Andy-TWDG

To be honest, they seem to be doing their own SEO, of course they will want a link back if they add a logo, that's sort of thing is a well known / used SEO link building method, "widgets"

No problem, you know where my inbox is.

Not a problem, glad I could help mate. Also it's fantastic that you have a new dev onboard, I wish you all the best for 2012 mate!!! :-)

Ste has made some good points above.

Seriously I'm seeing loads of mis-leading and contradictory advice on here, on-site SEO makes up roughly 20%-25% of your over all SEO don't worry too much about loads of copy!! It's an ecommerce site, get the code structure right, title tags and h1s then make sure the off site SEO is as good ad can be... An also I would join a real SEO forum like SEOMoz or SEOForums.org they will give you far better advice. No wonder you are confused, contradictory advice from everybody!!

Sounds like the redirecting of duplicate pages has had a good effect then?

Do you have any live examples of work you have done?

Yes I know they are, but registering domains and duplicate content are different. Matt cuts has explained the issue in his video...

If you are talking about google using the canonical link on the sites to tell it which version to use.... The site in question doesn't have a Rel="canonical" Matt Cutts describes the Canonical link element here... http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 (1min 50sec in roughly) this wasn't posted 3 years ago... This video basically tells you exactly what i have said, and might be a good way to fix it, it even mentions the 301 redirects. Have a good listen to what Matt says here and compare it to your site set up. or read here... http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Your main domain seems to be the non www version... Yahoo SiteExplorer is showing the following for backlinks to your site.. http://www.thegeekestlink.com/store - 575 thegeekestlink.com/store - 21 http://www.thegeekestlink.com - 2631 thegeekestlink.com - 0 Essentially all four of these are the same page... as you have a redirect set up to go into the /store/ Your main top level domain has 0 back links according to yahoo... people seem to prefer to link to the www version as this has 2631 backlinks found. The added complication to this is the /store/ some people are linking to this too.. All of these means that you are missing out on securing all the pagerank which is being passed to your site from your link partners, the PageRank which is being passed is being split at least 4 times here. I would imagine your competitor doesn't have this problem.

Ahhh .. I remember our convo last week.. Ok to start you may be splitting your PageRank between two versions of your home page... http://thegeekestlink.com & http://www.thegeekestlink.com you have no "301 redirect" set up to handle this, so some external links may by passing PR to the www. version or the non www. version... In-fact looking at it.. all of your pages may have this issue,, two versions being indexed... Also.. the domain auto redirects to /store/.. again backlinks will link to the root domain not the /store/ directory...might be an issue. i have performed this search in google: "site:thegeekestlink.com/store/" this confirms my suspicions, two versions of some of your pages are being indexed... this needs fixing ASAP.

Are your URL's SEO Friendly? or do they have URL Variables throughout?? We could really do with looking at the website in question... can you post it up here?

Hi Abbey, do you have any local charities near by? Also it depends what sort of volunteer work you want i guess, i have done a lot of volunteering for Epilepsy Charities online... Online marketing for them etc..

I agree with you Steve, to some degree. I have been running localised SEO campaigns for skip companies for roughly 6 years, search volumes can be very low with local search, with only a handful of keywords bringing traffic with SEO, combined with PPC targeting 100's of terms and it's an unstoppable force :-) (which comes back to my earlier post)

Cheers buddy :-)