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There certainly should be much of an impact in your ranking. However there are a couple things worth considering in this matter:

-Location value: If you are a working on a campaign that is focused on a specific international region then having an IP from that country can be beneficial in the eyes of some search engines in regards to local searches

-Link Value: You'll also want to make sure that you aren't switching to a shared IP which hosts websites that are linking to you already - while in all honesty something that would be extremely rare, if it were the case it would likely lead to the devaluation of those links

-IP History: It's also important to know that you aren't moving to a digital neighborhood that's known in the search engines eyes for housing spam. Think about it like sharing your identity, you wouldn't want someone under your name giving talks about illicit topics. Look up your neighbors with a reverse IP lookup tool such as yougetsignal.com before making the jump.

All in all you likely won't see a big impact from switching your IP address - you just want to do a little due diligence to insure that your new digital home is one that's squeaky clean before moving in!

Cheers,
Adam

If you have a lot of duplicate content (or overlapping content) on the same server it may not be a penalty but Google simply lowering the value of the properties due to a lack of uniqueness.

Make sure as you rid of old domains you are 301 redirecting back to the main site and continue to simplify your site and consolidate it into single landing pages. Also make sure none of these old sites are inter-linking in any method other than a 301 redirect as that would have a negative impact on your SEO.

In a way I wouldn't worry too much - it's kind of what you want a push in the right direction long term. If you are going to have secondary websites they need to be unique enough (by the nature of intent) to actually warrant their on place in the search engines. If you are really just having a slightly different spin to the same intent and content each time then Google is going to continue to lower the value of the sites across the board.

I've had the same thing happen to me with old clients that started back in the day that owning multiple domains made sense, a lot of them dropped off and the clients freaked. We streamlined the content into unique and hyper targeted landing pages and 301'd the old domains - within a few weeks not only were we back up and running but we were simply crushing our competition. We shot up in SEO across the board, our traffic was up almost 30% and our users were converting at a higher rate due to ease of use.

Think about it from the user perspective and you'll always win, streamline it, make it easy, make it accessible and the rankings WILL come. (Well worth reading Cyrus' post about that mantra: http://moz.com/blog/seo-satisfaction)

The disavow tool should not be your first result and it isn't a magic fix all button.

Before using the disavow tool you are expected to try and reach out to webmasters and make manual link removal requests to try and remove as many negative links as possible before using the disavow tool. After all you can't expect Google to just batch dump all the data it sees for your site otherwise their penalties would be worthless.

After that disavow the links, be honest and open in why the links are there and what caused them. If you are lying about it it will be pretty obvious and your disavow likely won't get granted; and if you have been doing something shady that wasn't yet caught it will be when your site is reviewed.

All in all if you have a clean white-hat campaign and have come under some link spam flack then using the disavow tool will be helpful. It's helped a few of my clients survive competitive negative SEO - however, sometimes this simply isn't enough. It won't fix everything, it won't remove all your links and it won't help against any manual penalties.

Once you've cleaned up as much as you can, and ensure you are employing white-hat SEO methods and have your facts in order give it a whirl and hope for the best. That's how the disavow tool plays out.

Hey Mker,

Here are a few things to consider:

1. You are in a sector that is hit pretty hard with an authority domain (Zazzle), you have to remember that the closer to the authority source a link is the more value it holds. Perhaps even opening up a Zazzle shop with an external link, or trying to get some craft blogs to write about your service could be some very valuable routes.

2. Integrate the product schema (http://schema.org/Product) not only will it help your SEO rankings but it's sure to boost your CTR and conversion rates simply because of the additional visual stimuli

3. Do some detailed keyword analysis, perhaps they keywords you are fighting for simply aren't the right fit for you. Try finding a number of easier ones that have smaller traffic but by grabbing a few of them you could equal the traffic of a more challenging word

4. Consider further segmenting your products so that you can have pages that target specific keywords - just like too many cooks spoil the stew, too many keywords spoil the SEO. If it makes sense to split your products and optimize your pages give it a whirl

5. SEO isn't the only strategy, consider inbound marketing some PPC ads or a Facebook fan page running a promotion make work wonders at the holiday season. Believe it or not even if you were ranking first organically some users would still only ever click the ads, and users that are ad shoppers are far higher when it comes to converting.

6. Off-site is going to be key in such a competitive industry, but far to many people make the mistake of trying to go for big high-quality links and as many as they can muster. Remember Google sees everything and hates SEO their main goal is to find sites that naturally and organically gain authority across the internet. When considering such things you may want to look at what seems reasonable for your industry. Appearing on popular mum blogs, craft blogs and holiday blogs or forums would be your best bet. If suddenly you had a ton of wikipedia links it would likely seem a little sketchy!

