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It all depends on server types.  Apache servers fetch the same exact page regardless of case, where as a IIS-Microsoft server considers the upper case and lower case pages to be different. You have an Apache server, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.  If you ever consider switching servers, though, you will want to take a look at your URL's.

OK, now you don't want some very aggressive call to action sentence. I'd try to avoid words like "best", "leading" etc. Try to describe what your website offers in a sentence.

Valuable content. That is it. Allow ONE link to their site and keep other links that are actually helpful. Use CopyScape do check plagiarizing. But to be blunt guest bloggers are only the quality you look for. I suggest looking for other sites where they have published content and figure out if they are worth the content. You should know when you have a REAL guest blogger or just another spammer with spun content.

Hi Andy, here you go: www.consumerbase.com/robots.txt I know we want to block the .html files, but I am unsure about the other folders. I guess I would need to know for certain from my programmers that none of our content is in there?

Hmm, Well first off a 301 is preferred over a canonical when dealing with cross domains. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA I doubt 1 backlink is the cause of this. I think maybe you have the canonical set-up incorrectly? I'd go the 301 route and see what happens.

Have you seen a corresponding drop-off in the ListFinder pages over that time. If the canonical is kicking in, you should see some of those pages fall out as more ConsumerBase pages kick in. Is there a reason your canonical'ing from the more indexed site to the less indexed one. It could be a mixed signal if Google things that ListFinder is a more powerful or authoritative site. Cross-domain can get tricky fast. Unfortunately, beyond NOINDEX'ing, it's about your best option, and certainly one of your safest. It's really hard to predict what the combo of cross-domain canonical plus link would do. From a dupe content standpoint, it's risk free. From the standpoint of creating 80K links from one of your sites to another of your sites, it's a little risky (don't want to look like a link network). Since you're only talking two sites, though, it's probably not a huge issue, especially with the canonical already in place. Google interprets cross-domain canonical heavily, so it can be a little hard to predict and control. Interestingly, the ConsumerBase site has higher Domain Authority, but the page you provided has lower Page Authority than its "sister" page. Might be a result of your internal linking structure giving more power to the ListFinder pages.

I'm with Highland on this one.  Once your new sites are up and running submit them via GWT to ensure that they get found. 301 for now.

Is there anything I can do to speed up the process? I noticed that since adding the tag yesterday (I know it is still extremely early), Google has continued to index more of these pages on Website B.

I was literally about to post the same question, I've seen a fair few competitor sties doing this, not wanting to taint the design of the page, so they just add a keyword stuffed doc with <--more--> tag in the footer. Black, grey or white on this one? I have a client that has insisted on design block heavy site which makes it very difficult to optimize for.....adding something like this could be very useful.

I do not think it will make any difference. The times where I am leveraging canonicals are for example when you have paginated category pages. But when doing ppc landers, I just noindex them.

You can certainly edit an existing 301 redirect to point to a new location, Zora. Obviously you want to do this as little as possible, but there's nothing against doing it to to fix the otherwise ridiculously long redirect chain. The "permanent" part of a 301 is the fact that it tells the search engine to consider that the original URL's page will never be needed again and only keep track of the new URL. Whereas a 302 temporary redirect says "the original page will be coming back at some point, so keep it in the index". Paul

The Alert thing is great!  I use it when we write new content (along with CopyScape after a week or so) just so I can make sure I'm outranking it.  lol

