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Just checked it for you and it looks to be working A-OK

Basically, if you try and type in finalduties.co.uk in your URL bar now, you will see that you're taken to the www.finalduties.co.uk website - just as intended.

You've effectively got 2 versions of your homepage live and ranking.

Using web-sniffer, you can see that both finalduties.co.uk and www.finalduties.co.uk are both giving 200 responses.  Google is effectively seeing both versions as two separate pages.

This can obviously be a problem because it might lead to duplicate content.  What you would want to do is 301 redirect one URL to the other.

Looking at your site architecture and linking, it looks as though you will want to 301 redirect http://finalduties.co.uk to http://www.finalduties.co.uk.  For more info on 301 redirecting, follow this guide.

From the horse's mouth:

How is influence calculated?
Influence is an amalgamation of follower count, tweets, age of the account, and influence of followers. This is a proprietary metric of Followerwonk that is much like a Klout score.

http://www.seomoz.org/help/followerwonk 

In addition:

Influence Score

The first metric is Followerwonk's calculation of influence. A high influence score means that the followers engage with the tweets sent by the bookmaker through favorites, replies and retweets.

http://www.bettingexpert.com/blog/do-bookmakers-buy-fake-twitter-followers 

You're welcome!

Looks like a good site to me.  It's important to check the IP and neighbourhood as getting links from a site that's in a "bad" neighbourhood, ie with sites that are spammy or harmful, can sometimes be detrimental.  Also, you would be able to check whether the webmaster has any other similar sites.  This usually isn't a problem unless they are linking the sites all together (link-wheel), which is against the Google TOS.

There's a really useful tool that was in beta last time I checked that let's you check all this but the name has gone completely out of my head - it let's you check via IP, adsense account, email used to register the domain, affiliate IDs and more.  If anyone can remember it, or if I do, I'll let you know!

In all honesty, I'd completely ignore PR.  It's a completely out-dated metric that you should not rely on for link prospecting.

All those other factors you mention, DA, PA, trust and social integration (think G+ authors) are far more important.  To add to the list, I'd look at how many sites sit on that IP/neighbourhood and check that there isn't anything dodgy going on with any of them.

Forget PR and go with your gut!

As you may (disappointingly) expect, there is no definitive line in the sand on this, and it's very much down to opinion.

In my view, relevancy is a very important factor for links.  To that end, I would rather spend twice the time researching partners and producing content for a related niche with, say, a PA/DA of 45, than a completely unrelated niche with a PA/DA of 60 (figures off the top of my head).

Of course, there would be exceptions.  Should one of the sites I'm working on be included in a YouMoz post here and the post takes off, then there's no doubt the link would help, despite it not being that relevant at all.  Very high authority blogs are worth pursuing - provided, of course, you have something of worth to say.

There's also crossovers between niches.  Say if you were doing work for a dentist - a blog about social media might not strike you as immediately relevant, but it is if you're launching a new health awareness campaign, or a technology blog might be relevant if you're talking about how the business functions.  In this case, I'd say that DA/PA 60 blog would be worth investing that time in - but, once again, only if you have something worthwhile to say and isn't considered a stretch.

Just my two copper on this and would love to see your opinion and others' on the issue.

I'm fairly sure that the Yoast SEO plugin has these features - which is a terrific plugin for Wordpress for other things as well.

Hi Ron, welcome aboard!

I think you should approach this from a content perspective - if each of your testimonials are substantial enough to justify unique pages, then by all means go for it.

There's no particular % or threshold for a minimum number of words you should aim to have, but it might be a good idea to have at least 300+ words of unique content.  This should be easily achievable if you include a history of the company you worked with, some quotes from them on the work you did, along with a general breakdown of the work you undertook and the results that you achieved.  I don't know what services you provide, but it might also make more sense to have individual pages as the work you undertake for one company might be very different to another.

Keeping them separate as well might allow you to keep things organised in the future, should you get a steady stream of satisfied customers - and here's hoping you do!

As for the SEO benefit, there wouldn't be much difference between individual pages or one large one.  A page with more content might rank for more long-tail keywords than several smaller ones (although they may not be particularly attractive keywords), whereas you could argue that a company might be more inclined to share the testimonial page, should it be a bespoke page that is unique to them and only includes them.

Google should recognise these links as the same page, so you shouldn't be penalised for duplicate content.

However, a problem may arise with Google preferring one version of the URL over the other.  I'm presuming you'd want Google to rank and prioritise http://www.domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post/ over http://www.domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post#more-0001.

With URLs like these (and with query strings, such as '-post?query3') it is important to implement a self-referring canonical - ie a canonical tag that points to itself, without the query.  This will tell Google that this is the URL string you would prefer it to rank highest.

You can check out more on canonicals with the SEOMoz guide on them.

In this case, you might want to consider setting up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file.  Here's a quick how-to guide.

