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Hi there

If you're intending to rank both pages, then you will need to create unique content for both of them. Replicating or syndicating the content would severely hamper your ability to rank either of the pages.

If you want to include the content for the user but do not necessarily want to rank the page, you have a couple of options.  You could a rel canonical tag to the new page that points to the old domain - this effectively tells Google to treat the old URL as the original and not to rank the duplicate content.

Alternatively, you could "noindex" one of the pages by adding this tag to the head section of your HTML:  _-_again, this tells Google not to index this version of the page with the duplicate content.

You can learn more about canonicals and noindexing with these two handy SEOMoz guides:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

Hope this helps.

RankCheckerAce and Rankerizer are two great free options. You can set up different campaigns and URLs to separate sites to track.  Both also come with a built in graph system.

RankCheckerAce goes up to 1000 keywords and 10 URLs for the free version, giving a lot of space to try out before you upgrade.

If the content is syndicated throughout the network, then this could become a problem.  It would effectively make it a hub for duplicate content.

However, if each website is kept unique and on their own subject, providing unique and quality content, then it should be OK.  There could be an issue with the sites interlinking with dofollow links, but this may be overlooked.

However, as you have rightly pointed out, you would not necessarily get the "C-Block" diversity by writing across the network and if all the sites sat on the same server/IP address, if just one site was penalised manually by Google, you could expect the rest to follow like dominoes.

I'd reiterate something I and others have said before, though, in saying that you shouldn't be blogging for SEO - you should be blogging to reach an audience.  If these networks help you achieve just that and on a big scale, then you should definitely go for it.  If you have concerns about the SEO, which is a bit debatable I think, then make the links to your site in your posts nofollow, link to your social networks instead, or don't put any in at all if your confident that users will be able to find you by other means.

Hope this helps.

This may have something to do with Google's recent change to show results as country-specific by default, rather than whichever TLD you use (.co.uk, .de, .fr etc).

This is causing a few rank checkers to throw off a few wild results. I've seen all the major ones be affected by this.

If you can't recreate the results and traffic is normal, don't worry too much, as the software people will be making fixes soon.

FYI - if you want to get round Google's change and still get specific results from a specific country, you can add:

&gl=us
&gl=uk
&gl=fr etc.

To the end of your query string. Replace the country code with whichever you need.

Great advice here from Marcus.

To expand on his point on hosting, you should see if Vidahost can provide what you need - I've found them to be very reliable and affordable for some blogs. Good customer service as well.

Hi Daniel

There could be some SEO value to gain from 301 redirecting this domain.

Does the keyword.com.es site already rank in Google?  If so, then this would be another reason to redirect, as people clicking it in Google will obviously go to your website.

Does the keyword.com.es site have links pointing to it?  You should use opensiteexplorer.org to check this in detail.  It is important to check that the website has quality links on it and not spammy backlinks - otherwise, you might harm your website by redirecting the keyword.com.es domain.

If the keyword.com.es site has quality backlinks (no matter how many) and is relevant to your other website, then a 301 redirect will pass on around 90% of its SEO value, or 'juice' to your new website.

Hope this helps and I'll happily answer any other questions you have!

Tom

Hi Johan

Have you implemented the 301s regardless? It may take time, but there should be no reason for the link equity to inevtiably pass to the new URLs and for Google to give the new URLs the same credit, and possibly ranking, as before.

If the redirections are in place and rankings don't recover in, say, a month, then the course of action would be to optimise the new URLs as you would have done previously - making sure the on-page is all in order and then earning high quality links.

There's no magic solution to implementing 301s at a later stage and it works on the same SEO principles as before, but so long as the 301s are now in place then Google should (emphasis on should) eventually give your new URLs the strength the previous URLs had and hopefully promote it in the rankings.

Hi Robert

I think the problem with your portfolio is that there is not enough unique content on the page that Google can read.  Let's look at these two examples:

http://www.webworld.no/referanser/nordstrand-kiropraktorklinikk_14/#topp_
http://www.webworld.no/referanser/r%C3%B8d-eiendom_13/#topp_

Remember, Google doesn't "see" the images as we seem them, so for all intents and purposes it will be seeing these two pages as nearly identical, hence a potential duplicate content issue.  You can check how your page looks in Google's eyes with this SEO Browser.

As for the webworld.no & www.webworld.no issue, what's basically happening is that both URLs are being indexed, therefore they are technically duplicates.  For homepages, I recommend 301 redirecting one of the URLs to the other.  Decide how you'd like your homepage to be seen and then redirect the old URL to the new one.  SEOMoz also provides this handy redirection guide.

