Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for hte clarification, Theo... Now , about this "first make sure these extra links will actually help rather than hurt you"... I'm not the sharpest tack just yet... how would you ensure that links like this would have a beneficial or detrimental effect? Is there a tool or method about which I am unaware? Thanks!

Loved this article on the subject. Check out the hashtag tip. http://www.seo.com/blog/testing-link-priority-rule/

A thought to consider is you may have links that you are not seeing. There are also bookmarks users may have along with e-mails which can offer a link to each page. Every product page represents potential sales. If a user who does follow a bookmark or link finds the page they expect, there is a much higher likelihood they may make a purchase on their next visit. If users are dumped on the home page they may close the browser window. Think about how you would react if a friend sent you a "hey, look at this great product" e-mail link and you found yourself on the home page of a company with 8000 products. It comes down to what type of company you are and how you wish to balance costs versus service. Is this a one person company who lists 8000 products and dropships orders from various suppliers? Or are you a large company with a warehouse which carries thousands of products and has a large staff. In the latter case, I would ensure all the pages are properly redirected. Keep in mind your redirects don't necessarily mean 8000 lines of individual code. Depending on your old and new URL structure, it is possible your entire site can be redirected with a single regex expression, or a relatively few of them.

Back in the day I would say it's two datacentres being queried. Then again I've seen algorithm testing do the same thing. Latest observation was the PageRank stuffup by Google and it was interesting to see results jump up and down as they were recalculating it. Not a factor guys huh! Think twice

Cheers, thanks for the input.

Run an SEOmoz campaign and look there for the referring URLs?

You might also consider writing the redirect so that you don't have any extensions (see the SEOmoz URL for an example). That way, whenever you next change technologies, your URL will still stay the same.

Keri - Interesting that you've seen others mentioning this. I'd be very interested to see whatever references you can dig up. Thank you!

Far, far more than 3kb. Somewhere halfway this blog (http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/41/does-source-code-ordering-still-matter-for-seo/) you'll find some references to sources on this same issue, they might be helpful for you.

Just to pick up your point about keywords in the title. Yes, all the new business listings have keyword rich titles - e.g. Dagenham Waste Removal, so you could be right about that being the source of the problem.

I'll be looking forward to reading the full article.

You might want to also consider using the 'NOODP' and 'NOYDIR' meta tags if you have listings on Yahoo Directory and Dmoz. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264

Thanks for the link. So, less the number of links, more is the link juice passed

You are the man, John. I really, really appreciate your thoughtful reply. -- Jim

This is more of a question for the help desk. Email them at help@seomoz.org with your login name and this question and they'll get back to you real soon. Thanks for using SEOmoz!