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Bob, there's nothing 100% safe for the future, Google is a private entity and they make the rules of their own game. However you can 99% sure that links will always be in their algo, just because is the inner nature of the www to have sites interlinked. I imagine that they'll become every day smarter in detecting patterns and automated links or human trying to manipulate the algo, but what they won't never control is human manual editing. It has no (huge) patterns and it's natural which is what they really want. About your alumnis I don't have the compelte view of your market and situation but if I understand yyour position: they know that they're helping you but you're not giving nothing back to them. I think that since they've studied in your center they've been selected as top alumnis and been given a badge to demonstrate that. If I were them I would like to show it, so ask them to write a post, I think that the value for them here is intangible, jsut ego-boosting you need to play in that ground, I don't know how renowned you are in your market but someone is always happy to be endorsed by a structure (maybe you can offer special linkedin endorsemnent for a really short group with good websites )

Best practices would be to 301 all those pages to their relevant new page. Now, if you're not worried about the traffic going to some of those old pages you could choose to 404 the page and let it die but you'd be missing out on any link equity going to that page... but if there are no external links pointing to them then you only have internal links to worry about (but those are likely all on old pages which no one will see anymore either via 301s or 404s). As for those products with 5+ URLs on the old site... redirect them to the relevant new page. It doesn't matter that there are 5 URLs redirecting to one if that one page is relevant to all 5 old URLs. I wouldn't worry much about server load either with that amount of redirects and eventually any old listings in the SERPs will update to the newer URL (if relevant for the specific query) instead of constantly sending people to a page they know exists elsewhere.

I would never get rid of links simply based on pagerank (or DA/PA).  I would evaluate my links based on whether or not they were natural or self-made. The first thing you need to decide though before slashing links is whether or not your links are actually hurting you.  If your rankings dropped it doesn't necessarily have to be because of spammy links as there are many algorithm factors that could be in play. Now, if your rankings dropped significantly on a Penguin refresh day, then yes, you could consider removing or disavowing the links.  Most SEOs agree that the key to recovering from Penguin is to do that.  You may not even have to remove them.  Just disavowing is likely enough for Penguin.  But no one can say for sure because Penguin hasn't refreshed since the disavow tool was released. But be careful messing around with the disavow tool.  I've seen sites that had other issues such as Panda or site structure issues that went and cut a bunch of potentially spammy links out and damaged their rankings even further.

yes homepage penalty means site is penalized across the board

Hi Brad and Martha, You've asked a lot of questions which likely why you haven't got a lot of responses.  It could take a few hours to answer all of those questions and really to answer completely someone would need to have a very close look at your site and your analytics. I have a few thoughts for you though.  The graphic you showed was interesting.  Your drop that starts in March does not coincide with any known algorithm update so it is not due to Penguin or Panda.  You do have a drop that coincides with the Penguin rollout of April 24 but your backlink profile is not really typical of a Penguin hit site.  Sure, you've got your keyword as your top anchor, but according to ahrefs there are only 12 domains linking to you with that phrase.  I would be surprised if you were severely affected by Penguin.  I'm not saying it's impossible, but if it were Penguin it should be something not too hard to recover from. I think there is likely a site issue.  I only had time to spend a few minutes but I found that these two pages on your site contain content duplicating each other: http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/ http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/index3.html http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/index1.html The second contains odd characters and I'm guessing it is not meant to be in the Google index, but it is. It's possible that if you clean up the duplication on your own site you may rank much better.

Ask yourself if you really think that multiple city pages are different enough in nature and content to bother.  Are you legitimately offering those services in those cities or are you just being greedy with traffic? If you really think it makes sense, I would start by building out the top 5-10 term+city variations and spending a LOT of time on each one making it truly different from the others.  Claim and optimize your Google maps listing in each city, build up content relevant to that city alone, build links from local sources like Yelp or other websites that will portray a strong local connection. I do not recommend building out 300+ term+city pages.  Start with 5 and see if it really makes sense. Two articles I recommend you read in full : Ranking for Keyword + Cityname in Multiple Geographies Local Search Ranking Factors

I don't know if that really matters but I prefer to use z-index to show tabs using css instead of display:none. It makes more sense for me that the tab is under the other, but still there, then just say that it is hidden

If I'm (we're) understanding your situation correctly, then I'd have to agree with Mike. You should 301-redirect all of the versions, not "chain" the canonical to a 301. That's going to produce very unpredictable results at best.

My pleasure, Joe!

It was on Friday so 4 days. Very odd.

I do think you should make the whole article available on the download page.  If the page is designed well and the content is laid out in a digestible manner I think it's probably more link worthy as an html page than a PDF.  You could also convert it and share on SlideShare type sites for added exposure and co-citation.

Over-optimized internal links can only harm you, you are in direct control of those, external links you are not. So I would do everything you can on your site to show Google that you are not trying to game the system and that includes well but not over optimized internal linking. Paul answered your question well though.

Thanks Marie, I've confirmed that the client is the content source originator. Their CMS won't accommodate canonical tags at the moment. If the URLs were the friendly URLs with dynamic params then it'd be no problem, but it's actually index.php on each one. http://screencast.com/t/VuWv0gL7uq I did take a look at their parameter handling in an attempt to optimize at that level. I modified the settings to this: http://screencast.com/t/hkjw258Bb5Qd and am considering blocking /command in robots.txt. Thoughts? TextMarketing, the page actually has quite a few authoritative links and very few "commercial terms". I thought "Penguin Penalty" at first too until I viewed the backlink profile. Thanks you 2 - your help is beyond encouraging.

That's a little disconcerning, but having said that it has got some stellar reviews. Furthermore, people in January this year have been saying the plugin is still working a-ok: http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/html-on-pages That's encouraging if it still works well for WP 3.5. If you've got the time, I'd maybe a run a test on this - see if you can set up a dummy site, or use an old site you may have, and see if it works for you. Best way to test and debug any problems is always to do it yourself.

Hi Elissa, If you look at the source code for (as an example): http://www.finalduties.co.uk/probate/father-and-son-battle-over-13th-century-inheritance/ You will see a bit in the head like this (just under the rel=canonical): So you are giving a link to 2 versions of the same page in your code. The short tag is put in since wordpress 3 (maybe you recently updated wordress?). You can see 2 ways of removing this tag here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-disable-and-remove-shortlink-link-rel-hook-in-wordpress-header/ Hopefully that will help with the duplicate content / rel canonical issues in site explorer (I don't think I see any of these ?p= links in the google results for your site as of yet).

Wow - never knew that - Thanks!

Certainly adding an SEO tool like sh404SEF to your Joomla site will do wonders. I don't think there is much evidence though that Google prefers once CMS to another. If you plan to migrate to Joomla 3, the latest sh404SEF now supports it.

Make sure you're using the rel="canonical" tag on that mobile page. That tells Google that the original content is elsewhere on your site. This will help keep you from getting dinged from search engines. You can learn more about the rel="canonical" tag here .... http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394