Redirect it to a relevant page and it should pass on the strength that it had.  This in turn could help the new page to rank for the term.

If your top ranking page was returning a 404 error then yes, there's absolutely no doubt that this would effect its ranking.

The Googlebot would basically be hitting the page and being repeatedly told that there's nothing there and so would devalue its strength in the SERPs as a result (because what user wants to hit a 404 page?)

That's an ASAP-do-it-yesterday sort of fix!

I'm afraid it will have to be a case of one or the other - either create unique content for the pages or consolidate them into one listing.

You've nailed the reasons already, so I'll offer a bit of advice into making the decision of which option to choose.  I'd look at your analytics data and see how many times those individual product pages have had users entering the website from them, which you could also break down further to see which users have entered via google shopping.

If there's a substantial amount that you believe has led to conversions, then unique content might be the way forward.  If not, then I don't think it losing the other two listings from Google shopping would be much of a sacrifice.

Hi Chris, sorry for not getting back sooner.

I think you can be confident that Google will recognise your brand name if its included in all of your titles.  Case in point, if you look at the SEOMoz site - 'SEOMoz' is repeated on pretty much every page, of which there must be hundreds of thousands.

There's a couple of things I'd take issue with this title.

First of all, as you mentioned, I'd want to include a brand term.

Second, the title is 79 characters - the general consensus is that you should limit your title to 70 characters, as any more might either be abbreviated by Google in the SERPs, or even replaced altogether by Google, which will then pick what it thinks is the most appropriate title. Source.

Third, by having that many keywords, you're diluting the 'strength' you would get from it.  By limiting to 1 or 2 keywords, more of a 'focus', as it were, would be attributed to those keywords.  Furthemore, you could then optimise internal pages of the site with the other keywords, which in turn could help build up overall domain authority if you choose to link-build to those pages.

Fourth, there is a case that this could be seen as over-optimisation by Google.  And we all know what over optimisation might lead to in the future.

I wouldn't worry about what your competition is doing.  The title tag's strength has been weakened over the years, but having a particularly spammy one could do more harm than good in the future.  I would focus on two keywords at the most per page, and as I mentioned earlier, this means you could optimise internal pages for the other term, which in turn could build domain authority.

There's a couple of reasons why people might want to do this (and why I do with all my websites)

First of all, the page/site might be scraped and replicated by a bot, particularly if it's an authority domain.  Having your canonicals in place to begin with will help reduce the chance of your content being seen as duplicate, should a bot scrape your site.

Another reason would be if a website might generate any additional versions of the page through queries, eg www.domain.com/page.php?query2 - Having a self referring canonical will also tell Google that you want to rank the URL without any other queries, which can help prevent any of those queries appearing in the Google index and/or SERPs.

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

You're very welcome Samantha!  Hope everything goes smoothly.

It's not a large enough of a drop for me to think that your site may have been effected by an update.  Regardless, if you have webmaster tools set up (and if not, do so), my first step would be to check for any messages from Google.

After that, I'd analyse your own link-building campaign over the last month or two and maybe compare it against a few competitors and see if there are any differences and short comings.  Open site explorer has recently had its index updated, so it can help in this case.

I'd highly recommend hosting your videos with Wistia.

The reason being is that with Wistia you can use your videos in your rich snippets for the SERPs.  This could increase the click rate of your results, as it will simply take up more real estate on screen.

Wistia is something I've used on sites before for this purpose - it's also what SEOMoz use for their Whiteboard Friday.

Hi Anna

It's not personally the way I'd do it, but it's not my position to tell your client how to do things.  It's slightly clumsy, but there is a way to have both domains and not worry about any duplicate content penalty.

First of all, on the print/advertising site, I would implement rel=canonical tags.  You can learn more about the tags with Moz's guides here and here.

You'll want to point the canonical tag on your print page to the corresponding page on the site you want to rank for.  This will tell Google "We know this site has similar content, but that's OK - we don't want it to rank, rank this one instead"

You can take further preventions by blocking bots from crawling, and therefore indexing your print website.  You can do this by adding text to the robots.txt.  Moz also provides a guide on this.  An example of what you'd want to to include in your txt might be:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

The reason why I say this is clumsy is that it will completely block your site to Google.  This probably serves your clients' purpose, but consider people reading your print advertising and then they type in the URL wrong, or search for the brand on Google.  In both instances, they're going to be met by the web-friendly and SEO optimised domain.

I'd be more inclined to use the same domain (let's just use domain.com here), create the print friendly URLs (domain.com/friendly) and then 301 redirect them.  This would allow users to type in your friendly URL, but still be taken to the right page on the site (eg: domain.com/friendly-not-so-friendly-12).  You can do this through the htaccess file and, you've guessed it, Moz also provides a nifty 301 guide.

Hope this helps!

Tom