agreed Erica

not sure that's its a problem to do it - there are thousands of respectable sites out there with footer navigation that includes a link to the home page - this is no different than one link with the brand name in it.

yeah I think there is debate as to whether the actual text link (hidden with CSS) is more powerful than the img alt text (which has the brand name in it now). Maybe I'll test with both and see what works best.

Hey man - yeah, logo links back. Main purpose of footer link would be to sure up the internal linking that signals the engines that the home page should rank for the brand name. Background here is that I am actually dealing with a site that I took over from another SEO. He had a footer link on each page linking back to the home page with just the brand name as the anchor text. My client recently went through a name change which included a domain change as well. The other "wrench" in this one is that the new name is not extremely unique, and is basically the product name of another huge corporations flagship product. Sorry I can't provide specifics on the actual names. I only give that background to explain why I won't "easily rank for my brand name" in this specific situation.

Quick question - is it a best practice to add a footer link on each page of a website that points back to your home page, with the anchor text being your official brand name?

Hi Jannkuzel - as far as duplicate content, it depends on what pages are being tagged as duplicate content as far as what you do to correct. For instance, the tools in SEOmoz tell me I have dup content for about 50-60 pages on one of my client's sites, but the reason is because each of the URL's is the same except for a product ID (&pid=540985). Each id loads slightly different content into a few areas of the page. So, the system thinks these are all the same page. These pages are not important pages on the site so I'm not that worried about them. Without knowing what is on your pages that are being tagged as duplicate content, it's hard to tell you what to do to correct it. Generally, you are on the right track in that you want to change the content on each page to be different enough (keep in mind that the info that is spiderable needs to be unique, pics, iframes, etc don't make much of a difference) that it won't get tagged as duplicate content.

As the title tag is the most important on-page ranking factor, you want your targeted keyword to be at the very beginning of the tag, with as close to an exact match of the keyword as possible. Even though it's a pain, yes, you would want to give each of your 200 pages unique title tags. It's fine to put the Brand name at the end, that's normally where I put mine.

H1 - is actually not quite as important as it used to be, but is still very important. H1 doesn't really have any relation to the Title Tag. Bottom line is that again, you want as close to an exact match of your main targeted keyword(s) in the H1 for sure. Also helps to work them into your other header tags as well (h2,3,4). Find a balance between making it legible and working in your most important targeted terms. If at all possible, use the exact term you are trying to target. Positioning (beginning or end of tag) doesn't matter as much as it does in the Title Tag.

Let me know if this helps!

Hi Robert -

Yes we did it on the URL level, but the client is using IIS as opposed to Apache, so we had to figure out a way to use a global 301 that trickled down to the page level. Each page is redirecting to it's new home on the server side (www.oldsite-innerpage.com to www.newsite-innerpage.com). We actually ended up with a global re-write rule that still allowed it to be a page-level redirect. Eventually we will be going into IIS and writing in server-side 301's for each individual page. It's been 2 weeks so I'm hoping to see return of rank here in 2 weeks time or so. Thanks for your input.

Hi Adrian - thanks for your reply. for client privacy purposes I cannot reveal the site.

no, the old site is not showing on the SERP anymore, and no, there were no 301's to the old site

Hello all -- just looking for those who have implemented site-wide 301 redirects due to a domain change. I am about 2 weeks into mine and am seeing minimum 5, maximum 21 spot drops in many of my targeted terms. My pages have strong GPR, with most being 3 or higher.

Anyone out there been able to track a ballpark of when rank will return? The 301 redirects were implemented correctly, with 1 to 1 setups in most cases. Google has updated the listings with the new domain name, but I'm taking a huge rank hit.

Any experience on how long I can expect (I know it's different for every situation) would be great!

Thanks.

Hi Jannkuzel - as far as duplicate content, it depends on what pages are being tagged as duplicate content as far as what you do to correct. For instance, the tools in SEOmoz tell me I have dup content for about 50-60 pages on one of my client's sites, but the reason is because each of the URL's is the same except for a product ID (&pid=540985). Each id loads slightly different content into a few areas of the page. So, the system thinks these are all the same page. These pages are not important pages on the site so I'm not that worried about them. Without knowing what is on your pages that are being tagged as duplicate content, it's hard to tell you what to do to correct it. Generally, you are on the right track in that you want to change the content on each page to be different enough (keep in mind that the info that is spiderable needs to be unique, pics, iframes, etc don't make much of a difference) that it won't get tagged as duplicate content.

As the title tag is the most important on-page ranking factor, you want your targeted keyword to be at the very beginning of the tag, with as close to an exact match of the keyword as possible. Even though it's a pain, yes, you would want to give each of your 200 pages unique title tags. It's fine to put the Brand name at the end, that's normally where I put mine.

H1 - is actually not quite as important as it used to be, but is still very important. H1 doesn't really have any relation to the Title Tag. Bottom line is that again, you want as close to an exact match of your main targeted keyword(s) in the H1 for sure. Also helps to work them into your other header tags as well (h2,3,4). Find a balance between making it legible and working in your most important targeted terms. If at all possible, use the exact term you are trying to target. Positioning (beginning or end of tag) doesn't matter as much as it does in the Title Tag.

Let me know if this helps!