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Chenzo is correct, install the SEO Ultimate plugin as this does wonders for deep editing of titles and descriptions for categories/tags and more. There is a setting that you can rewrite the URL from categories in the url to a specific post url.

I usually avoid having categories in the URL due to the issue you describe above of having multiple categories, I use a rewrite to just have a url such as /blog/post-name/ instead of /blog/category/tag/post-name/.

If I were you I would most probably nofollow those links in the footer. It also depends on how you link them, I would avoid any exact match anchor text that links the sites in the footer as this does not provide any value and Google is known to target this method.

If it were brand sites say on different cTLDs like .co.uk, .com, .ca etc. then it would be ok to not use the nofollow, however as you mention they are largely unrelated. Cross-linking within the footer (sitewide) without a nofollow may end up looking like a link wheel or network.

If there is relevance in having those links, keep them but nofollow them and avoid using exact match anchors.

Where are you getting the link data from? If you are looking at OSE it often does not show the whole link picture due to the index it takes, however it does show you the most important links and in my mind is reliable at telling you which links actually count. If you have millions of low quality links they will more often than not fail to pass any value to your site after the latest updates.

Also are you getting confused with total links and referring domains? You may have 500 unique referring domains but over a million links as some could be sitewide on thousands of pages?

You should really (well I do) take referring domains as a basis for number of inbound links as the way PR dissipates across multiple pages on the same domain. I assume you do not have 1.3 million unique referring domains as that number seems incredibly high.

You need to come up with highly unique and engaging content that will benefit users like in depth product reviews or writing about your industry, make it good and it will generate it's own links and social shares. Relevant business directories are still good, but will not get you ranking high on their own. Since you sell products try using product feeds to syndicate to other sites as well.

For the first month we have planned to do around 20 bookmarking, 3 articles each to 15 article directories, 30 directory submissions (priority to niche based), business page listing in hot frog etc, 3 articles each submitted to 10 web 2.0 properties, 1 press release to 15 pres release sites, some Q&A links and few blog comments, 10 video submission and 1 guest blogging.

Scrap all of this and use the time to learn seo. These tactics may have worked 5 years ago, but you will mostly be wasting your time doing this. I advise totally against 'submitting 1 article to 15 press sites' or the articles. Learn about duplicate content.

1 high-quality, engaging article submitted on a relevant industry website will be worth way more than spun articles on low quality article directories that probably do not pass any value. Sorry the above strategy just seems weak and ineffective, you need to spend your time learning about seo and content strategies and SEOmoz beginners guide is a good place to start.

Hi there,

I have a site that contains descriptions of accommodation and we also use this content to syndicate to our partner sites. They then use this content to fill their descriptions on the same accommodation locations.

I have looked at copyscape and Google and this does appear as duplicate content across these partnered sites.

I do understand as well that certain kinds of content will not impact Google's duplication issue such as locations, addresses, opening times those kind of things, but would actual descriptions of a location around 250 words long be seen and penalised as duplicate content?

Also is there a possible way to canonicalise this content so that Google can see it relates back to our original site?

The only other way I can think of getting round a duplicate content issue like this is ordering the external sites to use tags like blockquotes and cite tags around the content.

If you used seomoz to look at the links then you may notice that there are 200 fewer links because of the recent updates to the mozscape. It contained far fewer domains than the last index update so link profiles look naturally smaller because of this.

There is the other case though that these 200 links have been lost which means less juice flowing to your site and lower ranking as a result. You probably need to diversify your link strategy. What kind of links did you lose? Were these directory links, blogroll links?

Sitelinks are not a top level natural ranking for a domain they are part of the universal results and only appear on certain rankings some of the time (mainly rankings for brand that have a high CTR % or terms Google sees as having most relevance and CTR). So no, organic sitelinks do not show as a ranking and I don't think you should consider that subdomain as a ranking result because it may not show 100% of the time.

Sorry about your drop in rankings, it can be frustrating when this happens but I think you'll have to give us a bit more information to try and discover why your rankings dropped. Have you had a look at your backlinks? You may have had a drop off in the number of links pointing at your site, particularly low quality article/directory links that Google is devaluing.

