Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Perfect advice, sir.  Thumbs up

Hey Mark,

Read this:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

The bit that will interest you is "The rel=canonical passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes up much less development time to implement."  I think that is the answer you are looking for.  However, if it is possible I would suggest the 301...

Cheers

This should help you:

http://webdesignandsuch.com/create-a-htaccess-file-to-redirect-to-a-404-html-page/

I think we will all be taking a look at that one - thank you!

There could be, I am not sure.  The company I work for did some sort of a trial so I could play with it for a few months and give my COO feed back before they entered in to a contract but I don't know if the trial was free or just at a lowered rate.  We use it in an agency setting so we have many slots we can move clients in and out of - if you are just getting it for one website it is probably much more affordable.

BrightEdge really does do it, as well as many other things (I sound like a BrightEdge commercial, LOL).  It is expensive though  and of course, who can say if it finds them all....

I understand totally.  If you do decide you want a quick report run just let me know.  I would just have BrightEdge add the domain and wait for their next crawl (they crawl every weekend) and I can email the report to you the following Monday.  No problem at all  Happy to help.

I can totally dig that!  If there is a tool here that can do it, it is one that I have not utilized.  If it comes down to it you can message the URL to me and I can have it put in to BrightEdge (we have some open slots) and see what it can find for you.  Let me know if I can help (billy.j@vizergy.com)

BrightEdge can do that.

I completely agree with you, Robert.  Content for the sake of content doesn't help anyone, including the SEO working on the website.  Each page should have a focus and should stick to that focus; concise, informational and clean.  Thumbs up to you, sir.

I ran your new domain - the one that you redirect the others to - through OSE and there were 58 incoming links but they were from only 2 different root domains.  One of them no longer linked to you when I checked it and the other one was blocked by our security software here at work.  The software stated that it was a 'Verified Threat'.  If the site linking to you is malicious and there are multiple links from that site to your domain Google could be penalizing you for it - once all of the link juice (well, all that WILL pass) is passed via your 301s then this should tip the ratio of good/bad links in to your favor and hopefully fix the issue.  It may be a good idea to look in to the site though.  It could be nothing, our software has been known to block pages that are fine although it is pretty rare... the page that is linking to your page is http://www.onlinebizdirectory.com/business/businesses_for_sale_in_vermont.html

The page you redirect to has 58 links from two root domains.  One seems not to link to you any more and the other is blocked by Trend Micro here at work calling it a verified threat.... that may be worth looking in to while you wait for the link juice to pass....

Doh - I right clicked and copied URLs - I didnt notice - LOL, sorry about that

Got the same error for http://www.businessbroker.net/listings/business_for_sale_california.ihtml

I dont know if this is the best tool (just found it using Google) but I used http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php/ and checked http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-California.aspx and got this:

Either http://www.businessbroker.net/Businesses_For_Sale-State-California.aspx is NOT REDIRECTING to any URL or the redirect is NOT SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY

Also - I have noticed that Google+ Local is showing EXIF data for images... I suppose that means that Google is reading it so I have started adding titles, comments etc... to the image properties (not in the img tag but in the image).  I have only started testing this but it could help as well.

I don't think so, but it will help keep you from dropping.  You are doing it for your users and that is great I just worry if that would not be obvious to Google - that's all.

I thought this was a good article about getting images indexed in Google - maybe it will help you: http://www.masternewmedia.org/how-to-get-your-images-indexed-by-google-image-search/

I wouldn't do that.  It would work, but in case your site was ever manually looked at for any reason and that was noticed, that could look like an attempt to manipulate search results and you could get hit.  I would just put it on as text and either noindex the page in your robots.txt file or do as Raymond and Nakul suggest and set up a canonical tag.  In my very humble opinion I think the safest thing would just be to block bots from the page but the canonical isn't a bad suggestion at all.

I like the idea of 301's the best in this case - in any event all of your suggestions are right on.  Thumb up!