7. Watch out for any SEO now a days who doesn't talk about inbound marketing and buyer personas. SEO as a tactic is a dying breed, SEO is now a part of a much larger strategy - and the key reason why SEOmoz is now Moz. People who talk to they are blue in the face about building you links and optimizing your on page are likely to hurt you in the long run. Take the time to invest in someone who is going to give you a holistic and complete approach to inbound marketing. When the user is happy, Google is happy and ranks are high!

8. Last but not least use a tool like ahrefs and scan for sketchy links, maybe despite all your hard work something is dragging you down. Try and contact those webmasters of any spammy links you may have to get them removed, and if worst comes to worst try the Google disavow tool

Oh and PS don't forget a site map, eCommerce and a beautiful sitemap with product schema markup is sure to be a great hit!

When ever we talk site structure I love to refer to Rand's Intro SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) slides 46 & 47 in this case if I remember correctly.

The basic mantra to remember is that when it comes to URL's - keep it simple.

Google loves simple, clean and meaningful URLs and dropping the .aspx extension should actually serve as a plus long term. While Google may initially rank the old page depending on its indexing and crawls just make sure that the .aspx pages are re-directing with 301 redirects (not 302) and eventually they should swap out entirely.

In all the years I've worked in SEO I've only ever seen sites improve their ranking by cleaning their URL's like this. Just make sure to 301 and you're all set!

Hi Megahn,

You don't have a small task in front of you so I am going to break down a number of steps and suggestions that will hopefully guide you through this process.

1. Consider your CPC and Positioning - While you didn't mention it, there is the possibility that due to the economic regions you are targeting that your ads are either more costly or simply more competitive (via QualityScore) compare your average position of the ads in these countries with ads in other countries. This may be where a lot of your discrepancy comes from. If your ads are at a lower position consider doing what you can to improve your QualityScore.

2. Consider linguistic differences  - One of the more challenging concepts for many PPC campaign coordinators to grasp is the HUGE impact of linguistic changes in your ad copy. Things that preform well in one region may not perform as well in another simply due to cultural bias, or linguistic nuance. Use the Google Keyword Tool Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home?__c=9069233028&__u=4674907968&__o=kt) and target each of your regions individually, run a number of searches (and search suggestions) on those geographic locations to see the difference between how users search for your service in those countries as opposed to the ones you are performing well in. Consider modifying your ad copy to match this.

3. Service Discovery - Another thing to remember is that in each part of the world people discover services differently. While in some places people Google search for a plumber, others may still just instinctively use the yellow pages. Check to see the differences in the amount of search traffic you have between the countries you are performing well in and the western countries where you aren't. Consider in regards to your service if another strategy may be worth while.

4. Conversion Opportunity - The countries you are discussing are a little more challenging to convert. They expect a more professional looking website, detailed contact information and a well laid out service guide and pricing information before buying. If you are seeing traffic but it isn't converting the same it may be worth while reaching out to individuals in these regions and working through some site useability testing.

When going through these steps the problem should become clearer to you - if you still don't know what to do about the problem once identified (or once you have more data but aren't sure what the problem is) I encourage you to reply to this thread and I'll continue to do what I can to help walk you through this process.

Since you are using wordpress you won't have individual pages in your FTP. The only way you could edit something into the individual pages would be each posts edit page on the CMS. However, I don't know if doing that would work since its technically beneath the head.

And yes the canonical redirect can be done in the general header, although personally I would load it as a php IF criteria. In other words you add it to the general header but tell it only to load that if i t is on one of these /en pages. That way you don't have the canonical applied to other pages you actually want, or the main page that it is directing too as that would cause an odd loop for the spiders that I doubt they would respond positively too.

Here you can find a quick sample of working with the PHP if page criteria: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7997016/if-this-page-show-this-else-show-this

Good luck!

If you check out Rand's Intro to SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) slide 46 and 47 talk about URL structure and specifically sub-domains.

As Rob said you do want to sub-folder structures and avoid sub-domains. Hopefully you are old enough to remember when websites like lycos.com were big and people could make their own websites. These were all hosted on subdomains like moz.tripod.lycos.com and because of this structure search engines needed to see subdomains as separate websites. For this reason they have separate grading, change the flow of link juice and can easily count as duplicate content.