Have you changed any content? Had a look at your robots.txt file and make sure nothing is no-indexed? You need to have a look at all these things before jumping to a conclusion.

Remove your adsense until you get traffic and rankings. Your link profile is horrible as well, massive amount of comment spam with exact anchor which isn't doing anything for your rankings. You also have a massive percentage of nofollow links because of this, this doesn't hurt your site but obviously it seems part of your marketing strategy. You should try building content that can be shared out on social platforms etc..

For the first month we have planned to do around 20 bookmarking, 3 articles each to 15 article directories, 30 directory submissions (priority to niche based), business page listing in hot frog etc, 3 articles each submitted to 10 web 2.0 properties, 1 press release to 15 pres release sites, some Q&A links and few blog comments, 10 video submission and 1 guest blogging.

Scrap all of this and use the time to learn seo. These tactics may have worked 5 years ago, but you will mostly be wasting your time doing this. I advise totally against 'submitting 1 article to 15 press sites' or the articles. Learn about duplicate content.

1 high-quality, engaging article submitted on a relevant industry website will be worth way more than spun articles on low quality article directories that probably do not pass any value. Sorry the above strategy just seems weak and ineffective, you need to spend your time learning about seo and content strategies and SEOmoz beginners guide is a good place to start.

I think I answered the same question you posted before, but did you try and use canonical tags? As I said using noindex and nofollow is probably not the best option if Google doesn't know that it should show http: instead of https.

Have you tried searching for http versions of your site listed? Are there any pages that are just http listed?

A banner ad can be a legitimate link source, it will be an arrangement between the site owners and not done through an ad network. It would just be like you coming to me asking for a link on my site, but instead of anchor text using an image. Not using a no-follow tag is against guidelines, but you could argue it's not a banner ad and a legitimate link.

Link juice is definately not passed through banner ads on ad networks such as adwords/doubleclick or affiliate banners as they bounce over an adserver first.

Data merging: No and I feel your pain as I once worked for a client that had 3 profiles I had to keep going back and forward to from 3 different time periods.

Email: Yes. In your main Google account screen (your Google account where you find googleproducts etc.) you can add more email addresses that enable you to login to your Google account. So you can add a corporate address that would enable you to login to your Google account where you can access Analytics.

You can also add a separate user in Analytics with a corporate address and delete the original primary email address.

Setup a subdomain blog. on your site and a /blog directory and then use SEOmoz competitive link analysis. You will see it shows different DA, Google sees these as completely separate entities.

I do believe there is some value passed on, but from my own experience /blog ALWAYS wins over blog. and I've done numerous tests on this.

I've noticed a drop in external links for some clients too. I wouldn't worry about it, it is the fallout from Penguin/Panda where Google has devalued certain links. Those 30k links or so that came from 5 domains could have been sitewide blogroll links or footer links of low quality that Google has removed from their index.

I would assume your right about DA, but I wouldn't worry about it that much unless your rankings are seeing a massive shift.

Google essentially sees those 5 domains as individual sites and will list each as individual sites in results.

Follow the guide bjgomer liks you to, you need to set up your .htaccess file to resolve www and either finishwith a trailing slash or index.html the former usually being the better. You also need to decide first whether you want your site to be http://mysite.com or http://www.mysite.com.

If Analytics is properly set up and connected to Adwords the first steps I would take are to review each campaign in Analytics and Adwords.

You should be able to cross-reference each campaign in Analytics with Adwords to review click/visit data. This way you may find a discrepency in a particular campaign - check landing pages, do they have the correct Analytics code?

It is most likely down to either incorrect or missing Google Analytic codes. Check that first.

Use this tool

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php

Generates Google syntax queries to help you find links like that.

Change them to your brand. Avoid using exact match type competitive keywords like 'web design by..' Google does not penalise exatc brand mentions so much as most commercial websites are expected to receive numerous exact match brand links anyway.