Hi Matt.

Perhaps I misunderstood the question but I believe Toren only wishes to prevent the subdomain from being indexed. If you restrict subdomain access by IP it would prevent visitors from accessing the content which I don't believe is the goal.

Toren, I would not recommend that solution. There is nothing to prevent Googlebot from crawling your site via almost any IP. If you found 100 IPs used by the crawler and blocked them all, there is nothing to stop the crawler from using IP #101 next month. Once the subdomain's content is located and indexed, it will be a headache fixing the issue.

The best solution is always going to be a noindex meta tag on the pages you do not wish to be indexed. If that method is too much work or otherwise undesirable, you can use the robots.txt solution. There is no circumstance I can imagine where you would modify your htaccess file to block googlebot.

A test was done a few months ago. While the test concluded a hyphen harmed the rankings, the test only involved one example (3 sites) and the content was not the same, although the content was moved between sites.

http://blog.silktide.com/2011/06/how-one-tiny-hyphen-destroyed-our-seo-efforts/

Google's algorithm is not known to us so we are left to guess. There could be some case studies but even so, the algorithm changes around 500 times per year so it is impossible to know for sure.

My best guess is, all forms of attention grabbing on a page such as bold and italics are put in a bucket which share the weighting bonus. If you have only a couple words on a page appear in bold, then all the weight would apply to those couple words. If you present the entire page in bold, then all terms would be treated equally.

My normal recommendation would be to use bold for the most important words, or the most relevant ones. If you feel the design of the page improves by using bold text on the first couple of sentences, consider changing the text color instead. I have seen some creative results in this regard but don't have any examples to share.

An offsite established blog such as Google's blogspot or WordPress.com can benefit your site. Those types of sites overcome several of the challenges which arise when you try to set up a blog.

Advantages: quick and easy to set up, a unique C block for hosting, no worries about site maintenance, etc.

Disadvantages:

• your blog content would not be on your site so would not benefit from the main site's DA. Also, your main site wont benefit from the links your content will hopefully generate. While you can link from your blog to the main site, it is not as beneficial as having a direct link to your site.

• as Alan shared, your main site would also lose out on the freshness benefits a quality blog can offer

• internal linking is also a fantastic means of properly directing the flow of PR throughout your site. With a single site, there is software which can automatically generate all your internal links as appropriate. For an external site, you would need to manually create all the links which is a lot more work.

Overall the best results should be achieved by integrating a blog into your existing site. You could choose an external blog and it can benefit your site, but not as much as an internal blog would.

Hi Jim.

Duplicate content refers to the content itself being made available on multiple URLs. You can duplicate content internally or externally.

Would I be penalized for duplicate content if I purchased country-specific domains and pointed them to the .com site?

No. Let's assume you own www.mysite.com and also own www.mysite.fr. If you use a 301 redirect to point the french URL to your main site, there would be no penalty as all the content is still only on one site.

Another note is translated content is not considered as duplicate content.

A final note is country-specific sites can duplicate your .com site without it being considered duplicate content. If you have a .fr site it could be an exact duplicate of your .com site but the .fr site, assuming it was properly set up, would rank well in Google.fr whereas the .com site would rank well in Google.com or whichever country was the focus of the .com site.