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Hey Jon,

I agree with both David and Kayden--readability, emotional impact, and great content should take priority over the mechanical SEO-rewriting.

IMO, the best option here is to teach your copywriter the basics of writing with SEO considerations. Investing that time up front will save you the pain in the long-run of "re-cooking" his content. One suggestion would be to develop a checklist, or a system of some sort that helps your writer incorporate SEO best practices while writing the posts (think: synonyms for latent semantic indexing, rich anchor text, proper use of headings, etc.)

Teach a man to fish...

Hi Tony,

If the "Sign In" form is an element included on the page that you set to rel=canonical, the other instances of the sign in form should be neutralized (in terms of triggering duplicate content errors).

Usually, something as small as a sign in form doesn't constitute enough content to trigger the "duplicate" warning. The SE's algo has to account for certain elements that are useful on each page (for example, navigation bars). They are more concerned with people scraping large amounts of written content from other sites or just recycling large portions of their own site for SEO purposes.

Hi Tony,

Welcome to the world of SEO

I just spoke to someone who had a similar issue (duplicates due to user reviews). There is a relatively clean solution for this and it comes with a fancy name, "Canonicalization". Here is a great step by step for setting a page to rel="canonical".

Basically, you want to tell Google that there is one "source" page for all the duplicates.

Example:

You have a page for blue widgets. Users can review the blue widget, but each new review becomes a new page (problem). If you label the original product page as canonical, your duplicates will be ignored, and the Google bot will be much happier with your site

It's hard for me to tell how much the duplicate content is impacting your ranking right now, but after you use rel=canonical, you should see some major improvements within a couple weeks.

As for the 302 redirects...you want to fix this immediately! Here is the step by step for 301's.

There are some shortcuts to changing 301 redirects depending on your platform...do you happen to know what your development team is using? Changing 5,000 of these would be a little cumbersome to do by hand

Keep up the good work!

Stephanie,

My pleasure. Feel free to PM me if anything comes up--I'm probably dealing with similar issues.

Hi Stephanie,

The more I work with ASP.NET the less scared I am about its SEO implications. Be encouraged that you are building the site from the ground up, rather than optimizing an existing site.

The biggest thing to look out for is duplicate content. Make sure your developers are building pages that are unique and worthy of Google's crawl.

Also, if you plan on having user reviews enabled for your products, it may be helpful to set one product page as rel=canonical, so that you aren't confusing the SEs with lots of similar pages.

Example:

You have a page for blue widgets. Users can review the blue widget, but each new review becomes a new page. Since all the pages are about blue widgets, and share the same image content and product description, you want to canonicalize the original product page so it gets indexed.

Before you pay the final balance to your dev team, crawl the site with SEOMoz tools. If there is anything substantial, you can point it out to the developers.

Good luck!

That's great! I'd love to see how your campaign progresses. Keep me in the loop!

Hi Wissam--Lucky for us, inurl is still a valid operator. See this example in action for "SEO"

Hi Peter,

I think the operator you need is "inurl:" The operator "intitle:" will search for the keyword in the title tags.

Here is a full list of search operators for Google and Yahoo.

Happy advanced searching

Hi Partouter,

I prefer option #1, "a single powerful domain" for a few reasons:

1. It's always easier to pass link juice from an authoritative top level domain than it is to drum it up from scratch. With good site-architecture you can achieve faster indexing results with landing pages organized by topic/category.
2. Consolidating all of your content under one website helps reinforce your brand over time. It's better to be an information hub for your audience than it is to capture traffic from a bunch of fragmented mini-sites.
3. Search Engines crack down on folks who own a lot of interlinked domains that all speak about the same subject matter. It can be difficult to create unique subject matter for each of your microsites, unless your client is a corporate conglomerate like GE or Johnson & Johnson

Now, personally, I have used smaller, niche sites to rank for long-tail searches. But I only took this approach when my client has a legitimate service or product that deserves this level of attention. This is more common with geo-targeted search terms (i.e. a product or service that is specific to Boston, MA; Los Angeles, CA; etc.)

Best of luck!

Hi dMoon,

Cut right to the chase and use Google's own tools Try Google's Website Optimizer to handle your A/B tests. Everything will synch up with your analytics and provide a slick report in the dashboard.

