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You are absolutely right. That's why I avoid systems like Disqus and IntenseDebate. Comments = user generated content. I want this to stay on the page as a plain HTML and get indexed.

That's an excellent idea. I will take a look and talk to the owners. What tool(s) do you recommend. Will OSE do it?

It's definitely possible. Why are they hosting their newsletters on a 3rd party site, anyway?

I think you're right in suggesting to forward the .com to the .net right now. Just as a side thought, does the company ever use offline marketing/print/TV?  If they do, could be a great opportunity to use the .com domain on that advertising while the 301 is in place.  That way, you'll know that most people coming in via the .com domain will be from those avenues, so you'll be able to calculate some form of ROI.  It can't be completely accurate, however, as the .com extension is definitely the most recognisable in the world, so someone's first intuition when they see the brand might be to use .com anyway. With that in mind, you should anticipate that they may want to move to the .com in the future.  What I would strongly, strongly recommend is to keep the site and URL structure exactly the same - same subfolders, subdomains, same everything.  This way, all you would theoretically need to do to preserve your "link juice" is export the XML sitemap from the .net domain (or at least those with backlinks - Screaming Frog is great for this task) change the extension to .com in excel and you've got all your new URLs that you point the old ones to. It becomes a pain when companies want to change their site structure in the migration.  I'd advise them not to, if possible.  By all means, they could use the opportunity to rebrand the website and change the content and imagery, that would look impressive.  But where possible, keep the structure the same. Hope this helps!

You shouldn't receive any kind of penalty for doing so. The premise of the nofollow tag is tell Google that "Hey, these links might be paid advertising, or could look a bit unnatural, so I'm going to whack a nofollow tag on them so you don't pass any link juice".  It then ceases to become a tool to manipulate the SERPs, so you're not doing anything wrong in Google's TOS. I think that's pretty clear cut.  It's this scenario that nofollow was pretty much designed for. I'd never bet the mortgage with Google, but this comes close! If we're talking site-wide links like footers to show that you worked on the site, from a personal POV I think that's a bit much and that a homepage link would achieve the same effect, but that's just me. Hope this clears things up.

Matt Cutts just said a week or two ago that 301s pass full PR and none is lost, not sure if that's true http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw

No need to apologise. I'm here for honest answers, not to be soft-soaped. I agree with a lot (but not all) of that. A lot of the article directory/blog footer links were obtained 3/4+ years ago by a previous SEO firm. Like everyone else, we haven't done article marketing in 2/3 years. Funnily enough, ALL our articles on article directories were high-quality and informative (Yes I know, we should have found another home for them. But time was when even Bing advocated using article directories). Re; the 3 links you refer to, it appears the company that built our (real estate) site lists all the real estate sites they have built and puts them on a template. Trust me, I didn't ask for it, didn't pay a cent for it. Re: PR links -- I'm fully aware they don't pass link pop. They were a genuine attempt to drive clickthrough traffic (and we have received traffic from them). Why are they bad, per se? We actually do have editorial citations/links from related sites, including the New York Times real estate section. I'm not defending the parts of our link profile that aren't great, just trying to improve things the right way.  FWIW, our link efforts are now focused on content creation and social media.

All of the SEO tools help you to conduct research and analysis to enable you to make decisions when doing onpage and offpage optimisation.  The purpose of the tools is to help you make the best decisions based on insight so you can improve your sites performance. There's the answer.  The tools combined with an investment of time and carefully study - they apply what you learn - are what you need.  No magic bullets. Even if you learn everything and apply it perfectly you might not have success.  The reason is that - at difficult levels of competition, SEO becomes a battle of resources.

Thanks for your reply. I've done quite a lot of link building since the last OSE update so maybe when the next OSE update happens I'll get a better overview of my link profile and see where there could be problems. The only real strategy I've used though is guest blog posts on quality sites. I always run them through OSE to make sure they're authorative and have a good link profile. I've been careful to vary anchor text too. The keywords I'm after aren't particularly difficult to rank for ( according to the keyword research tool on here they're in the 30% - 50% range) so I thought the amount of work I'd done and the ranking positions were about right. I think I'll just keep building links I guess and try to keep building the site. I guess that's all I can do.

Very nice site. That's some solid onpage optimization and I didn't notice any errors. Some things you might want to consider are authorship markup and semantic markup. Authorship will likely play a big part in Google's algo within the next 5 years, and you get a nice picture in the SERPs which increases CTR. If you have any expert writers that want to build up authority in your space, now is a good opportunity to start doing that. Semantic markup can also help enhance your SERPs, and improve CTR. One piece of markup you might want to start with is breadcrumbs, since you use them on the site. Facebook markup can also help your articles look nicer when they are shared. Social sharing buttons on your articles would be a good idea as well. At least have a G+1 button and FB likes. Those will help with social sharing, provide social signals, give you social proof, and in the case of Google+, help improve your rankings for G+ users.

hi Cyber, EGOL, I think that you've to be cautious on what you publish. Your focus should be always the final user. If you're focusing on the users you can't do it wrong, if after making the article you see that is not useful (because it is mainly done to attract google bot) avoid it because it won't be adding value to your site. The division EGOL is proposing makes sense: articles to give freshness to your site which are industry related updates. You said that your niche is quite interesting so your users may find interesting to have all the industry news centralized in one site which is reporting them shortly and quick (you can also use that feed to update your social profiles) deep diving articles. Guides and helpful content with videos and images to really help your users and which are link/share worthly. One note: beware of how tos and the like. That is  demand media (ehow.com) core business and it was something which google was supposedly going after with the Panda update. Be sure to write good and deep articles without trying to scale it with easy articles written in a bunch by freelancers. Always have a look at your final result and ask the question "is this adding some value to the user reading is?" if you find that you're losing your time while reading it the user will feel the same

Ok cool. I think what you are referring to are links that are redirected to a URL via JS. The case you have is clearly not, since link text is a traditional text link, it is just being hidden by JavaScript to incorporate the design of your page.

Thanks Irving. Could you elaborate a bit on Load More being SEO friendly? Is there a way of doing it that is potentially damaging? Also, if this is done, there wouldnt be a need to have paginated content, thus making the whole noindex part irrelevant, right?

You're very welcome Candice - I've gotten a bunch of inspiration and motivation from this site from other members in the past, so if there's ever a chance to impart the same on someone else, I jump at the chance. I do like the Q&A idea, as it opens you up to being both a service and an educational resource, kind of like the guys at Distilled, with their SEO service but things like their blogs and their DistilledU ideas. So it can and does work. It also gives you a long lasting effect from your social media interactions. All the best going forward, can't wait to see what you can come up with!

Thats exactly what we are thinking of doing Make h2 bigger and at the top and H1 lower down and less obvious.   I'm glad that the feedback has been the same as what we feel.

ReferralCandy, When optimizing your page for a set of keywords it's important to keep in mind that exact matches are most powerful. With that in mind, think about your customers and the order of the keywords they type into the search. Are your customers more likely to google "gift set organic soap" or "oganic soap gift set" In my opinion, the second one is more natural and probably a more common search query. With that being said, the second URL makes most sense. Hope this helps! Matt

with a "nofollow" attribute in the link code, yes, you can use it on the whole site. However, doing so can be seen as "tacky" / "less than truly professional".  That's why its suggested to be only on the home page footer.

You can't go wrong with the keywords in the URL's. But titles are very important too for sure.  I definitely recommend key words in titles if relevant and organized.