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I use 2 different sitemaps and submit them both to Google and the other search engines

No they all get crawled and considered for indexing providing that you don't have too many URLs in the file and the file loads for Google. I always put the homepage first though, and i break out sitemap files into sections of the site because my site is millions of pages. You can leave the priority tag out of the sitemap.xml.

It doesn't really matter, you are sending a little more PR to your hompage if you link both places. I would make sure you fill out your alt tag in the image.

There's a bit of a problem going on with Google WMT at the moment - might have something to do with the PageRank update.  Here's a link to the thread going on in the Google Products Forum. Looks as though Google is aware of the problem.  Give it a few days and things should calm down.

Thank you Dana! It's something we have been considering. Do you feel that Panda specifically would be penalising for the titles and titles? Or another part of Google? Is it your view that the issue is that we have boilerplate titles, or too many very similar skills listed? Or both?

Howdy, Actually, in the short-term, it may be beneficial to list both in your sitemap. The reason for this is that you want search engines to try and crawl the "old" url to process the 301 that it finds there. The quicker they visit the old URL, the faster they will realize the page is redirecting, and this actually will reduce any perceived duplicated content issues on the part of the search engines. Generally, you would do this with 2 sitemaps - one with the old URLs and one listing the new, and submit them both to Google via Webmaster Tools. You would leave the old one in place for 30 days before removing it. After 30 days, however, it's best to use a single sitemap with only one set of URLs. As Ben mentioned, you don't want search engines wasting crawling resources on forever trying to visit URLs that redirect. So after a time, it would be best to remove the old URLs from the sitemap. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the AceSEF Joomla package, but I believe there is a way to configure it to remove those URLs - even if manually according to the feature set: http://www.joomace.net/blog/xmap-joomap-sef-sm-2-and-acesef Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

I understand completely where you're coming from. It sounds like Google's gone a little wacky. I think you can review the person's blog that would effectively allow you to review what you think of that person's work. The person section in there is for you. You need to put your companies or personal information in their for Google local/places and other sites to find you. you might want to consider adding and Hcard you can of course review the blog as a place. Or the URL what are they selling or the product information. That's how I would take it and that's how I would structure it. Their examples are a bit out there and I thought the same thing as you however you should use it and use it to the best of what you believe is correct. If you want to review product well I consider writing a blog work and the product is the intellectual property and yes you can use stars but you need another plug-in. I really like the snippet plug-in as well for Schema it allows you more freedom. I would honestly ask Raven tools themselves they probably will give you the best answer possible. I hope I have been of help Thomas I believe a person/business can have reviews but I think only the business is if it's tied to the person.

Yup, Don't mass delete.  If you don't have a lot of links, check each link and see if it is a good site that links to you.  It is possible that the site that linked to you may not have high PR but that site is a niche related to your site.  Those can be good to generate quality traffic.

