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Thank you for your answers easyrider and Ewan!

Hi Bilal, Google will use hreflang to help determine which pages will show and where. Geo-targeting isn't much use to you in this instance, as you can only geo-target, not language target - so you'd be determining a physicial location (i.e. a country) rather than particular language speakers. I've never been particularly confident of the geo-targeting option in Google webmaster tools in any case - it didn't seem to make much of a difference to the sites I saw it implemented on. Hope this helps Hannah

Does anyone know whether google marks down websites reported for copyright issues? (I realise with the big G everything is an element of guesswork, but if anyone has any experience of this please chip in.) Cheers P Hi Wayne Thanks for that. Confirmed what we have been thinking. We have sent the a removal request. Wait and see how long they take to do it. Thanks again Patrick

Ok thanks for the quick response

Hi, Your best bet is Web master Tools or any other server side tool like the ones available for Word Press like you've mention. Depending on your server (unix or microsoft based) and/or your platform for the backend you can install / add additional features to get more info for this - google bot visits / crawl rates and formats. There are no fireFox addons since the browser dosen't have access to your site / server in order to see when google bot is visiting what pages and how is it performing - as that 's a behind the scene type of process. If you have access to your server you might try newrelic.com  (I am not affiliate in any way with them - I just love the tool). However there are several others in the same spectrum that will give you more then the Google bot stats and data. Hope it helps.

Yes, you can disregard my guest blogging comment. That will teach me to slow down when I read. As I mentioned later, seeking reviews is good, especially if you are using some criteria as you outlined. What I would try to do is gain links in other ways as well to help diversify the type of links you get.

Hi, thanks for your response, and I apologize for the delay in responding! In our current state, removing the AJAX links would be extremely difficult. We do actually have the AJAX Crawling Protocol in place, which is, conceivably why Google is able to crawl us and our rankings are basically unchanged. After speaking again with Bing's Support, they did acknoledge that they DO follow the escaped_fragment we set up, but that a rel="canonical" tag to the non-AJAX version was creating what they called in infinite indexation loop..whereby a java redirect at the non-AJAX, sent them to the AJAX, and a rel canonical sent them back to the non-AJAX. They suggested that if we wanted them to index the "Pretty" AJAX version, we remove the rel canonical pointing to the non-AJAX url. They didn't suggest putting the Pretty AJAX url in the rel canonical - I'm wondering if they may be a solution?Ideally, we'd have them index the non-AJAX url (though it seems like that isn't possible? Sorry this is so convoluted!) In the meantime, we've removed rel canonical entirely from this level of our website..but at the moment rankings haven't really been affected. Any suggestions? It feels like AJAX may be just completely inadvisable for Bing.

Thanks

I think you're overthinking the issue. The question is not the C blocks, but how it relates to your site. Are these links relevant? Are they using natural link text? Are you geolocated? Remember that IPs are a technical thing, and while they count for some things, it's only one signal among many factors with your link profile.

I suggest looking through previous Q&A forum results for various answers that have been provided for this question. Here's the query to find them: https://www.google.com/search?q=seomoz+base+href. Basically, you are right, you should use absolute links instead of relative links. You only need to use a base href if you are using relative URLs on page and the base href is needed for them to resolve correctly. The base href you are seeing in the code shouldn't be causing any issues for Google when following internal links. The issues, if any, would be caused by the relative links themselves if they are not set up correctly (this should be easily tested).

You usually need to verify both the www. and naked subdomain, in order to prove that you control both. It's silly for small businesses, but makes sense for larger sites, especially those that allow subdomains to be controlled by users. Not sure if that answered your entire question, let me know if not.

It could just be due to fluctuations in the size of the SEOmoz index and which of your links they indexed this month.

There should be more information there. Mind sending an email to help@seomoz.org? We'll help you figure it out from that end. Thanks!

I can get way up in the clouds on this one. Fluctuation is a natural part of the SERP. I would say this increases with the less domain authority you have relative to a search query. If your domain is not as strong as those ranking in the top results, Google may have less trust in your site, and thus move it around a lot more to see how it performs. The fact that you are jumping around on pages deeper than the 1st 2 leads me to believe that your domain authority is not competitive enough for the keywords you are monitoring. We know that Google and Bing both measure CTR. It could be one indication to how relative a site's content is to a search query. Google may drop a site in a new spot, measure the CTR, and see if that site is more relevant than most sites that fall into that position. Ultimately try to pay more attention to ranking averages - focusing on the jumps my drive you mad. Good luck.

Thats my fear.  So that leaves my 5 301s to what is now the same page - so 5 old links now link to the same content.  Does not that make the old links show up as duplicate content?

I will add my two cents to whatever Irving will answer, while I'm here. It is possible to get out from under a penalty, but it is difficult and usually takes quite awhile. This is especially true when the penalty is related to backlinks, as it is difficult to remove backlinks to your site. There is certainly merit to Irving's suggestion to simply start over with a new domain. It is typical for drops from a penalty to be immediate and abrupt. I will also mention that I disagree with Irving's suggestion to "never point to the homepage". I understand why he is suggesting that, but a website with no links to the homepage doesn't look very natural to Google. Also, there are many instances where you'll have to link to the homepage, such as if you are submitting to a high quality directory. I would just say to be very careful, and don't build links you might need to delete later. To be honest, I think you will find it nearly impossible to build really good quality links as long as the site has that thing that looks like a squeeze page across the top. Very few  high quality websites will want to link to a site where the real content is buried underneath an aggressive "sell" like that.

Hey Jonathon Google can follow these links, but it is not ideal. In the webmaster guidelines they state: Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. So, if these are your only links then it may be a problem but you could just get around this with a sitemap or some such but I would prefer to lose those or add a secondary text based nav. You could likely achieve the same look and use text for the links as well with some jazzy CSS. Hope this helps! Marcus Ref: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769