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I think your suggestion in the last paragraph is an excellent one.

I'm currently in the process of putting together a "War Room" of sorts to immediately respond to negative ORM issues (think Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign,) and preparing disavows in advance might have a place in that.

Thank you. Anybody else have a comment?

One of our blog posts was just linked to from a paper.li site; the post on the site was then tweeted by the site's owner.

From what I was able to determine, paper.li is little more than an aggregator, and the tweet was most likely automated.

So, this is my two-part question: 1) Is the paper.li platform one that Penguin disapproves of, and 2) if so, should I prepare to disavow?

Perhaps I worded my question poorly.

When I've tested Schema.org, it returns a result that looks something along the lines of:

Item: widget
Price: $00.00
**Short Description: **blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah

But, what if my on-page content reads:"The **widget **comes in blue, green or yellow, and costs $00.00. It blows away the competition and could easily be described as blah, blah, blah, **blah, blah, blah, **blah, blah, blah."

In other words, the page's content is written in a narrative form, and I'd rather not have that narrative broken up with a block showing just the Item, Price, and Description—but, I'd still like to have the benefits of rich snippets.

Did that make more sense?

Thank you. I'll give it a try.

Say you've got a Magento e-commerce site and you want to add Schema.org Microdata to it to take advantage of Google's Rich Snippets feature.

Would the markup be part of the page's HTML TITLE . . . or somewhere in the bare-bones description (usually wrought by inputting data into separate fields in the CMS), e.g.,

Item: Something
Price: $00.00
Short Description: blah, blah, blah

Or, hidden somewhere in the header?

Or, can it be marked-up somewhere beneath my lengthy (and Panda-friendly) content and subsequently extracted by Google and highlighted in the SERPs?

Admittedly, I'm more than a bit late to the Schema.org party and I'm a content-guy anyway; and not much good at under-the-hood stuff. I figure I'd better get my chops together, now.

I've searched Moz.com's Q&A as well as Google's and Schema.org's and haven't come up with an answer yet that doesn't require that I learn a whole new vocabulary.

We've used freelancers from both oDesk and eLance and have been disappointed with the results. Outsourcing content creation to those in other countries (with the possible exception of certain expats) may be inexpensive ($2-$5 for a 200-300 product description) but the results tend to be thin and with awkward syntax—obviously not written by someone with a native grasp of American or UK idiom.

On the other hand, those domestic writers—if they're any good—tend to want a minimum of $25 for a well-written and researched article or product description. There are also the considerations that 1) eLance and oDesk freelancers tend to charge by the hour or by the job, which can be problematical if you'd rather pay by the piece.

Here's how we handled the situation: We needed around 600 unique product descriptions for our Magento site. On my recommendation, we hired a very recent journalism school graduate at just over minimum wage (with a timely review) and provided enough research material to begin writing the things we needed. We taught this person the very basics of SEO (keyword placement, density, etc.) and—under close supervision—set the new hire to work. After roughly 2 weeks, the content was sufficient for posting after going through a thorough optimization process (employing whatever new Panda change MOZ.com had brought to our attention that week)

And after that review period, we gave our new employee a nice increase and we had an in-house content writer (Across all channels)—saving us a ton of money—who is learning SEO as an ongoing part of the education process.

Awkward syntax and poor or incorrect use of idiom erect roadblocks to the flow of a narrative, depreciating the user experience.

It's been my experience that when a writer attempts to replicate a particular cultural context that is not natural to him or her, the user will recognize its artificiality—even if only on a subconscious level. An analogy would be a motion picture with dubbed—rather than subtitled—dialog: There's something that's just off.

According to Google user experience trumps, doesn't it?  (See, I used an idiom right there!) So, for what its worth my advice would be to stay away.

I've been following various threads having to do with URL length and Google's happiness therewith and have yet to find an answer to the question posed in the title. Some answers and discussions have come close, but none I've found have addressed this with any specificity.

Here are four hypothetical URLs of varying lengths and configurations:

• EXAMPLE ONE:
  my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (115 characters)

• EXAMPLE TWO:

sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (126 characters)

• EXAMPLE THREE:

www.sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (130 characters)

• EXAMPLE FOUR:

http://www.sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (137 characters)

Assuming the examples contain appropriate keywords and are linked to appropriate anchor text (etc.,) how would Google look upon each? All I've been able to garner thus far is that URLs should be as short as possible while still containing and contextualizing keywords.

I have 500+ URLs to review for the company I work for and could use some guidance; yes, I know I should test, but testing is problematical to the extreme; I look to the collective/accumulated wisdom of the MOZVerse for help.

Thanks.

I've been tasked with writing scripts for upward of 100 YouTube videos describing my company's products. In more than a few cases, the products are so similar as to be almost identical; unfortunately, they aren't and will require their own videos.

If I create a "template" script, I would save hours and hours of tedium. For example:

Video 1:

(VOICEOVER) Buy the  ABC widget today!