Yes I would think Google would consider it spamming - there are wat too many instances of Celotex in the copy. I would look for places to remove instances of Celotex where not needed. | Celotex TB4012 | 1.2x2.4 = 2.88m² | 12 | 0.50 | 2.00 | 0.50 | 1.44 Celotex TB4020 | 1.2x2.4 = 2.88m² | 20 | 0.90 | 1.11 | 0.72 | 2.07 Celotex TB4025 | 1.2x2.4 = 2.88m² | 25 | 1.10 | 0.91 | 0.85 | 2.45 Celotex CW4025 | 20x0.45x1.2 = 10.8m² | 25 | 1.10 | 0.91 | 0.85 | 9.18 Celotex FR5025 | 16x1.2x2.4 = 46.08m² | 25 | 1.10 | 0.91 | 1.00 | 46.08 Celotex PL4025 | 26x1.2x2.4 = 74.88m² | 37.5 | 1.20 | 0.87 | 9.06 | 678.41 Celotex TB4030 | 1.2x2.4 = 2.88m² | 30 | 1.35 | 0.74 | 0.98 | 2.82     ETC Celotex FR5030 | ?x1.2x2.4 = m² | 30 | 1.35 | 0.00 | 1.16 | 0.00 Celotex TB4035 | 1.2x2.4 = 2.88m² | 35 | 1.55 | 0.65 | 1.11 | 3.20 Celotex FR5035 | ?x1.2x2.4 = m² | 35 | 1.55 | 0.00 | 1.32 | 0.00 Celotex TB4040 | 1.2x2.4 = 2.88m² | 40 | 1.80 | 0.56 | 1.26 | 3.63 Celotex CW4040 | 12x0.45x1.2 = 6.48m² | 40 | 1.80 | 0.56 | 1.26 | 8.16 Celotex CG5000 | 12x0.45x1.2 = 6.48m² | 40 | 1.80 | 0.56 | 1.48 | 9.59 Celotex FR5040 | ?x1.2x2.4 = m² | 40 | 1.80 | 0.00 | 1.48 | 0.00 Celotex CG5000 | 0x0.45x1.2 = 0m² | 90 | 1.85 | 0.54 | 2.55 | 0.00 Celotex EL3050 | x0.6x1.2 = 1.44m² | 50 | 1.85 | 0.54 | 0.00 | 0.00 | Also way too many instances in the copy, less is more with new Google algorithms. Celotex have rebranded their improved products the '4000' series. For example, Celotex GA3000 becomes Celotex GA4000 and Celotex XR3150 changes to Celotex XR4150. These changes reflects Celotex's improvement in product performance, and highlights the improved thermal performance of the boards. Title and meta descriptions are too long <title>Celotex Rigid PIR Insulation Boards GA4000, TB4000, XR4000, CG5000, CW4000, EL3000, FF4000, FR5000, PL4000, SW3000, PL4000, TA3000, TC3000 and TD4000\. All available from Just Insulation, UKtitle> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">Description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Buy your Celotex insulation boards online at the very best prices, sa fely and securely. Celotex high performance polyisocyanurate (PIR) boards offer an unrivalled range of thic knesses from 12mm – 200mm with products suitable for pitched and flat roofs, walls, cavityies, and floors ... along with a Class O fire rated product range for when project specifications demand enhanced fire performance.</a>" />

include the URL and main keyword(s) and we can take a look. It's hard to say without looking at the code.

My goodness ! they atleast they can give a dofollow link ! this is bad ! As Irving told that no-follow will be a problem. link nofollow will be simple no backlink, but the authorship nofollow is new ! consider that advice of the expert one ! we sometimes make the link no-follow, but not for the author google plus !

I'm pretty sure Irving means: site:www.xyz.com Put that in the search bar itself.

Thanks for your reply Moosa! The author of the WP plugin has responded to me with the following: Pretty Link does send a nofollow/noindex in the http header of the request (you won't see it in the HTML because its sent with the http request). I don't think he's making things up, at the same time I'm not code savvy enough to confirm it. What do you think? One or the other way, I will also follow the hard coded no follow from now on. Just to wrap it up. If by any chance, all outgoing links are still FOLLOW, I believe it would be the wrong move and suspicious to search engines, if I went out now NO following all links that there are in the site. Correct? Thanks again for your help!

GWT is clean. And we never had any paid links or something special. All we did was concentrate on social sharing, good on page optimization and then good blog posts about those keywords and social bookmarking mostly. Thats all. Very odd.

I think in a way you are asking what is best from the SEO prospective... to use a logo as an image or to use it as a text? If this is the question that technically there is no problem either ways... if you are using it as text it will be counted as a text and if you are going to use it as an image you can always add alt tag to let Google know about its value in terms of text... But, from the user perspective it is better to have an image as it can give more attractiveness as compare to a text with CSS.

Ahh, now I understand better what you are asking. So, you still want the same URL indexed, but you want Google to be reflecting the new content. Yes, in this case, I would use Fetch as Googlebot. I would also recommend resubmitting your sitemap. That will help too. Thanks for the clarification! Hope that helps. Dana

Sounds like a waste of money. Simply pinging search engines is not going to influence how likely they would be to index your content. It may help discovery, but you can use free tools to do that (pingoat, pingomatic), Wordpress has the function built in.

Yup, deleted.

OK, so as so often happens, after asking a long, drawn-out question, I've gone off and found a working solution. Whereas when I originally tried it the "?rel-author" tag didn't work for me before, now it does. I'm ready and willing to accept that I'd done it wrong the first time around... but just in case anyone will find this ramble of any use whatsoever, here's what I did (as per Google's instructions): Add a G+ profile link to each article posted - such as [View Google+ Profile]([your Google+ profile address]?rel=author) Make sure that under the "Contributor to" section the root domain of the site is listed. You don't need to put in a link to the specific article - just the root domain. Test the link using the structured testing tool again - it should give a pretty much instant result, hopefully in the positive. Wish that you'd done this properly in the first place.