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Hi,
  Duplicate content issues are created when the same content appears on two different urls. So if your content appears on www.yourexample.com/brandaproduct and www.yourexample.com/brandbproduct, then that's when it's an issue.

You can do this by changing dynamic elements via personalisation, but it's not necessarily easy to do, and could well end up risking a penalty for masking/cloaking if there's an error.

Personally, I'd rethink why you're running both brands - are they targeting different audiences/locations?

If there's no differentiation between the two brands, then there's no point in having them. But if one is targeting a different demographic, then there's a reason to create unique content which will appeal specifically to their audience. The actual product and data may be the same, but the benefit of bespoke content for the right audience will be an increase in conversion rates to actually purchase your services, rather than simply avoiding any SEO penalties...

It's an approach which is done by many, many companies. For example, I worked for a major UK publisher with 5 magazines all covering the same topic area, but one was aimed at beginners, one was for advanced users, and others concentrated on specific niches within the market...

What CMS platform are you using? If you're on WordPress, for example, you can use the Redirection plugin to redirect any non-existing url to an existing relevant page.

Alternatively you can do the same with your .htaccess file.

1. I have a few sites on Godaddy and haven't seen anything unusual occurring for soft 404s.

2. It depends on the cause - are they a large percentage of the total indexed pages? By the sound of it they're only 2 or 3 from a total of how many?

The solution is usually to check why your pages aren't returning a proper 404 error code if they don't exist, or whether there is an issue with them being redirected somewhere.

In terms of Search Engine Optimisation, I haven't seen any categorical proof that active or passive tone will make a big difference.

When it comes to writing style, the use of an active voice is encouraged in journalism, copywriting etc. It's much more effective at encouraging users to take action (i.e. buying a product for example).

Whether or not that should be included in the Yoast plugin depends on personal preference. Personally I use the comprehension scores and anything grammatical as a rough guide, but nothing more than that. Especially when WP still insists on American spelling checks, and most of the subjects I write about tend to use fairly niche technical terms which will be flagged up every time they appear as a spelling mistake, and as potentially too complex for everyone.

I'd say it's always worth testing on a couple of products if you're unsure. Personally I would try and phrase as much as possible in an active voice anyway (Especially any Call To Action), but if, for example, I wanted to echo Wikipedia or a scholarly academic article, I might choose to go more passive...

Any automated checker will only ever be a reasonable guide - and I say that as a big fan of the Yoast plugin - there should always be human judgement applied to whatever is recommended...

Hi - it's nothing to worry about, as Thomas said.

All it means is that anyone going to nappyvalley.net is correctly redirected to the www. version. That's right, as you always want to pick one version of the url as the canonical version, and redirect the others to it.

And when you set up in Moz, you tried to track the non-www. version which is being redirected. Just select the www. version and it'll all work fine.

Google Page Rank was deprecated and not updated since the end of 2014, and the public facing Page Rank metric was generally too broad to be able to use as a useful tool...

The only change now is that Google has killed it off completely for any third party tools to pull data, so it's completely dead...

In terms of your own site, you're better off looking at whether a page is attracting traffic via organic & paid search and social channels as a measure of success.

In terms of external sites, the various tools (Including Moz) which allow you to check metrics are generally more useful - Page Rank never supplied an equivalent to Domain Authority (As a 'site' page rank was the page rank of the individual home page), and although the crawl amount often isn't quite as wide as the resources of Google, the individual PA scores are more granular, so you can more accurately look at closer competitors if that's your thing...

There's quite a big factor for not ranking yet which is easy to overlook when you've put your heart and soul into what is a decent content page.

Look at the competitors - e.g. if I google 'Moving Tips', you're up against Buzzfeed, Goodhousekeeping and the BBC for starters.

blog.storitz.com DA: 27. Buzzfeed DA 94.

Looking at most of the first page and a bit, they've all got higher Domain and Page Authority. Without having the time to investigate right now, my first suggestion would be to run some of the specific competitor ranking pages/sites through Open Explorer and see where they are getting links from and how it compares to you. Creating great content is a requirement these days, not a complete solution - you still need to encourage traffic and links...

It depends on the competitive nature and how ethical the industry niche is as a whole. You tend to find certain areas of bad practice get cleaned up more effectively than others - and don't forget that there was supposed to be a major Penguin manual algorithm update rolling out since the start of the year which has been continually been delayed before it moves into constant rolling auto updates - so unethical practices may be even more risky than before in the next few months.

If you're in position 3, I wouldn't worry too much - there are some studies which show positions 2 & 3 can actually get more clicks than 1 depending on user behaviour, and the increase in PPC slots at the top of results pages only confuses things further (Especially as reports today indicate about 50% of people don't even realise there are paid ads at the top of search results).

I'd agree with Dmitrii that for the time being, it's best to concentrate on what you're doing, and making sure that you won't get caught out by any algorithm updates, then wait a month or two at least to see what affect the next rollout has... Obviously in the meantime, you may be losing some business, but it's potentially more cost effective to invest in some PPC in the short term to see whether that has a bigger impact than moving up organically...

If you go with a single domain, you can use hreflang to cover duplicate content targetting each location, which works for same-language/different country.

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

'Some example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended:

• You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content, like forums, typically do this.
• Your content has small regional variations with** similar content in a single language**. For example, you might have English-language content targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland.
• Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.'

Hopefully the situation is already resolved, but having recently had to do this for both clients and my own projects...

First, make sure that the email address used for your Youtube account is added as a manager to the G+ page you want to be linked in the future.You then need to go into Youtube settings and click on the option to DIsconnect from Google+.

This will remove the link to the unwanted page - it takes about 20 minutes plus for the change to take effect across Google+ and Youtube.

You can then go to Advanced under the Name section of the Youtube Settings and click to link your desired Google+ page.

I'd recommend checking everything is all working, then finally go back into Google+ with your original Youtube email address and delete the now extraneous and unwanted page.