Sub-domains are best utilized for information that is distinct enough. Like in the moz example Rands personal blog could theoretically sit at rand.moz.com as its a separate theme, different content, etc it would just loose out on the  flow of value.

Once again Rob is right about using 301 redirects to move your subdomains into folders.

Now moving on to the more specific nature of your question "Are fourth level sub-domains any worse than third level sub-domains" I am going to suggest that when asking such a question you've already lost a big chunk of the SEO/inbound marketing battle.

The question you are framing is "I know it isn't good - but is it any worse?" Well even if it's not any worse you already know that it's not great and you should be taking structural steps to build on a sites accessibility, user functionality and it's SEO. If you find yourself asking "Is X any worse?" "How bad is Y?" "Can I get away with Z?" then you should immediately stop pursuing that idea and try and find a different method.

In this case that method is sub-folders and a 301 migration, but remember the framing of your questions and your over all directional strategy need to change to really drive home your campaigns!

I'm sure you've heard the saying "If you build it they will come" - it's a famous movie quote (I want to say Field of Dreams, but I can't quite remember off the top of my head), but more importantly it's a great mantra to build off of for SEO.

When you are trying too hard to improve your rankings you are going to fail. The most important thing you can do to improve your SEO is improve your site for your users. Google will identify your poor grammar stuffing time and time again - and let me tell you that's going to hurt you in the long run.

If you are a golf store in leeds then make sure you have an address in your footer including your city name, make sure your business is listed (and verified) on Google Places (<cite>www.google.com/local/add/</cite>‎) and if you have a trusted and notable business listing directory in your area like YellowPages make sure your business is listed with their digital directory. (Do NOT ever take the time to list on directories that aren't big notable companies it will actually have a negative impact)

Next it may be worthwhile implementing the Local Business schema markup (found here: http://schema.org/LocalBusiness) or schema events as they geotag as well (http://schema.org/Event)

Other than that keep your content organic, focus on your visitors needs, don't try and stuff in keywords and hit percents it all looks unnatural. Focus on getting your users the website they want to see and your CTR, Time on Site, and Bounce metrics should alter in a positive fashion lending themselves to a bit of an SEO boost anyway.

To stray away from the SEO and get a little inbound it's worth while to set up a Facebook profile with website and address information for your business as well, not only driving traffic but giving you more locational and social authority.

If you've already reached out to them asking them to remove these and had no luck, and you've seen a negative impact on your site it may be time to use the Google disavow tool.

However I wouldn't actually take the time to do this unless it is negatively impacting your site. Google understands that you don't control the links that go to your site, and as part of sites organic growth and sharing pattern you will certainly see occasional spammy links. If they weren't links you created, and they really were spammier blogs simply picking up your copy then I doubt you have anything to worry about.

Obviously if this is a botched blackhat SEO campaign it will be noticeable in the anchors, property times and property relations and that will hurt you long term, but if you were also picked up by some legitimate good quality blogs I wouldn't fret too much about the spammy links.

Yeah these are indeed different metrics.

Think of it like someone following your brand on Twitter. Followers follow (quite obviously) and the +1's are like favoriting a tweet.

Followers would fall under the site trust category of the algorithm much like verifying with webmaster tools or Google authorship.

A +1 on the other hand is a social signal that tells Google "this page delivered what I was looking for". A sort of validation that you matched the users intent for that key term.

While I am sure they both play into the algorithm in much more complex manners and have multiple bearings on trust, intent and social sharing this example should at least help you make the distinction.

Due to the information we have this response is obviously going to be some educated speculation. You said 1.5 months ago that you changed the structure in how you present your language options to the user and I think this has a great deal to do with the index pages your seeing.

If you check out Rand's SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) from slides 39-47 you'll see his discussion on the importance of site structure in the eyes of Google. While translated content may be all the same to the user, the search engines take the structure to mean different matters of intent.

For example, sub-domain information is often taken to be duplicated translate purpose only content. It's also often categorized as a separate site.

When you went from sub-domains to language directories you went from three separate sites to one site with flow-down accessible information. In Google's eyes you just expanded your website with new fresh and valuable information. While some of the indexed pages may drop off I think this structural change is the main reason you've had such a pick up in indexing and hopefully it plays well for your on your international SEO campaign!

Cheers,
Adam

Yup hootsuite isn't the right tool for you there.

You CAN use hootsuite to track hashtags and mentions on both Facebook and Twitter, but you can't track things like follower growth, interaction and other key metrics.

The tools you'd be looking for are things like socialbro, or fanpagekarma - they track this information and do competition comparisons.