Hope this helps you.

If you use your company G+ URL in the author tag, you will not see any benefit.  The image won't appear in the SERPs and Google has been quite explicit in saying they want the author tag to be for real people and won't pass any of its benefits (ie, future author rank) on to a corporate page.

My inclination is to say: use both G+ accounts to their fullest.  Both promote it, use your profile for a rel=author markup, use the company page for a rel=publisher markup.  My inkling is that if a page is linked to an active, engaging G+ company page via rel=publisher, then at some point in the future that will make the website appear more authorative.  You'll only get the thumbnail in the SERPs if you use your personal profile, but I'd definitely share on both accounts (or make the company share first and then you share from that same post).

If the traffic itself has not increased since you've reached page 1, then it's likely to be a matter concerning search volume and SERP positioning.

Now, if we take one of your keywords and say it's 250 searches per month - what sort of traffic can you expect from page 1? Well, it can be a wide range.  A combination of this case study and this case study shows that even if you rank on page 1, people in position 5 may only get between 4-15% of the click through rate. Even at the top estimate, that would mean an increase of roughly 37 extra clicks and visitors per month. I have no idea what your industry is, but even a very high conversion rate would struggle to show any significant increase in conversions there.

Then there's the whole matter of local search.  As you'll know doubt be aware, an increasing amount of local search terms start to list Google Map/Local listings above the fold, of which there could be up to 8-10 listings.  This could affect click-through rate even further.

I feel for you because in many ways local campaigns are even tougher than national ones.  If you still don't see any marked improvements in your traffic and conversions, I'd start keyword research again and look at some other product related terms.  When doing this, however, I would Google the search term itself and see what the SERPs look like - is there a lot of PPC competition for the term? Are there Google+ listings? A lack of PPC competition might open up an opportunity there, while no Google map listings would probably mean a higher click-through rate for getting on page 1 (and perhaps an opportunity to get your company listed there yourself).

Hope this helps in some way, might not be exactly what you want to hear, but hopefully provides you with a decent point of view.

Hi Richard

My advice would be not to worry about it too much, which is based on what John Mueller of Google said in 2011: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitemaps-priority-13936.html Some analysis and comments in that article too.

If everything was set to 100%, then it would negate any effect the protocol would have, so I'd avoid this.

I'd have your more important pages more heavily weighted, such as product pages, sale pages etc, in addition to having these pages higher in the sitemap.  This might give a slight nudge to Google on which pages to crawl first.  If you have a regularly updating page as well, this might be a high priority candidate.

But all in all, I wouldn't worry about using it too much.  The reason that there's not many more articles on it is that there's not really much to say about it - a sitemap alone will suffice.

Hope this helps!

Hi Amar

I would definitely advise against it - if you have pages with similar content, you could fall foul of the Google Panda algorithm and be penalised for having duplicate content.

I would highly recommend producing unique content for each product page, if you intend to rank each one.  Obviously some things might not be changeable, such as product specifications.  If you keep these on the page, you must add some additional content that will show Google that the page is unique.  Otherwise, Panda may strike.

The alternative is to rank a content hub or category page that links to all of these pages instead, rather than trying to rank the individual pages themselves.

Hope this helps.

I don't see how noindexing pages would help with regards to a Panda recovery if you're already penalised.

Once the penalty is in place, my understanding is that it will remain so until all offending pages have been removed or changed to unique content.  Therefore, noindexing would not work - particularly if that page is accessible via an HTML/XML sitemap or a site navigation system.  Even then, I would presume that Google will have the URL logged and if it remained as is, any penalty removable would not be forthcoming.

Noindexing pages that has duplicate content but hasn't been penalised yet would probably prevent (or rather postpone) any penalty - although I'd still rather avoid the issue outright where possible.  Once a penalty is in place, however, I'm pretty sure it will remain until removed, even if noindexed.

Hi there

You just need to add the unicode of the Emoji into your HTML.  You can find the unicodes for each emoji in the list here: http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode, plus how they'll look on each device.

If you're running WordPress there's a couple of plugins that can do this for you as well, such as Hello Emoji and Open Source Emoji.

Just don't go overboard with them.  Part of me fears Google will suck the fun right out of this and block Emoji's from appearing in the SERPs if lots of people jump on the bandwagon.  Hope not, but possible.  Also consider that not every visitor on every device might be able to see the emoji properly, which could put people off.

With all that said, I love emojis. 'U+1F60D'

As you say Jason it's almost impossible to say when it will rank without knowing your keywords, competition, content links etc.

