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How established is your site, how long have you been working on it?

If it's fairly established and older I wouldn't expect a huge amount of change if you were to cut your content somewhat (500-700 is still a lot of words on the page), you might experience a bit of a wobble as google gets used to things, but it shouldn't make a huge difference.

Worst case scenario you can put the old text back and pretend that nothing ever happened.

If you change things and it does make a significant difference it would be interesting to hear about it.

You might want to experiment with your new text first using some sort of A\B testing. That way you'll preserve your current rankings, and test your new text to see if it's going to improve your situation. It's worthwhile testing first before making the switch.

At the most basic end of the spectrum how you have Google website optimizer:

http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

but there are some great paid for options out there that do an excellent job.

I've suggested using robots.txt in the other question you've posted and I think the same applies here. Do any non-duplicate pages appear in the /embed/ or /email/ directories?

If you use just used robots.txt to block the byrating directory that would probably be simplest. SEOmoz will still flag the pages up as errors but this is an intentional use to reduce duplicate content.

Well you could limit things with robots.txt instead, but that's a bit of a blanket block. It would probably be better than nofollow though.

Using noindex and nofollow in conjunction would also likely be better than just nofollow by itself. It's a long way from the elegance and usefulness of rel="canonical" but it is easier.

Your better off using rel="canonical" to solve the problem if you can:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

It's potentially more difficult to arrange than the nofollows but it was put in place to resolve exactly this sort of problem.

The microsites are a nice idea and could work well in the long run, but you'd be fragmenting your efforts, so your main domain would probably suffer due to diminished updates and attention.

I'd stick with the single domain and as long as the niches are related continue to build on that.

I work on a set of sites that were split from a whole and they are a lot more work than if they were just one site together.

Tom

Okay take this with a pinch of salt because this is quite old information and things do change quickly in this business. Yahoo used to value pages over domains, so if you had the 'best' page on a subject that is what would count, the information on the domain itself was largely irrelevant, and this may still be the case. Google has a more holistic approach, considering the domain as a whole.

This may be what is causing the difference. As Andy says they all have their own algorithms and ways of judging a site, and this is just a symptom of that.

It's not really a reason to worry though Google is still the largest player (certainly in the West and especially the EU) and exposure on there will likely help push your rankings on the other search engines up as well over time.

Lets face it, if you're doing well in Google you're ahead of the game, you've done well. For the time being just keep doing what you're doing.

If that's the case I wouldn't worry about it, if things change and you start blogging maybe use it there but like you say it's not worth worrying about.

Tom

I would say that it depends on how content rich your site is going to be, if it's likely you're going to be the victim of scrapers use the absolute URLs. Most scrapers will of course try to remove any links you put in, but not all will and it's better for you if they refer back to the site where the content was originally appearing.

I'm going to have to give you a tenuous link here because I cannot find where I originally read it, but point 13 on this page (about an SEOmoz masterclass in bulgaria of all things):

http://koosjan.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/37-takeaways-from-seomoz-master-class-in-bulgaria-by-paris-childress/

Ah okay and in chapter 4 of the beginners guide:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development

I've had scrapers recently start paying attention to one of my sites, and it's good to see the absolute links appearing in there. It's not going to pass over much juice or authority, but it will help avoid duplicate content issues.

Edit: And Mike already beat me to it.

We've been running wordpress with the all-in-one-seo plugin up until now, but since looking at the Yoast plugin suggested here I've switched. Great suggestion.

Wordpress is very easy to get up and running, and can be very easily optimised, but if you want things to be "just so" it can be complicated getting it just how you want it. That said the volume of themes and plugins available make life very easy if you are willing to compromise. Just remember to keep it updated.

I am about to start playing with MODx which is really the other end of the spectrum, very customisable but with limited support compared to other CMS's. It looks clean and easy to optimise, but it lacks a lot of the bells and whistles that you can take for granted in other CMS's, simply because it's not as mature. They can probably be designed in, but you'll have to do the groundwork.

It really depends on what you're after.

Links are what you want in SEO, they are probably the strongest ranking factor (at least for the time being), but the easiest way to get those is to visible create content that people want to create links around. This is the reason that content is so important.

If you are doing all your linkbuilding manually, by yourself, you have a long road ahead of you.

Google has indexed your page, so it's been crawled but it only has the one link pointing at it and as I said that's not providing any particular context.

I don't think that anyone is going to disagree with the concept that knowing more about SEO is an advantage, but it's not a game winner.