This isn't so much an SEO question as it is a personal policy question.

Obviously declaring something as No-Follow allows you to retain the PR flow from your website. Yet this isn't always something that guest posters are happy with.

The other thing worth considering if your guest posters are only willing to write for you in exchange for a Do-Follow link is maybe they aren't the best guest posters. Not only will similar guest articles and do-follow links from them be popping up on a number of sites as this is their active strategy, but there end goal isn't user experience it's SEO.

To improve YOUR seo and ultimately your business you want a guest poster who cares more about improving their personal brand than their search engine ranking. This way you will find a user committed to quality and user experience, someone that search engines and people a like want to read, and someone who won't require you to give a do-follow link, because regardless of link status their brand grows.

Remember inbound marketing isn't all about SEO, you need to debate where the technical side of your business ends and the branding begins and how that effects your policy!

Sometimes there is absolute nonsense when it comes to topics surrounding "the passing of link juice". You need to remember that:

A) Link juice isn't one set thing but rather a quick name given to the overall sphere of influence from an external website

and

B) Link Juice isn't on or off like a switch but rather in varying degrees.

Personally I would 301 any page that ranks for a keyword to your internal page that you wish to rank for that same keyword. One of the most important things for Google is deliverable intent. For example in the mobile search market plenty of websites redirect users on mobile to the mobile version of their site. But if the clicked moz.com/article.html rather than get directed to m.moz.com/article.html they are just redirected to m.moz.com and fail to hit their intent. This causes a devaluation and an increase in bounce rates.

You want people searching for keywords to still find your solutions. So 301ing the entire site to your homepage is a bad idea. However, if you 301 a page that ranks for "LinkedIn SEO" to your page on linkedin SEO you are keeping the value in the same intent and niche and delivering the user to what they want.

While on the main page of your competitor you should leave it up and put a note of the acquisition/merger but still keep the site structure and links to the pages you have 301'd so if a spider or person comes to your competitor site and clicks "services" they are 301'd to your services.

While this is a lot more work it's going to ensure you maintain their old value, increase your value and keep a flow of new customers coming your way from search results. It's well worth it!

I agree with you that a 301 is better than a single on site link, but 301'ing the entire site at the homepage level will result in all his competitors pages being deindexed and only passing the value of the domain not the internal pages.

While that may have made sense previously he stands not only to get more SEO value from redirecting internal pages to their equivalent on his site but FAR more inbound marketing value as even if people find his competitors site (which will still be indexed) the internal services pages are redirected to his pages.

Yup wildcard syntax is indeed still valid. However I can only confirm that the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Bing) actively observe it. Other secondary search engines may not.

In your case you are probably looking for a syntax along the lines of:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.pdf$ This would set that any user agent should be blocked from any file name that ends in .pdf (a $ ties it to the end so pdf.txt would not be blocked in this case)

Keep an eye on how you block them. Missing a trailing slash could block a directory rather than a file, or not appending a strict symbol ($) could mean that phrases throughout a directory could be blocked rather than just a filename.

Also keep in mind if you are using URL re-writing this may play into how you need to block things; and you may also want to remember that disallowing access in a robot.txt does NOT prevent search engines from indexing the data, it is up to them if they honor the request. So if it is very important to block the file access from search engines then robots.txt may not be the way to do it.

When questions like this pop up I feel its best to reference Rand's intro to SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) specifically slides 40-47 which cover site structure.

Separate sub-domains are often viewed as separate sites so you are now building separate value identities instead of one. If it's important to you to give them all a separate blog rather than a central one with multiple authors, then you can still achieve this by simply giving them separate sub-directories.

Sub-domains will not pass value the same way, and will be focused on different content and not associated with the main site.

Back when we had popular sub-domain hosting services like Lycos this is what seperated sitea.lycos.com from siteb.lycos.com and the same sort of thing would happen to your blogs.

If you want them to self promote and the SEO value and content association of the mainsite to flow down to them (and theirs to flow back up) structure it as www.yoursite.com/blog/author1 for each author and you'll be good to go!

While I've never come across this exact problem before I can share with you one my mantras that applies here:

"If a system (browser, search engine, etc) needs to perform a data re-write, you aren't accessible enough."

Google loves accessibility. It always wants the user to be able to easily access information and it wants it's spiders to be able to easily index and categorize the information. When accessibility options such as javascript versioning or if a site is using flash or not have an impact then it would only logically follow that more obvious structural access issues do come into effect.

