Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mozzers, We're working on a website for a manufacturer who allows retailers to reuse their product information. Now, this of course raises the issue of duplicate content. The manufacturer is the content owner and originator, but retailers will copy the information for their own site and not link back (permitted by the manufacturer) - the only reference to the manufacturer will be the brand name citation on the retailer website. How would you deal with the duplicate content issues that this may cause. Especially considering the domain authority for a lot of the retailer websites is better than the manufacturer site? Thanks!!

I'm looking for writers to write content for 1000+ key words. 300-400 words per keyword. I would like this done by the end of July. Any suggestions or recommendations on where to find a team that can produce quality content in that amount of time? Thank you!

I'm wrestling with something that I'm hoping members of the community can provide input on.... I've working with an enterprise level client that is in the business of data capture and distribution. I've diagnosed a clear drop of traffic on May 22nd, i.e a loss of search visibility post Penguin 2.0. Their link profile is big! Discussions with internal stakeholders who have been with the company 10's of years confirm that no "link building" service providers have ever been hired and no over-zealous employee is ever likely to have tried to "do" link building internally. They are just one of those lucky companies that by their nature publish information that people want to link to and share. As a first port of call I've grouped links by anchor text and can see groups of hundreds of matching anchors based on their brand URL and specific page titles. The matching anchors have resulted from big take up of interesting data that they have marketed via press releases. NOT for link purposes. My question is this.... Does the community think or have evidence (or can point me toward any case studies) that show that Press release syndication alone could result in: a) a penguin penalty   or...
b) a devaluing of press release type links during Penguin 2.0 that could have resulted in a loss of search visibility and give the impression of a penalty Your thoughts are much appreciated!

Hi, We've got some old content, about 50 pages worth in an Ecommerce site, that is optimized for keywords that aren't the subject of the page - these keywords occur about 8 times (2 keywords per page) in the old content. We are going through these 50 pages and changing the title, H1, and meta description tag to match the exact subject of the page - so that we will increase in rankings again - the updates have been lowering our rankings. Do we need to completely rewrite the content for these 50 pages, or can we just sprinkle it with any needed additions of the one keyword that is the subject of the page? The reason I'm asking is that our rankings keep dropping and these 50 pages seem to be part of the problem. We're in the process of updating these 50 pages Thanks.

Hi All, I'll premise this by saying that we like to engage in as much white hat SEO as possible. I'm certainly not asking for any shady advice, but we have a lot of local pages to optimize :). So, we are an IT and management training course provider. We have 34 locations across the US and each of our 34 locations offers the same courses. Each of our locations has its own page on our website. However, in order to really hone the local SEO game by course topic area and city, we are creating dynamic custom pages that list our course offerings/dates for each individual topic and city. Right now, our pages are dynamic and being crawled and ranking well within Google. We conducted a very small scale test on this in our Washington Dc and New York areas with our SharePoint course offerings and it was a great success. We are ranking well on "sharepoint training in new york/dc" etc for two custom pages. So, with 34 locations across the states and 21 course topic areas, that's well over 700 pages of content to maintain - A LOT more than just the two we tested. Our engineers have offered to create a standard title tag, meta description, h1, h2, etc, but with some varying components. This is from our engineer specifically: "Regarding pages with the specific topic areas, do you have a specific format for the Meta Description and the Custom Paragraph? Since these are dynamic pages, it would work better and be a lot easier to maintain if we could standardize a format that all the pages would use for the Meta and Paragraph. For example, if we made the Paragraph: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area.” As a note, other content such as directions and course dates will always vary from city to city so content won't be the same everywhere, just slightly the same. It works better this way because HTFU is actually a single page, and we are just passing the venue code to the page to dynamically build the page based on that venue code. So they aren’t technically individual pages, although they seem like that on the web. If we don’t standardize the text, then someone will have to maintain custom text for all active venue codes for all cities for all topics. So you could be talking about over a thousand records to maintain depending on what you want customized. Another option is to have several standardized paragraphs, such as: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area. Followed by other content specific to the location
“Find your [Topic Area] training course in [City, State] with ease.” Followed by other content specific to the location Then we could randomize what is displayed. The key is to have a standardized format so additional work doesn’t have to be done to maintain custom formats/text for individual pages. So, mozzers, my question to you all is, can we standardize with slight variations specific to that location and topic area w/o getting getting dinged for spam or duplicate content. Often times I ask myself "if Matt Cutts was standing here, would he approve?" For this, I am leaning towards "yes," but I always need a gut check. Sorry for the long message. Hopefully someone can help. Thank you! Pedram

Greetings My site was seriously punished in the recent penguin update.  I foolishly got some bad out sourced spammy links built and I am now paying for it 😞 I am now thinking it best to start fresh on a new url, but I am wondering if I can use the content from the flagged site on the new url. Would this be flagged as duplicate content, even if i took the old site down? your help is greatly appreciated Silas

Hello everyone, I have an online shopping site selling, amongst other items, candles. We have lots of different categories within the LED candles category. One route a customer can take is homepage > LED candles > Tealights. Within the tealights category we have 7 different products which vary only in colour. It is necessary to create separate products for each colour since we have fantastic images for each colour. To target different keywords, at present we have different titles (hence different link texts, different URLs and different H1 tags) for each colour, for example "Battery operated LED candles, amber", "Flameless candles, red" and "LED tealights, blue". I was wondering if different titles to target different keywords is a good idea. Or, is it just confusing to the customer and should I just stick with a generic item title which just varies by colour (eg. "LED battery candles, colour")? If I do the latter, am I at risk of getting downranked by Google since I am duplicating the product titles/link texts/URLs/H1 tags/img ALTs? (the description and photos for each colour are unique). Sorry if this is a little complicated - please ask and I can clarify anything...because I really want to give the best customer experience but still preserve my Google ranking. I have attached screenshots of the homepage and categories to clarify, feel free to go on the site live too. Thank you so much, Pravin BqFCp.jpg KC2wB.jpg BEcfX.jpg

We're looking to redesign one of our niche business directory websites and we'd like to place local content on the homepage catered to the user based on IP. For instance, someone from Los Angeles would see local business recommendations in their area. Pretty much a majority of the page would be this kind of content. Is this considered cloaking or in any way a bad idea for SEO? Here are some examples of what we're thinking: http://www.yellowbook.com http://www.yellowpages.com/ I've seen some sites redirect to a local version of the page, but I'm a little worried Google will index us with localized content and the homepage would not rank for any worthwhile keywords. What's the best way to handle this? Thanks.