Your situation will all be solved by sorting out that slider and getting some more links with the right anchor text pointing at KennethLewis, specifically at the page we're discussing.

Yes, maybe I was a little blunt there, sorry about that, it wasn't how I intended it.

Nothing wrong with a sales page as the front page if your clients are mostly direct and you expect that to remain the case.

With that said if they have gone to the trouble of typing in your URL, they are expressing quite a lot of interest already, so it's unlikely that they'll begrudge clicking through to a sales page if you make it an obvious and desirable option.

It's a bit tricky to give you anything firm, because in very broad terms these things are down to the volume of links pointing at a site, and both the sites in question are low on links (if you were to get a few reasonable external links pointing at KennethLewis.com I think you'd see a rapid change). But going on the data we have I think this is a mix of site structure, content and page title.

Breema has reasonable content relevant to the query you've mentioned on the front page. It's in plain text there is really no messing around, it's nice and simple. On the other hand the page on KennethLewis is somewhat buried behind a slider containing none of your quoted keywords (and it's the last slide as well).

Moving on to the titles Search engines will read in the region of 70 characters of your title, anything more than that and you are likely to be losing the later words in it. In the case of the page Google is ranking the word "marketing" gets cut off halfway. Breema on the other hand has Georgia mentioned twice and Internet Marketing all covered within those 70 characters and this is going to have an impact.

If you were to create even a few text links to that page from other pages on the site using your quoted keywords I think you would see an improvement, it would be even better if you got the text on your slider sorted, right now it's all about cars, hunger and statistics rather than internet marketing.

Links are the key, get a few reasonable external links with the right anchor text and you'll see some results.

Hope that helps.

I had a look on open site explorer, and you're right more links would help a lot, the juice pointing at the page is fairly diluted, facebook and twitter would both be nofollow links as are some of the external links pointing at it. The internal links aren't really well placed for promoting it either, you have a link from :

http://gyumolcstarhely.hu/tudasbazis/

but that's a page with an enormous number of links on it, so any credit passed down to it would be minimal. The other internal links seem to place it at the bottom of the page under "ezen" which doesn't really give it a huge advantage in indicating what the page is about (I doubt it's a factor here).

If you were to get some external links to point directly at it (or maybe just from the front page of your site), I'm sure it would start appearing.

Edit: Just spotted something else, there is a severe drop in pagerank from the front page of the site to that page mentioned above, which does make me wonder if there is a problem with it. Is the page you're asking about new? Have you tried posting any other new pages on there? How are they ranking?

This is pretty much an opinion question, I was under the impression that footer links had been devalued almost to the point of uselessness, and if they weren't going to be of any real use to the users of the site why bother.

I was speaking to a web developer though whose opinion I do largely trust who remains very pro footer links, and I was wondering what everyone else thought.

Am I being too dismissive, or are footer links on the way out?

I bought the expired domain of a competitor a year or so ago and redirected it to one of our main domains and it's done us fairly well. Unfortunately they left quite a few unhappy customers so there has been a bit of PR firefighting to do, but overall it's positive. If I were going to do it again I would have done a lot more research, I was just sloppy.

MaryAnneG is absolutely right, you need to do a lot of research before you buy one, there are plenty of people out there artifically making their domains look much better than they are.

I am fairly sure that Pagerank is now constantly updated, it may well be that they only adjust the visible pagerank every three months though.

I can only say this next bit speculatively because I don't have the data (I would love to see the periods and numbers for the site above), but the cap itself might be a somewhat fluid idea, pages may be retained in the index as they are discovered but get pared back to their "hard cap" periodically.

I think it could be down to an indexation cap. I know Pagerank is not the force it once was but it does play a role in the number of pages google retains in it's index (if they regularly cull sites back to their cap that might explain the fluctuation, or maybe you fluctuate between two thresholds).

Matt Cutts made some comments which Rand broke down into bitesize chunks in the SEOmoz blog to that effect:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-illustrated-guide-to-matt-cutts-comments-on-crawling-indexation

Your Pagerank is low, and without trawling through your site I don't know about duplicate content, but this could well be it. The fix is the same as an awful lot of SEO problems, more, better links.

I feel bad because someone posted this yesterday and I have no idea who it was:

http://www.vervesearch.com/blog/seo/how-to-optimise-for-google-products/

I will have to go back and find out. Credit where it's due and all.

Edit: It was of course Mr Rand Fishkin on Twitter @randfish.