From a technology stand point I can tell you that "." is not traditionally used in the scope of a URL/file structure as it a reserved character and therefore your structure is being re-written to display those. Much like international domains like the chinese internationalized domain name extension .中国 (which is basically a visual re-encode of the unicode: xn--fiqs8s) For the sake of accessibility, proper structure formatting and system practicality you should avoid using non-standard characters such as the . in your url

That all kind of depends on what your vertical is, and what you mean by the number one spot.

The News Carousel show up first, when it shows up. That being said it is pulling information in a different manner than the organic results so being #1 organically wouldn't include you in that system automatically. Imagine it like when Youtube results or Google maps results show up in the search. They are an additional search element that is run separately than the organic system.

As far as if these are going to see more clicks - quite naturally they will. Just like Google Rich Snippets profiles see an increase in CTR beyond the normal results listing. People are more apt to click these results for three reasons:

1. You've presented them with additional information which in the long run is what they are trying to access
2. The majority people fall into a visual learning type. When you show them a picture they will pick it over text every time
3. It's new, and people have a natural curiosity with that which is new and will click on it simply to explore.

When you understand the background process that leads to the click decisions these people make it's not a huge leap to think that they'll be plenty click happy on the news carousel!

I don't want to post the same answer as I did to your previous question but perhaps there was further clarification that you needed, that I missed!

Put a conditional in the header. Since you are using a wordpress platform you can't go in and manually edit each pages canonical anyway. Using the page if function and a variable you would be able to assign each one it's own rel= from a central head file anyway.

In an ideal situation you'd do each page manually but because of your CMS you need to do a work around

While there has been extensive debate to the value of 'nofollow' it's best not to get caught up in the nitty-gritty of it all. Here's the mantra I follow when dealing with links:

1. Ask yourself does your reader REALLY need this link. When in doubt, go without! Conserve your link juice as much as possible but put the user first.

2. Is this the right place for the link - remember links placed higher on a page and in mainstream content react differently that footer or sidelinks.

3. Is this an authority site? If yes I won't nofollow it, I encourage Google to know I'm linking to high-end authority. Otherwise, I'll nofollow the site.

Last but not least consider that either nofollow plugs a page leak or it doesn't, but it certainly doesn't penalize you - so wouldn't you rather be safe than sorry and use it anyways?

Well I have to commend you for thinking outside the box - I've seen a few attempted approaches at this but never pulling in recipe snippets before.

Would it work - I don't think so, I think Google calls on the Rich Snippets (excluding Authorship) only in relational context. Basically what this means is Google is well aware based on the user search if someone is looking for a product or a recipe and from my understanding would likely only pull the appropriate micro-form data. That being said, I've not tested this. Your best bet would be to start by using the rich snippet test tool to see what displays (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets)

As for what would happen if it did work - you wouldn't see any impact negatively on your SEO I imagine, but you certainly would see a spike in CTR which would ultimately boost your SEO. People love pictures and you'd be in a unique and highlighted position for that search result.

However, at this point I feel it's fair to warn you that you may be in a grey area when it comes to Google's policy. In the Rich Snippets Guidelines (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2722261?hl=en) it is discussed that webmasters have a responsibility to ensure that their information is properly represented and not misleading. While you aren't exactly tricking your clients, the fact that you are declaring a product image in the recipe category may in fact violate this policy. This policy is not an automatic one and therefore not black and white. It's really up to the Rich Snippets Manual Review team (which is surprisingly extensive). Punishments can include manual removal from the rich snippets program permanently and manual trust/quality penalties that would harm your SEO long term.

So while this may be possible, and may be temporarily beneficial I would personally advise against anything but proper micro-form markup.

Hi Andrews,

While the difference between dashes and underscores use to be a big issue a few years back its something that seems to hold minimal merit now. The two can be used rather interchangeably without any major impact. This was phased out around the same time as exact-match-domain value was as far too many people were abusing the long-tail dash page method.

1. CPC and Positioning: Here is some detailed info on qualityscore: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454010?hl=en it will help raise your add position without raising your price (depending on competitive factors)

2. Linguistic Differences: Noted just wanted to cover all our bases!

4. Conversion Opportunity: Excellent! Consider linking your Adwords and Analytics to run A|B testing on a landing page for your Ad as well!

Yeah it certainly sounds like your campaigns are going to cost more in these regions! In your Google Adwords dashboard on the 9th column to your right, you will see "Avg Pos" this is the average position which the ad appears. Just like Google organic search lower position means less visibility and less clicks by an exponential factor. The first 3 ads display above the organic results and get roughly 60% of the ad clickers, and then 4-10 sit to the right of the organic results and get the other 40% (diminishes quickly). Anything below 10 is seen only if the user goes to the 2nd page or further.