Happy testing

Hi Partouter,

I prefer option #1, "a single powerful domain" for a few reasons:

1. It's always easier to pass link juice from an authoritative top level domain than it is to drum it up from scratch. With good site-architecture you can achieve faster indexing results with landing pages organized by topic/category.
2. Consolidating all of your content under one website helps reinforce your brand over time. It's better to be an information hub for your audience than it is to capture traffic from a bunch of fragmented mini-sites.
3. Search Engines crack down on folks who own a lot of interlinked domains that all speak about the same subject matter. It can be difficult to create unique subject matter for each of your microsites, unless your client is a corporate conglomerate like GE or Johnson & Johnson

Now, personally, I have used smaller, niche sites to rank for long-tail searches. But I only took this approach when my client has a legitimate service or product that deserves this level of attention. This is more common with geo-targeted search terms (i.e. a product or service that is specific to Boston, MA; Los Angeles, CA; etc.)

Best of luck!

Hi dMoon,

Cut right to the chase and use Google's own tools Try Google's Website Optimizer to handle your A/B tests. Everything will synch up with your analytics and provide a slick report in the dashboard.

Happy testing

Hi Peter,

I think the operator you need is "inurl:" The operator "intitle:" will search for the keyword in the title tags.

Here is a full list of search operators for Google and Yahoo.

Happy advanced searching

Greg,

I'm sorry to hear about the crash...what a bummer! Did you have any interruption in your Pro subscription?

Since SEOmoz is web-based, all of your historical research should be preserved. Under your campaign manager, click, "See All Keyword Rankings". From that link you will find a list of keywords and can click to view their historical performance.

Of course, if you cancelled your subscription or failed to renew it, that information is not likely to be recovered.

Loudogg,

I ended up stumbling over a previous moz thread on this where a lot of folks mentioned tools that they've used with success. Here is the original post.

I went through and rounded up the suggestions. After comparing the tools, I came up with the following list:

SubmitEaze
http://www.submiteaze.com/

WhiteSpark
http://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/#

Directory Submitter
http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/

Fast Directory Submitter * Most popular

http://www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com/tutorials/73-fast-directory-submitter-video.html

Sick Submitter
http://sickmarketing.com/

IBP
http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/submission/site-submission-tools.htm

Webceo
http://www.webceo.com/

Most of these tools have semi-automated versions of their app which allow you to pick and choose from the directories available. This will help filter through spammy/non-related directories.

Just don't go too crazy Spam filters will be triggered if too many directory backlinks pop-up at once.

Hi Rich,

PR is frustrating, isn't it? It looked like Google gave us a definitive, all-in-one metric to determine the value of our pages--but it just doesn't cut it.

Honestly, I just use PR and Mozrank (which is much better) for competitive analysis. Focus on the following instead:

1. Tracking your ranking for desired keywords
2. How much traffic your site receives as a result of #1
3. How well does the traffic convert (i.e. are you getting customers from the traffic?)

These are the metrics you want to care about over the long haul. Who cares if you have a PR of 0. If you are getting 300% more paying customers this year, that's what counts!

Hi Mark,

In the case of title tag keywords, less is more. The most value is assigned to the first few keywords in the title. If your website is selling apples and you found a niche opportunity with the granny variety in CA, your homepage title tag should look something like:

Granny Apples CA | Your Company.com | Are your green apples safe to eat?

Note the following:

1. Keywords come first
2. Your company name (branding) comes second
3. Promotional copy comes last but still includes keywords

If you want to target cities in CA, it would make sense to make separate, unique landing pages that offer value. You can use cities and state abbreviations in those title tags.

You don't want to devalue the strength of your home page's title tag. Keep it short and to the point, focusing on your main keyword target.

Here's a great best practices guide for title tags.

Just a reminder: click-through rate is very important...keyword stuffing a title tag may "cover your bases" for more keyword targets, but it could be turning away visitors.

Edward,

You can certainly continue to syndicate your articles through the same channels as before. The article directories that were affected by the Farmer update won't pass as much link juice as before, but they also won't hurt your site. In fact, they will still drive traffic. Just make sure you aren't giving reciprocal links.

I would recommend taking advantage of social bookmarking tools like Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Reddit.

You can target the insurance categories and if the articles are well-written, they will go viral.

I haven't seen Google issue any official statements regarding the Chrome blocking option, however, as this post suggests, they may be starting to incorporate user signals like this into their algo.

We know that Google takes spam reports issued from the Webmaster tools as a legitimate signal. But they still haven't assimilated those reports into the algo.

I wouldn't expect that the Chrome feature has much of a future as a signal to Google since it could be easily gamed and used as an espionage tool to wreck your competitors' ranking

Hi Tony,

If the "Sign In" form is an element included on the page that you set to rel=canonical, the other instances of the sign in form should be neutralized (in terms of triggering duplicate content errors).

Usually, something as small as a sign in form doesn't constitute enough content to trigger the "duplicate" warning. The SE's algo has to account for certain elements that are useful on each page (for example, navigation bars). They are more concerned with people scraping large amounts of written content from other sites or just recycling large portions of their own site for SEO purposes.