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Thanks. I would rather not share my URL at the moment. We do not have duplicated content at all. All is original. What do you mean by orphan pages? We are an e-commerce website and some products that became obsolete are no longer linked to (orphans). Is that a problem? Also, these orphans have nothing to do with the specific problematic page...

You're welcomed !  I know how it is to get stuck on things like this

Thank you!

Very good answer Elias. Thank you.

I am fairly new to SEO but have been having success on multiple sites. What I have found that works is: aim for the keyword with the best rating (ie: low enough competition, high traffic, and the top 3 sites for that keyword have holes in their SEO that you can exploit, relevance etc) to go to your homepage. One particular site that I worked on had 38 DA and 44 PA and so when I put an easy keyword on the homepage (lets call this Keyword #1) it went to no.1 within a week. Then I created a separate page to attract higher amounts of traffic with keyword #2 and it never ranked at all. Finally, I played around with the titles and h1 etc. and added the keyword #2 to the homepage (diluting the SEO, I know!) and within another week or two I saw the homepage ranking for on page two for keyword #2. This is because the homepage carries more weight because most people link to it and so even though DA is very important, your PA is equally important when going after those tough keywords. I would pick the best Keyword and make your homepage rank for that. The closer it is to the head keyword the better but just don't overshoot.

Thanks Michael for your quick reply. I think I'll go with your suggestion of establishing a Google+ profile for him. Anyone else in favor or not of Michael's opinion?

Thanks a lot for your suggestion.  We have successfully run 500 URI limit using trial version of this Screaming Frog software.  We will check up with the licensed version of the software.

I also need to redirect my category pages from non-www to www. There is no option in Google web master tools for category pages, can you share with me exactly the code for my category page?????

Thank you for replying Karen. As far as l am aware, nothing changed at that point. i visited the website you mentioned but l have no idea how to use it.

thanks everybody for the feedback. I actually also stumbled upon an excellent whiteboard friday from Cyrus related to the topic (also excellent comments at the bottom of the post) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

Moosa, Martjin thanks a lot for your feedback. So I will give it a try.

In short, the answer is.... It is impossible to accurately say why Google changed the rankings. Anybody who says that they can do this is full of BS.  There are hundreds of variables.

(1) Yes.  G+ authorship represents real human authors, and it's not only perfectly natural for an author to contribute to multiple sites, it should make that author more credible, as multiple websites "believe in" their expertise and accept their contributions.  I also believe that AuthorRank will consider the diversity of authors writing for a given site to be a positive thing. (2) AuthorRank doesn't really exist yet, according to most experts, FYI.  But I don't know if you can find anyone who'd predict that it WON'T make it into the algorithm soon.  PageRank is a completely separate factor & algo.  The Google ranking algorithm is a combination of many factors, of which PageRank is one, AuthorRank will likely be one eventually, Panda is one, Penguin is one, etc. (3) I think that's OK, however, keep in mind that if the user is very active on a personal level, this social online activity won't benefit his/her corporate profile.  If that person is willing to spend a little time every week in BOTH profiles, sharing, commenting, interacting, etc., then I think all is good. On the other hand, a social media profile that never interacts...just publishes...that looks like spam. (4) I would leave their profile alone, and encourage them to use it wherever they are going forwards.  If they continue to be active, build more trust and authority, etc., that can only benefit you. (5) They should.  NY Times does. It might not be affecting them now, with AuthorRank apparently not yet part of the algorithm, but it is expected to.  Keep in mind, giant corporations typically have a very hard time making changes, and for a massive industry leader like CNN or USA Today, they've got such strong backlink profiles that there isn't nearly the pressure on them to take advantage of new and upcoming factors like AuthorRank.

Yes, that's very likely to draw a Penguin penalty, presuming that the links go directly to your domain, and not to an intermediate (like Commission Junction or Shareasale etc., for tracking...those kinds of affiliate programs are understood by Google and handled for you, so no problem if you're using those). I would ask the affiliate to add a rel=nofollow; if they won't, then I'd disavow their domain.

Try to keep anchor text links to 30-40% maximum if you want to steer clear of Penguin. The rest of your anchors should be things like your brand name, your URL, "click here", etc. Look at the link profiles of other sites to see what a more natural profile looks like. Ultimately you want to avoid links where you have control over anchor text in the first place, and try to attract organic links to your site, which is ultimately what Google wants.

Hi, SEO for youtube videos is really great and it's still so easy to do - especially since a lot of people don't optimize those videos. if there is still room to optimize those you can go really high ... The best available resources I was able to find and follow with great results are from this guy Derral Eves : http://www.youtube.com/user/derraleves I have no connection with him - so it's not advertising I guess Hope it helps.

You should always protect the brand.  But the question is, are their any SEO implications for the work that you are going to do?   The answer is not much.  If you do an awesome job on you client site, you should be fine.

If Phil does not have what you're looking for I don't think anyone does. All the best, Thomas

Using it the way you proposed is encouraging engagement with your post which is a great thing.  Aggregating these ratings for each blog post using proper Schema is a great use of the function.  Shouldn't cause any problems. The negative problems I have seen were related to aggregating ratings and reviews from established authority sites and placing them on a page.

The thing is the site is not losing traffic, else I would agree. Historically the homepage has never ranked well for the main chosen keyword - highest I think is page 2 or 3 previous to migration to Magento when it started to drift.  Overall organic traffic to the site has steadily risen since the beginning of 2011 and the homepage is ranking well for some longtail variations of the keyword.