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Hi there, While looking at metrics like this is important, you're approaching modern link development in a slightly misguided, old-fashioned way. This is the way we used to link about link dev three or four years ago. For one, there is little use finding an older article (anything published more than a few days or weeks ago) and trying to get a link on it. This was a very popular, effective tactic up until about 2010. However, figuring out if a link was included as an original citation or added after the fact is incredibly easy. Thus, it's easy to discount links-added-later, and you can be fairly sure that Google is suspicious of these links given how popular this link development tactic was pre-2010. If a site has good Moz metics (DA, etc.) and no or very low toolbar PR, this can be an indication that Google finds something wrong with the site... but toolbar PR is a relatively outdated metric now, so take its figures fairly lightly. If you can potentially get a link from a site, look at all of these metrics and then look at both the backlink profile of the potential linking site and which other sites it links out to. Does it look like it sells links to unrelated, spammy websites / industries? Don't go for a link with them. Do they advertise a text-link service where anyone can buy a link on their site? Definitely stay away. If you come across a less-popular site in your niche with original, quality content, don't turn a link down on that site because it has low metrics. "2. If a site is a PR2 DA 30/ PA 32 with 14 root domains, 250 total links.... Would a link like this give me any benefit or should I skip links like this? Why?" To answer this, you're going to need to look further than these metrics. Those numbers are good enough that if the site is otherwise a good match for yours, the link could be worthwhile.

So, there are lots of 'ifs' here, but the primary problem I see with your plan is that the CDN will return the content to Googlebot without the request hitting your server so you won't have the option to serve different headers to Googlebot. Remember that every page is the main HTML content (which may be static or dynamically generated for every request), and then a whole bunch of other resources (Javascript and CSS files, images, font files etc.). These other resources are typically static and lend themselves far better to being cached. Are your pages static or dynamic? If they are dynamic then you are possibly not benefitting from them being cached anyway, so you could use the 'vary' header on just these pages, and not on any static resources. This would ensure your static resources are cached by your CDN and give you a lot of the benefit of the CDN, and only the dynamic HTML content is served directly from the server. If most of your pages are static you could still use this approach, but just without the full benefit of the CDN, which sucks. Some of the CDNs are already working on this (see http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225343/Akamai_eyes_acceleration_boost_for_mobile_content and http://orcaman.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/cdn-caching-problems-vary-user-agent.html) to try and find better solutions. I hope some of this helps!

Hi Alexander, For multi-location businesses (that is to say, businesses with more than one, staffed physical office) it's generally considered a best practice to link to the location landing page on the website, rather than the homepage, because your Google+ Local page is then pointing users and bots right to a page that matches the NAP on the business listing. This practice may also lower the risk of merging happening, because Google's bots are easily able to see that everything matches on the designated page, rather than leaving them to scour around the website trying to pick the right location out of a handful of them. You might enjoy reading: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide Hope this helps!

Got it -- thank you very much! Mike

When you submit the resubmission request, be honest and descriptive in your reply. State clearly what you have done to repair the manual penalty placed agaist your site, and that to the best of your knowledge, the issue is taken care of.

No. Goodbacklinks are one of the most important factors, as they are a source of traffic to the site, and a souce for Google to validate your site's content. if you have a ton of good links, but the rest of the site is garbage, you probably wont get very good results. The algorithm looks at over 200 separate bits of information when determining where to rank a site. Are backlinks high on that list? Absolutely. Does that mean that you can have thin content, bad optimization and design? No. Stating that "Backlinks are the most important factor in SEO" sounds more like a marketing phrase used by that company to sell their services.

Would it be possible to do a redirect from /section/index.php to just /section/ without causing a completely pointless infinite loop etc....

Hi, it helped us rank better for each product page. It allowed me to focus on a single product rather than variations of a product and made our site easier to navigate for the visitor.

As Mike has said, the fact that you are often linked to, and the content is translated, would put this far down my priority list as far as SEO goes, in that it's not going to hurt you (unless the site are extremely poor quality and linking to you a high number of times, which doesn't sound like the case here). I take it they're just lifting the content, not scraping the HTML, given that the content is translated. If they were taking the HTML, you can place the canonical tag in the source code and make it quite likely that they'll publish their version with a canonical tag, pointing to your site. From a legal point of view, you probably have good claim to go after this behaviour, which is up to you. This should not hurt your SEO, however.

Ever consider that the domain name itself may be a problem? It's just as easy to get www.viagrasssss.com. And I think the largest issue is that the domain name was registered one month ago. You can't expect much in the first month.

Hey, I struggle with adding content too, to me graphic on a web page look better than words, I try to add intriguing content and usually keep my wording to 400 words or more. Please seem to like looking at pictures rather than reading so maybe filter in some pictures or graphics within the copy.

Hi there, Bing also does and Yandex too. Unfortunately I can't confirm this with Baidu though and haven't seen any online documentation. I'll let you know if I'm able to confirm! I hope this helps!

May concern was these screwed up links would somehow impair ranking, but I guess not.  Thanks for the link.

If you have access to it i would for sure start re writing the content, after republishing the web pages, re submit the site map and the search engines should re-crawl soon. Good luck hope this helps.

You can run a test in moz to see if you have duplicate listings before even trying both. I just signed up for moz local and i love it.

I have 2 websites as well and they are in the same niche, i made sure the write completely different content that is helpful to my visitors. Different titles and descriptions as well.

Thank you very much. That is just what I was looking for.

Hi Jeff, thanks for your question! Did you see the responses from Dana and Donna? They asked some very good questions. We'd love an update, thanks! Christy

Thank you for all of your feedback. Unfortunately, this website is a on a old propitiatory platform that requires to have these long URL strings, but thankfully there are no separate pages for each of the backslash categories. For now, I have to accept having these long URLs and just make sure all the correct pages are submitted in sitemap. Thank you again for you all of your feedback. This was very helpful!

Hello David, This is an issue for many sites at the moment, I think. I just finished diving really deep into another site having the same problem, and we ended up - after fixing everything that "could" be wrong - deciding that Google has probably tightened the reigns on rich snippets displaying for product pages. Whether this is based on page-level authority metrics, number of reviews, trustworthiness of the reviews, etc... I do not know. It is not guaranteed that a page will display snippets in the SERPs even if the code is implemented correctly. That is about all we can know at the moment. The same goes for rel author thumbs and other enhanced SERPs.