Video 2:

(VOICEOVER) Buy the XYZ widget today!

So, my question is: Would I be looking at a duplicate content issue? Jeff McRichie's terrific Whiteboard Friday about YouTube Ranking Factors mentioned that YouTube has an auto-transcription feature that might expose my self-plagiarism, and I don't want to get dinged.

BTW, this isn't a matter of my being too lazy to write individualized content; it's more that 1) the products are almost identical, and 2) I have just about a week to write, produce, and act(!) in all of them.

A few months ago, in hopes of a) helping new customers navigate the sometimes-arcane language used in the precious metals industry and b) earning some props from Google for making the site more user friendly, I talked the Powers-That-Be into allowing me to create a glossary with links from some unfamiliar terms in each product description and added appropriate <title>tages for each term.</p> <p>My question is: <strong>In the opinion of SEOMoz was this endeavor a brilliant, transformative SEO brainstorm—or just a waste of my time?</strong></p> <p>We haven't been running analytics, so we are flying blind.</p> <p>Here's the 411:<br /> <br />Website: www.goldmart.com<br />Glossary: www.goldmart.com/glossary</p> <p>A sample description: http://www.goldmart.com/1-oz-pamp-suisse-lunar-snake-gold-bar-9999-fine-in-assay.html</p></title>

I believe this has been addresses and answered previously, but despite searching the Q&A archives, I was unable to find the question and answer. So, please be gentle and patient:

We have an eCommerce site with several hundred products, most of which use the structure:

www.mysite.com/subcategory/itemA.html.

We wish to feature itemA as a "daily special" item, and our Magento developer has recommended:

www.mysite.com/internet-daily-special/**itemA.html **

Because itemA.html is the same page—albeit following a different path—will Google see this as duplicate content?

Thanks.

ScribeContent.com does much more than I need. After viewing the video and digging into the guts of the site, I believe it is more of an SEO tool—plus, I didn't notice anything at all about Panda.

Hmmm . . . Seems more than a bit pricey, but I might take 'er out for a spin if I can't find a more reasonably-priced one.

Thanks.

Does anybody know of a tool that can "grade" content for Panda compliance. For example, it might look at:

• the total number of words on the page

• the average number of words in sentences

• grammar

• spelling

• repetitious words and/or phrases

• Readability—using algorithms such as:

• Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease
• Flesch Kincaid Grade Level
• Gunning Fog Score
• Coleman Liau Index
• Automated Readability Index (ARI)

For the last 5 months I've been writing and rewriting literally 100s of catalog descriptions—adhering to the "no duplicate content" and "adding value" rubrics—but in an extremely informal style. I would like to know if I'm at least meeting Google Panda's minimum standards.

I just checked the page's source code using my browser and—lo and behold!—there was the META KEYWORD tag . . . which it appears Magento had populated on its own.

I'm not competent to edit templates, and as long as there's no penalty, I don't think I'll mess with it. It's unfortunate, though, that the on-page optimization tool doesn't like it.

Two questions regarding the META KEYWORDS tag:

1. Does Google actually penalize you for using the KEYWORD META tag, or does it just ignore it?

2. On a related matter, I've noticed that when I use the On-Page Optimization Tool, it indicates that my header includes the KEYWORD tag, although I've taken great pains to remove keywords from pages that had been optimized by a previous SEO. I'm using Magento - Could it be a legacy issue? Would that make a difference?

For the last few months I've been rewriting website descriptions for the company I work for, trying to comply with the Panda algorithm as best I could. There are about 400 items. Today I am going to begin working on titles and descriptions.

Question: Once I'm finished and have run the site through SEOMoz's pro tools, I would like to have Google look at the site _**in toto  **_once the changes have been made so that maybe we can procure some decent organic rankings.

Can the site be resubmitted, and what is the procedure?

Ps. Today I am asking my fellow employees to help me proofread each description for grammar, spelling, accuracy, and keyword placement. I am also asking for suggestions from them.

I'm optimizing a Magento site and have a question regarding duplicate content. Currently, you can dig down to an individual product listings with URLs similar to this:

(1) http://www.foo.com/category/sub-category/sub-sub-category/item.html

However, we also have a "Top 50" area, with a link to the same page; however, the URL for that page is:

(2) http://www.foo.com/item.html

Both are dynamic, so a static page for (2) with different content is out of the question. I asked IT to have both (1)  and (2) point to exactly the same page, within the same categor(ies), but they said I would have choose one or the other

So, here are my questions:

1. Will Google consider the pages to be duplicates of each other, and thus incur a penalty;

2. If I were to choose one structure, which would be the "friendliest?"

I've think I've come across questions similar to this in Q&A, but haven't been able to locate them; so, I'm sorry to be posting a "duplicate question." I've been busy writing completely different product descriptions, nice and deep and value-rich, for more than 300 items and categories and am only now starting to look at current SEO protocols; I'm hoping to ask Google for a site reevaluation in another 2 weeks or so.

Thanks.