I don't know enough to suggest a fix, but a quick google found me this:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5e5e79427977d86a&hl=en

I've never used mod_proxy, but apparently you can use it to have a different ip address for a subfolder. I believe it's ProxyPass Directive that you're after.

Hope that helps.

I can't speak for the Panda update, but I do agree with Daniel Deceuster, subdomains have been treat historically as separate sites. So unless things have changed dramatically you will essentially be starting from scratch link and work wise.

Subfolders may not be as neat or compartmentalised as sub-domains, but they are unambiguously under the ownership of the domain in question. Search engines can trust that.

Almost all of this work is about reducing ambiguity for the search engines, and sometimes that is at the cost of elegance.

Whilst I do agree with Daniel Deceuster, subfolders are historically much nicer than subdomains. You're not going to get in trouble for having one on a different IP address. We use a subdomain for our members section (decision was made before my time), customers like that mental partition, and it's not done us any harm.

There is no problem with hosting things on the same server that's true no argument there.

But if you're planning on setting up microsites to boost one main site, and you set them all up on the IP address don't expect them to pass along the same link juice as sites on different IP addresses.

It's also worth pointing out that www.mountain-solutions.net and mountain-solutions.net also resolve separately so may also be seen as duplicates (this is often referred to as a canonical error).

The process is exactly the same as Cocarcea Ion mentioned, just use a 301 redirection in your .htaccess file if you have access to it.

This site may well help: http://www.websitetodos.com/list/websitetodos/webserver/canonicalnameredirect/canonicalredirect-apache

I agree with Wissam Dandan, you definitely need different IP addresses and the other things he listed (not 100% sure on the whois data, but it's likely, better to be safe than sorry). It's an expensive and desperate move, but if you have no other source for links it can be a viable option.

I've used it in very tight niches before and it has helped, but it's a lot of work and a reasonable amount of money you might be better off spending elsewhere.

In addition, if for some reason it's picked up, you lose all that benefit and effort.

I can see what you're getting at, but I agree with Lewis-SEO. Given that meta description is not visible on the page any changes (other than perhaps old school spammy) are just noted and displayed. If you were to change something on-page at the same time it may well get re-assessed, but that's not what we were discussing.

Even if it were to trigger a re-assessment all it would be doing is reviewing that page and putting it in it's "correct" place in the SERPs. Had you not done anything to it, it would still have dropped as soon as it was re-crawled regardless, all initiating a crawl would do is bring forward the inevitable.

Of course if we go on the theory that Google has started using user data; if the meta description changed how the page converted or how people reacted to the page (and you could check your analytics) it could effect your rankings.

Basically if users are now leaving your page in droves because of a misleading meta description that may have a knock on effect.

I have to admit that's exactly what I would do so I can't really suggest anything more exciting. Maybe someone needs to make an app that uses the SEOmoz api for intranet pages?

No problem about the answer, very happy to chip in. Hopefully someone else with a better idea will drop by shortly.

Maybe it's time for some old fashioned shmoozing? Make some contacts with people that might blog about your articles, or refer to them, or simply tweet about them?

The ablemag twitter account is very dry, so maybe inject some personality into it and build some helpful relationships?

I also think it might be interesting to widen your net somewhat, so your target market is people seeking disability news, that's fine, but there are other people who may well blog about some of the things you write even if they aren't your demographic.

It's an odd subject but people interested in body modification or transhumanism may well be interested in some of the things you write. Both of the following articles would serve as a starting point for some linkbait for that demographic:

http://ablemagazine.co.uk/artificial-pancreas-in-pregnancy-promises-fewer-diabetes-deaths-and-abnormalities/

http://ablemagazine.co.uk/pistorius-eyes-2012-with-new-pb/

PS I PM'd you a few ideas, let me know if you didn't get it.

No, and I have to admit I'm curious as to why you would want to. Are you competing with other pages for results or are you just trying to make search as easy as possible.

I should have said that Lewis-SEO offered some really good advice, mine was more a fallback (maybe a little bit before the blackhat option.  ) if that failed.

Yeah you could always reciprocate, then offer a ceasefire when things started to get daft.

Purely by chance (and I really don't put this forward as a serious option) this appeared on hacker news a few minutes ago and I thought it was quite a coincidence.

http://liveatthewitchtrials.blogspot.com/2011/03/search-engine-deoptimization.html

We're in the UK and took down a guy that was sitting on one of our domains (the then system admin had let it lapse) . It was incredibly costly (much more than just buying the domain from them was (but by that point he'd put the directors back up)). Ours was a different situation though, he was just squatting sending traffic to competitors, he wasn't a direct competitor.

Since we're discussing a .co.uk domain you can go to nominet and go through their dispute resolution service.

http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/

With this potentially useful section of the faq

http://www.nominet.org.uk/disputes/drs/faq/#rightstest

I can't offer you too much hope though, any legal stuff is always costly and often not worth the cost.

Absolutely, traffic is nice, but it is still a business.

You should know fairly quickly how things are going. I'd give it about a month.

If you have the time maybe blog about it on here, it would be interesting to see how it goes.

Best of luck to you.

Apologies, I misunderstood "in an image on top of the text." so please ignore me.

I would imagine it's going to be very unlikely that you'll experience a knock then, make the change then sit back and wait for a little to see what happens. Expect a wobble, and don't panic if there is a slight drop at first.

In the unlikely event that the text does make a big difference, it's the easiest thing in the world to just put the old stuff back and your ranking should return with equal speed.

1500 words is a lot to have on the homepage, so you might even find it does your position some good to thin it out a little.

In the long run there really is only one way to find out unfortunately.

I feel the need to clarify something, are you suggesting hiding the existing text behind an image with the new text on it?

I don't think that would be a fantastic idea, it's the sort of thing that can get a site in trouble.