But in terms of a period of time to wait before Google ranks new sites, there isn't any threshold for this.  Quite the opposite actually - there is a freshness factor in Google's algorithm so a new site could feasibly benefit from inflated rankings straight away.

Do things the right way and the rankings will follow, but by all means start doing them now - Google won't limit your progress based on your domain age.

If you do this - do it for the reader, not Google.

If the article has been refreshed with some great value and you think your audience would benefit from seeing it again, then I would update the date.  However, if you're trying to game Google by making out that the content/URL is new and fresh (by trying to take advantage of its freshness algorithm), not only would that be frowned upon, but I think I'm right in saying Google has clamped down on that effectiveness quite a lot since 2013.

That's right Ricky - provided the redirect is a 301 and remains in place, the strength of the previous domain will pass through. It's accepted that a little of the power is lost with a redirect, but certainly over 90% of the strength is passed.

Might be an idea to 301i the wellington-florida-homes.com domain too - unless you're leaving it behind because it has a spammy link profile, as those will pass on as well as any strength.

I can't give you any quantifiable data I'm afraid but all I can say is that "they work" from my experience - both for the local map/carousel listing and for the normal vertical search.

One thing that I have seen is that they are more successful when you a) make every citation exactly the same (address, number etc) and b) when you include those details on your website, preferably sitewide in a footer or header.

It's pretty much Google's way of seeing if you're a local authority - looks for your address and phone on your site, looks for that same stuff on places on yelp, yell, qype etc. The more of those citations you have, the better really.

I've yet to see citations like that have a negative effect, providing all of the sites are reputable and legit. That's why I'm slightly hesitant about some of those local/business specific directories - are some of those really "authority" websites? But for citations, it's all good and you don't really have anything to lose.

Plus you throw in the fact that some people do start their searches on some of those sites, particularly yelp, and all of a sudden having a listing there is a decent traffic channel itself.  I've seen a few sites where some of the top referrers are these citation sites.

Just make sure you really are who and where you say you are. If it's virtual offices/VOIP phone numbers, you're gonna have a bad time. Wouldn't surprise me if Google can already detect these automatically.

Would make for a good case study if done en masse for sure.

Hi Alex

From my own tests and experiments, I'm confident that a 301 redirect passes on the penalty.  Usually within 2-3 weeks of redirecting a penalised domain/URL to a fresh one, the new URL lost its rankings.  With that in mind, I would not recommend that you do this.

April last year would coincide with the first Penguin refresh, so I think you're right in your penalty diagnosis there.  However, when you talk about the duplicate category URL - are both URLs indexed by Google? And are both of them showing the same content?

If so, there is a good chance that you might be under a Panda algorithmic penalty as well.  The duplicate content issue would also be effecting the rankings of both URLs and could, potentially, be affecting the entire site.

My recommendation would be to deindex the old, penalised URL by adding  to the tag of the page (or blocking it through the robots.txt file.  I would then concentrate on ranking the other URL in a safe way.  By doing that, you may be able to recover the lost rankings with the new URL, without worrying about Panda or Penguin.

If you have similar duplicate URLs for other categories, I'd highly recommend that you do the same and noindex one version of them.  If you're confident no other URL has a penalty attributed to it, you could also 301 redirect one of the URLs to the other.

Hope this helps and apologies if I've covered things here you're familiar with - just wanted to check!

Hi Bob

I'm not saying do this and you may get in a wee bit of trouble, but this was literally the first thing that popped into my head after looking at your site.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but you look like the small business champion. The help that a lot of UK businesses need right now (bear with me, I'm building rhetoric!). With that in mind, why don't you get your brand out there...and stick it to the big guys?

Look at all those big brands not paying tax in the UK? Look at all those corps and bankers getting million pound bonuses while our public service falters?

Smack 'em!

Use your cheap printing, make a bunch of flyers and plaster them all over the place. On the walls of the banks, on the London underground, at the worst effected areas of the UK.

Print your images and messaging on multiple sheets to complete cover them up. Showcase how cheap you are to print and how you're taking things back for the beaten down bloke on the street.

Film it, get people to blog about it, ask people to connect to you on Twitter with suggestions on who/where/how you should target next.

Be the printing company this country needs!

This is slightly farcical (and slightly illegal), but do you see how it could work?  The viral spread across social media creating a buzz around the campaign.  Reaching out to the masses of people and bloggers out there who are championing this cause and speaking out for them, giving them a voice, appealing to your prospective client base? Filming it so you have a marketable bit of content to post, share and spread?

PR, links and buzz would follow. Hey, so might a knock on the door by the old bill, but I won't tell them if you won't!

Hope you've got that Friday Feeling!