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Thanks for all the input and advice! We are a gaming site that publishes industry news 2-3 times a week, but that is not our main source of income

I think it's erroneous to say that users don't want to see "built by" in the footer. I am often curious about who built or designed a website, and seeing that in the footer helps me navigate there. How does Google decide what a user wants to see or doesn't want to see? If a link is clicked on often, by a variety of IP addresses, could that indicate that it's a useful link and shouldn't be discounted, even if it's in the footer?

You might try the good folks at http://www.goinflow.com/ - Everett Sizemore in particular. He gave a very good mozinar on eCommerce SEO here: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues  This is how I became familiar with him. There are also two guys at http://www.melen.net, Matthew Prepis and Oleg Korneitchouk (Oleg is active here in the Moz forum) who performed a high level audit for us that was top notch. They were striving to win our business and are still in the running. They are excellent. Either of these two might come in quite a bit lower than a company like RKG, depending on the scope of the project of course.

You do know that you can put raw HTML into Wordpress, right? It's a full CMS system so you can paste the raw info in and it will keep the same template. Google itself really doesn't care about the extension or how it looks. If the page is isolated from the site (i.e. it doesn't interlink like a normal page) then Google might view it differently.

Hi Colin, Just wondering, did you ever move to Lemonstand?  If so, how was the experience and would you recommend it? Thanks!

Hey Mark, In answer to your question, yes Google does see more value in body links than in navigation links. That is because they are pretty good at detecting what is the reoccurring code across the site. As Dave said the navigation itself is a question of usability, so build it in a such a way that users can easily get to the right pages quickly. With the body links, however, it is about branding the other pages throughout the site for relevance. As you might imagine, it's a little harder to create relevance from just a list of links. Whereas if you have a paragraph of text surrounding a link you can programmatically identify context. All that is to say, what you've read is right. There is more value in the body links for search engines due to context and there is more value for the user in the navigation due to user experience. Account for both, but don't go overboard with either. -Mike

OK I think I understand what you did "The old site, which has many backlinks to the new site, is still in Google's index" So you are pointing links from a penalized site to your new clean site, hope you are using nofollows? hmmm. Not a good idea if not! I would not 301 redirect either. As this will simply assign all the bad stuff over to your new domain as well. The blog is internal which is a good thing now, but the low quality will effect the whole site eventually. Low quality content must be addressed or Google will hit the site hard with the Panda Algorithm. That low quality then links to your internal pages, not a good idea either. If the blog offers no real value and you are unable to maintain it then remove it for now completely and focus on creating a well rounded good quality site first. A few good blog posts is better than a hundred terrible ones.

I'm not the business owner and part of my position is to get our website positioned as high as possible but not sure how honestly. Would you care to elaborate on what's wrong with the site? I feel like something is wrong but not really sure what and would love to an expert's point of view.

This is what I came say. Have the html document, then the link to the pdf download. That way the html document can rank and also the PDF can too. I think some people over look the fact that the page a pdf is downloaded from can rank AS WELL as the pdf itself.

Thanks for the heads up on robots.txt. I also think the attribute landing pages will not provide the same user experience as the layered navigation pages. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the matter. Cheers!

I actually got rid of The articles.asp links because they were not descriptive in the urls.  I chose to create pages as opposed to these article snap-ins.  They are still in my article menu i suppose, but there should be no links or menus items pointing directly to the article.asp(s).  did you see that there were? Yes i will have duplicate content.  My blog www.bestbybrazil.com similar name without "fit" is set to auto post to several sites at once. If my website www.bestfitbybrazil.com is showing some of the same content, then again this must be pulling from the pages that were set up before.  I think Volusion will still show stuff that you have in the background even if you dont have it on your website.  So i will try deleting them i guess.  kind of a pack rat with data.  Always think i might be able to use it again. by the way it looks like MOZ is only showing one other fix for me "Overly Dynamic Url" http://www.bestfitbybrazil.com/NEW-ARRIVALS-s/1931.htm?searching=Y&sort=4&cat=1931&show=300&page=1 How do i get rid of this?  Its not even a page.  its a search.  the page is as follows http://www.bestfitbybrazil.com/NEW-ARRIVALS-s/1931.htm.  Everything after is some kind of query.  Do I need to enter the entire link as a dissallow in robot text or contact volusion.  Not sure how much help they would be since MOZ is showing this. Seems to work when i added the disallow in robot.text

In my experience, it doesn't matter where the byline is. I've dealt with sites with is almost everywhere and recently had a site with it in the footer with no issue. Maybe not the ideal place to have it, but still an option it seems.

Sean, What is the URL for your site?

I like #5 for the reasons you've stated.  Also keywords in the URI string aren't as strong a ranking factor (in my opinion) as they used to be.  My 2 cents.

Hello David, As Matt says, it does happen; but it has been quite a while since I saw them pull from DMOZ. I have seen everything else lately: Meta description drawn from content and not making sense when the Meta description on the site has nothing wrong with it. Title Tags that do not resemble the one from the sites, etc. Matt is also correct on the quick fix for blocking DMOZ or Open Directory Project (the odp in noodp). I would suggest if it is particularly disconcerting that you put the Meta tag in and then go into WMT and do a Fetch as Google on that page. While this is not the reason Fetch as Google was put in by Google, it often helps reindex quite quickly. All the best, and good luck, Robert

Hi Errol, Yep, these links all come from the same c-block. As Mary says, it's likely that Google is well aware that these sites are related. I disagree that that would automatically put you at high risk for a penalty, given that interlinking owned / managed websites is common practice, even amongst people who are not doing so for SEO purposes. Unless the network of sites appeared very manipulative, it is likely that the links would be discounted and no benefit passed between them rather than you being slapped with a bad penalty... however, nofollowing the links between each site and your hub site is the best practice when it is done to any extent / large scale, just in case this was viewed as manipulative. Since I do not know how many links / sites we're talking about here, I would certainly say that nofollowing these links would be the safe thing to do. Even if you were being super-sneaky with the hosting of these sites, disguising Whois information, making changes to your template, etc., Google is incredibly good at figuring out which sites are related to each other. They've been good at this for a long time, so it's always best to assume that they'll know about professional networks like yours and follow best practice with linking. Hope this helps! Jane

Personally, I would go with something more like  www.lasvegaswrappers.com (which is available). Or www.wrapvegas.com... Something that is less of a mouthful and will probably be easier for people to remember. -Andy

Hi there, Just checking in to see if you looked through the things Kevin mentioned and if you are still experiencing the indexation problem after the HTTPS switch? Cheers, Jane

Hi Jason, If you use the unique ccTLDs and the href lang / rel="alternative" tag, this duplication will be fine. The tag was brought out in late 2011 and tells Google: "just because this content is the same on an Australian site, a British site and an American site, this is okay - it has been done on purpose." You can also use it to point to direct translations, e.g. "this Spanish content is the same as this English content over here, but one is meant for the UK and one for Argentina." Lastly, you can also use this tag as mark up to say "This is French content meant for Canada, and this English content over here is also meant for Canada". More information about the tag is available here and here. Cheers, Jane

Hi I have used the URL removal tool in the past to remove URLs with success - as we know it helps speed things up. What you have done is right and if you are patient Google will start removing each page as it crawls it again. You might find this confirmation from Google reassuring in your situation - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en Reading the article you posted of when not to use the tool I can't see that your pages fall into any of these categories - but either way I personally can't see using it causing an issue to be honest but its your call.