Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
I would say a bit of both. It is fine to repeat your primary keyword phrase several times on the page; the number of times depends upon the amount of content. SEOmoz's On Page tool recommends 4 repetitions. However, you should also try to use some synonyms and secondary target keyword phrases also.
A good resource I saw posted today which might be of interest:
Hi there!
Ok, it is difficult to know all the ins and outs without looking at the site, but the immediate issue is that your robots.txt setup is incorrect. robots.txt files should be one per subdomain, and cannot exist inside sub-folders:
A **robots.txt **file is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlers
From Google's page here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
You shouldn't be blocking Google from either site, and attempting to do so may be the problem with why your hreflang directives are not being detected. You should move to having a single robots.txt file located at https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt, with a link to a single sitemap index file. That sitemap index file should then link to each of your two UK & US sitemap files.
You should ensure you have hreflang directives for every page. Hopefully after these changes you will see things start to get better. Good luck!
Ok, cool. To reiterate - with escaped_fragment you are just serving the same content in a tweaked format and Google recommend it rather than frown upon it. Good to be sure though.
See you at SearchLove! 
Putting aside server load / config issues, and from the pure SEO point of view.
No, you shouldn't have any major issues with that many 301s. However, what you might find is that depending on the size of your site and the frequency of Googlebots visits that some of these pages take a long time (months) to drop out of the index and be replaced by their newer alternatives. This normally isn't cause for alarm.
In some instances you might end up with pages that now have now links to them (as their parent categories were all redirected also) and so seem to get stuck and never get recrawled by Google to update. In a couple of instances I have had success using XML sitemap files that just include these 'blocked' pages (the old URLs still in the index) to prompt Google to recrawl them.
Also there is Google Webmaster Tools feature to 'crawl as Googlebot' which then prompts you to 'submit to index' which you can use to prompt recrawls on a per-page basis (but you have credits here, so should only be for the more important pages).
Best of luck!
Just to chime in on this, albeit maybe a little late now... I had the same thought as I was reading through this with using rel=canonical to point the old pages to the new for now, so the search engines don't have any duplicate content issues until a 301 redirect can take over when the new site is fully launched.
However, depending on your rollout schedule, this would mean that the SERPs would soon be indexing only the new pages. You'd need to ensure that the traffic diverter you are using would handle this. Otherwise you could put the rel=canonical on the new pages for now, which would avoid the duplicate content until you are fully launched. Then you'd remove it and 301 redirect the old pages to the new.
Just something you maybe want to think about! Hopefully your traffic diverter can handle this though.
I will just add that you need to be very careful. Maybe try the ones out that everyone has kindly suggested and then use SEOmoz Campaigns or other tools to check the quality of it.
This Whiteboard Friday post from last week has one of Bing's team pointing out how it is very important that your sitemap is of a high quality (no 404s, 302s or 301s for example), or it could be ignored completely:
If you have many URLs from the old site in the index that are all in the same directory (or a handful of directories) you can quickly and easily remove whole directories of URLs from the index via Google Search Console. We have found it to work very quickly.
Go into Search Console, selected ‘Remove URLs’ under ‘Google Index’ in the left hand menu.
Add the page or folder you want to remove, and click next. If you add the homepage, that's the same as all pages on the site. If you add a folder you'll get three options under the ‘Reason’ drop down.
One of those options is ‘Remove directory’. Select that.