Your average position will be expressed as something 2.7 it's an average of all the times you appeared. This is a good indicator that you may need to increase your bid and your qualityscore.

You can check your QualityScore by hovering over your keyword in the dashboard to see its performance results!

Best of luck!

The only thing to watch out for when re-directing mobile users is their lander.

Far too often when a user tries to access www.yoursite.com/thispage.php?=file.pdf they are just redirected to m.yoursite.com rather than m.yoursite.com/thispage.php?=file.pdf

As long as you let them access the content they are seeking on a single clickthrough to your mobile site re-directing them should be fine.

It may be also worthwhile reviewing the common practices in optimizing for smartphones as provided by Google:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/common-mistakes

They point out that it may be worthwhile having your videos in a more global platform such as HTML5 rather than flash!

The others are right Google analytics can not hurt your SEO; however, what it can do is provide some pretty effective reporting on factors than can hurt/improve your SEO.

More and more SEO is becoming about user experience, things like CTR, Bounce Rate and Time on Site matter as crucial factors in your quality and authority scores in Googles eyes.

Google Analytics will allow you to identify areas of user experience weakness, improve them and increase your ranking in the long term. While many people will tell you it doesn't matter if you have GA it infact can make a huge, and positive difference.

I would be VERY careful about any backlink structure between multiple sites you own especially if they are on the same hosting or clearly related to the same company or google verified profile.

If you have a high value backlink going to your three niche sites, all which direct to your main site and that is working for you I would leave it at that. By directly linking to your main site not only do you continue to diminish the page juice of that site but you risk Google seeing this as a purchased link or a link ring due to your related properties.

Remember good long term SEO isn't about tricking Google, it's about working to build a great experience for your users, and establish content authority. Links from one site isn't going to do that, and trying to build your own pyramid of sites isn't going to help you either.

Put the user first, build good content, make your site accessible and useable and get involved in any active communities that your niche has and strengthen your sites internals just as much, if not more than, you worry about links.

Very true Miriam,

Also I thought I may add that Google respects syntax - one of the modern debates in relation to your content is all about LSI relations. Google expects to see things like "Golf Clubs in Leeds" and will still rank it for "golf club leeds"!

You don't need the exact phrase zeroed in to rank.

The best way to research this is to use the google keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS)

Throw your target keyphrase in there and look at the and let it populate ad group ideas (only seen when logged in). What you'll notice is a lot of these adword ideas have the EXACT same monthly traffic, local monthly traffic, difficulty and CPC price - that is because Google treats them as the EXACT same phrase.

Golf clubs leeds
Golf clubs in leeds
leeds golf clubs

They will all likely be treated as interchangeable in Google to some extent and a diversity of them will really help to hammer home your SEO while making it look natural.

First, is this content dynamic? Depending on how the user progresses through these choices a search engine may not even see this information.

Second, as long as those aren't the pages you are trying to rank I can't see them actually having that big of an impact (if any) on your overall SEO. There is a difference between having pages that have the same content, and having pages that are duplicate content.

Rel canonical would be another way to save your skin, and making sure that the choices themselves are no-follow links (as long as there is some other method to get to the deeper pages).

Personally for the sake of SEO and user experience (which is far more important) I'd talk to the company about creating a dynamic selection wizard that could be a popup and once the user makes all their choices brings them to the right HTML page.

The HTML pages would be open, crawl-able, structured and sitemapped and the wizard would by a dynamic widget loaded in from a page that was robots disallowed. Helping both the human and spider experience - just my two cents!

Best of luck!

In all honesty people worry far too much about the duplicate content rule. Duplicate content is primarily for content sites and only penalized on a large scale.

In your case not only is the about page one that you likely aren't hoping to get ranked, but it's such a small factor that I doubt it will come into play.

Your inbound marketing strategy is likely to be much more than SEO traffic in fact I'd be willing to bed that a good 60%+ of your traffic is direct and/or social. In such a case as long as users are able to find the information they need on the site (and ultimately convert to bookings keeping the end-client happy and cash flowing) then I wouldn't worry about the "About Us" page.

Remember two things:

1. Put the customer experience first and everything else is gravy.

2. A good business (and good marketing) is a bigger picture than just SEO these days. Focus on what traffic origin makes sense for you and make sure they can access the information they need.

Here's what Matt Cutts had to say on the issue:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459