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Yes, that can be seen as duplicate content. Not only those but also
www.example.com/file//index.html
are all the same but can be seen as different.
My preference is to set the redirect to www.example.com/file
However, with blog-based sites, many prefer to leave the trailing slash in there.
This is only a wild guess, but are you sure it's not just downloading root domains rather than every individual link?
I did it to two client sites and neither lost any rankings. I used the Change Permalink Helper plugin, which made the redirects seamless. The most unfortunate thing about changing URL permalinks is the fact that if you have social sharing buttons on your posts, all the counts get reset to zero.
I must add that just because I didn't lose rankings doesn't mean there's not a chance, albeit a small one, that you will.
Wow, I didn't know you could still contact domains with private registration. Now if I can just convince him to let me devote time to this, there will be hope! Thanks for all your help!
Thanks so much for your extensive response! I really appreciate it.
One thing: "To resolve the problem, you are proposing to build different manipulative links, ones designed to trick search engines into removing the penalty."
No, not at all! I just meant that over time, the natural links they acquire will not have exact match anchor text, so once they have more links without it than with it, will it be enough to crowd it out.
I have looked up all the links to the site and gone to those sites one by one and attempted to contact them. 90+ percent didn't have contact information. Out of those 90+ percent, 90+ percent of those had a private whois listing. That's why I said the removal of the bad links is never going to happen.
It's a shame because the reason the client hired that shady company to begin with is because he didn't want me to spend time building links. He's never going to consent to my spending my time in an excessive campaign to remove them.
I guess there's nothing more to say.
Thanks for all the good answers. Since it's impossible to remove those links, if I acquire more links with varying anchor text will that eventually be enough to crowd the exact match out and stop triggering the penalty, or is the only option to ask for re-inclusion after the links are removed (which isn't going to happen)?
I don't know if that's good news or bad news. At least if you were penalized you'd have some kind of an answer. I think your solution lies in Irving's response. Blogs are great for SEO, but left to their own devices they can wreak havoc on your site and rankings. What does your SEOmoz crawl report say? How many errors does your site have?
It depends on your browser. If you're in Firefox, go to Tools > Start Private Browsing. With other browsers, it'll be something similar. Perhaps in Edit or Options, ect.
It's really a matter of preference. The strongest argument for using them is that other search engines use them. The strongest argument against it is the fact that your competitors can look at them and see exactly what terms you're trying to rank for.
I don't even think yahoo or Bing take them into account anymore. I don't even know which engines do use them. i guess I'd say it's better not to use them.
I would proceed with caution with the anchor text thing, but I have to agree with William about the exact match domain name. It's my belief these still help ranking a great deal, perhaps even more than Google admits. Still, that shouldn't put you beyond page 50. I would do a Google search for that term in private browsing and go all the way to the end to see if you're there at all. if not, you may have a penalty for that keyword.
I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I'm thinking from the standpoint of how you can make the most money rather than how you can increase your traffic and rankings of your current site. But make the recently acquired site a division of your current site and do business as both. Rather than ingratiating the business into yours, have two phone lines, two sets of letterhead, ect. I realize there's A LOT to doing this and you'd probably have to hire a couple more people, and it may be a bit of investment, but the long term payoff could be astronomical. I've seen clients do this right before my eyes and I have assisted them. Unless this is a known company in it's going out of business is extremely well-known. Then scrap everything I just said.
How new is your company? New enough to take on their name and scrap yours?
If not, you have options such as domain forwarding with the registrar, 301 redirect, ect, but I'd have to know if your end goal is to keep your current site and just use the acquired domain to help your site's traffic and rankings.
I mix up the order of my heading tags as well and have fabulous search engine rankings. I wouldn't worry. Heading tags may be a factor in ranking, but they're such a teeny piece of the pie.
Yes, it's fine and a good thing to do that.
This is the best way to do it to preserve your rankings. There's never a guarantee, but doing it this way is your best bet.
Once you've combined them into one, take the old page out of your sitemap.
Basically looks good to the best of my knowledge. A couple suggestions (keep in mind these are merely my opinion)
-I would check the box to disable the date-based archives. Make category archives the only one you use.
-I have no idea why, but I have noticed on every site I manage that unless you check the box "force rewrite titles" Google never seems to crawl them properly and adds a bunch of crap to the title of every post, such as your blog name and description. Also, at the time of writing your posts, when you're editing the SEO info, make sure you click the button that says "generate SEO title."
-Make sure any other SEO plugins are disabled!
What do you mean by meta robots instructions? Are you referring to the meta tags that go on each individual page? In that case, no, you don't necessarily need them. Robots assume a page should be crawled unless told otherwise. I'd still do it for pages that you don't want indexed and/or followed because a lot of times, robots, especially Google, seem to ignore these directives.
They have a small use in that they can help your readers find posts closely related to a more specific topic than your categories. Honestly, most blog readers don't even use them. But some do, so it can't hurt to have them as long as they're not indexed.
It's generally agreed that a best practice is to noindex tag pages because they create duplicate and thin content issues and have little use in general. If you were to noindex these pages, then of course you wouldn't want or need to fill in that information.