Let's deal with 2nd question first re changing 301s. As I mentioned in your more recent question, the solution is to go back to the original redirect and rewrite it to go to the new correct location. As long as you still control the original redirects, (which is why you'll want to maintain your old domain for at least 180 days, preferably permanently) there's almost never a reason to chain redirects together like that. Always better to rewrite the original to the new location. In addition to a number of technical benefits, it makes those redirects VASTLY easier to maintain. As for a solid redirect plan - yes at its most basic it's a matter of ensuring you've catalogued ALL the old pages and written good redirects to the new pages. But there's plenty more to do if you want the transition to go really smoothly! For example - as in the info above, you'll also want to check the old site for existing redirects and make sure they get included and rewritten as one-hop redirects to the new page. Perfect example of this: original site had several vanity short URLS redirecting to landing pages. E.g. www.site.com/sale was redirected to www.site.com/category/colour/somereallylongurl You not only want to redirect the /somreallylongurl page to it's new equivalent, you need to make sure you've also changed the /sale redirect to point directly to the new page as well (not having to go through /somereallylonurl to get there). Really look for these - there are often more of them than you think. You'll want a quality assurance plan in place to test as many of the redirects as possible just as soon as the new site is live. One misplaced or forgotten "?" in a RegEx can completely foul things up. This is a daunting task, but it's essential to catch as many mistakes as possible before the search crawlers index the goofs (or your users run into them!). You'll probably want to divide this task amongst a group of testers. Watch especially for whether redirects resolve whether the address of a page ends with a "/" or not. You'll also want a solid plan for how to ensure the search engines find and index those redirects and the new pages quickly. This is sometimes done by placing the old sitemap on the new site for at least a few days so that the search engine spiders are forced through the redirects for all the pages. Not everyone agrees with this approach, so you may want to research it further. Here are several additional things you will absolutely need to do in Webmaster Tools. As soon as the new site is live, set up and verify a new Webmaster Tools account for Bing and Google. (You can even do this in advance using DNS verification method or if there's a placeholder page live at the new URL before the move) As soon as the new site is live, use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools to point to the new domain. Use the  "Fetch as Google" in Google Webmaster Tools to find and submit a series of pages in different sections of the new site. This step helps the engines find and start indexing your new pages faster. Note that in Google, you'll want to request "Submit URL and linked pages". You can do 10 of these a month, so pick pages from different sections of your site for best effect. Use the  "Fetch as Bingbot" in Bing Webmaster Tools to to do the same thing you did in GWT above. Bing allows you to do 10 of these per day. and a total of 50/month. Use all of them, again from different sections of your site. You'll also want to make certain you have an effective robots.txt file in place to ensure the search engine crawlers aren't wasting their crawl budget on useless pages. Here's something else to think about. Can you get the owners of the sites that are giving you your most valuable incoming links to update their links to point directly to the new equivalent URLs? Doing this for even 10% of your top links has multiple benefits. The engines will find your new pages faster via the authoritative links, and those links won't lose any "juice" by having to pass through a 301. As mentioned in my first reply, now would also be a really good time to get a few new links to the new site from some strong external pages. You also need a solid plan for what tools you will use to monitor for missing/broken redirects and how you'll fix them quickly. Webmaster tools to watch for new 404s from incoming links Google Analytics (Make damn sure you have your tracking code included on your 404 page - many sites miss this so don't even see all the 404 hits). Open Site Explorer as a backup to Webmaster Tools for spotting broken incoming links Screaming Frog for an internal link scan to make sure you didn't create or inherit any broken links yourself accidentally When will you scan? Who will rewrite the .htaccess if fixes needed? (You don't want multiple people in there messing about). Who's responsible for updating the sitemap.xml file to the new one after a couple of days and resubmitting it to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools? Who will check GWT's Sitemap Details page to ensure the majority of the site is getting crawled and indexed, and will know what to do if it's not? Who will follow up with a search of the engines in several months to see if any of your old site URLs are still indexed and insure redirects are in placer for them as well? The whole point to all these steps is to use every method at your disposal to insure both Google and Bing fully understand the relationship between the old & new site, and to push them to transfer the old site's authority, rankings and traffic to the new site as quickly and efficiently as possible. And even though Bing may send less traffic, you still can't afford to throw it away, so you'll need to monitor it's own Webmaster Tools as well as Google's. Wow - I know that's a helluva load to think about so be sure to ask if there's stuff I haven't made clear enough. Paul P.S. The last thing is to accept that things will likely be a wild ride in the SERPs and traffic for at least two to three weeks after the move. Don't be tempted to overreact and start making large changes too soon if things look wonky at first. The only exception is 404s - fix those as soon as you detect them.

Totally agree with Casey. Otherwise everyone that offers something for free would be penalized and we have an empty Internet. Imagine searching for a free e-book on SEO and Google says: "Sorry, but free is a spammy word so I won't show you any results.". That would be hilarious wouldn't it? Do what Casey mentioned and you should be fine. Some free advice.. kind regards Jarno

Hi Zora, In my experience, it is easier to rank well for a subfolder than it is for a subdomain. With a subdomain, you are mostly leaving it to rank for itself, and it will need almost as much SEO as your root domain. With a subfolder, it seems that more link juice is passed down the line from the root, so it is much easier to rank. Again - this is just from my experience. I would say that you should not question why you have suddenly jumped onto page 1, though I suspect it is because you have moved the contents to a subfoler. I would set up a 301 from the subdomain and fingers crossed Google will rank your subfolder in place of the subdomain at it's next crawl. Cheers Matt

When searching a brand name that brand's Google+ page has been known to show. If you are looking to replicate this you will need to optimise your Google+ page for the knowledge graph and have a unique brand name. More info on this can be found by searching the Q&As for similar questions.

Nice article on 'Money Keyword' Anchor text. All of our search results links' anchor text is unique and we have over 60,000 of these pages. I am pretty sure they will be diversified enough. They are all somewhat specific, so I am pretty certain they will not match exactly what the user searches for in Google most of the time. Another question that has come up. For example, 2 of my pages are competing in google: A product page ranking 4th, and a dynamic search results page ranking 5th. Would no-indexing the search results page make the product page shoot up higher than 4, or is the purpose of removing competition just to guide the user more specifically where I want them? As long as I use the the noindex tag in a robots.txt file correctly, do I have your blessing? Thanks so much!

You are correct, it is for company name/branding. Our current site is not ranking especially well. It only seems to do amazing for branded search terms.

Google doesn't want to take up to much bandwidth on your server so it will "budget" its time during a crawl.  Make sure your page load times are fast, server has a good "up time", constantly add new content so when Google does the next crawl it will see that it is a site that is constantly updated, and make sure your pages aren't too large.  You can actually speed up Google's crawl (or slow it down) under configuration>settings> but you don't need to do anything here but make sure that the radial that says "Let Google Decide" is selected under crawl rate. If you haven't done so already, you can Fetch as Google and submit to index with all linked pages.  Technically Google sees your site so you don't have to do this but I always see an increase in the crawl rate when I do it.  (Don't do it if you've already done it recently).  I also like to submit individual pages to the Fetch as Google when I create new content and I only index that particular page if it's a brand new page that I've added. When your PR increases, you'll also see an increase to the crawl rate.