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The more pages you have that mention your primary and secondary keywords the more important your site is for that term. This is why you can't have a site about plumbing and then just create two medical landing pages on the plumbing site and expect to be seen as a content authority on cancer treatment.

This is a fascinating question. Regarding your question about 404 pages getting a 200 status. So obviously, Google doesn't index 404 pages, and de-indexed pages do not pass on link juice.  However, like you say, some people and sites link to 404 pages and so, were these ever to go live, you'd imagine it would have some sort of strength/authority. But how could you practically accomplish this? If you make the 404 page a 200 page, you've now got no 404 page for your website, which could be very bad indeed. So, you'd probably want to substitute that page with a new, fresh 404 page. But if that sits as the 404 page and gets marked as a 404, wouldn't the links become void again? If you then moved the old 404 to a new page, it loses the links once pointing to it. The hongkiat webpage is a really clever idea as it takes all those pages and makes a shareable hub, which of course then gets all the links and strength.

Thanks Alex, yes was talking about "backlinks", just seems odd as we work through our backlink profile we are still seeing links we have removed, I can understand a delay in weeks, perhaps a month but 2/3 months, just wondered what others had experienced. Thanks,

Wow the link is quite an analysis....thanks!

My opinion would be that DIV-based markup is the better choice here.  As you said yourself, it's not really tabular data, so in using DIVs you can use semantic markup which is a positive for SEO. You could improve/cleanup the markup of that data though, by: Use , , tags.  Even the bolded text in the lefthand column are basically headers for the text in the righthand column. You should remove the empty class="hr">tags, which I assume are in there to create the horizontal lines.  It's nit picky, as if you remove them, you'll need to add a 'wrapper DIV' surrounding each row, so you won't really be cutting down on the code used that much.  But having empty tags that are only there for presentation purposes is generally frowned upon.  You could create the same visual effect by using a border or by using a background image (if you want the line to not fully extend across the row). That's all pretty nitpicky coding stuff though.  For SEO purposes, I think the only thing that might have an affect is using the <hx>tags.</hx>

I like it! I would probably say either 1, 2 and 3 OR #4, otherwise it might be too much work for one link. If someone pitched this to me, I would take it!

No one except the Google Engineers will know. There is a difference between crawling an iFramed page/following the links and passing link juice.

I have in mind doing 301 redirects.

Ah, in that case the main factor is: how are all ranking currently? If they each receive traffic for their respective local keywords, it would make sense to just keep them as is (don't fix what ain't broken). However, if you feel they aren't getting the rankings they deserve, you should combine all the sites into 1 and consolidate the authority. As long as you set up 301 redirects correctly, you should be able to transfer your rankings and even improve them (if you set up your internal linking structure correctly). Just know you will most likely lose rankings for around 2 weeks. Something to keep in mind: it's much easier to maintain and improve one website over three. If you plan on generating new content (as you should), having 1 blog with kickass content is far better than 3 mediocre ones. Best, Oleg

Hey Steve, That was a great answer, and it was what I was looking for, I appreciate it very much.

Do you mean as in duplicate content or too high keyword ratio? If so, I checked for duplicate content, didn't find much off site or on, fixed what I could. All the content was originally written and added to the site months ago. Survived Panda in Oct. Nov. and Dec. so why now? It's a mystery...

The Panda algo detects sites that have lots of duplicate content that has been published on other websites.  It also detects trivial content. If your site is judged to be low quality because your duplicate or trivial content exceeds a certain amount then all pages on your site can suffer a demotion in rankings. You can read reliable information about Panda here.... http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/panda/

I don't know why you would want category pages to rank, especially if the content changes from time to time. By the time they appear in search results and reders click on them, the content has changed, and what they were looking for is no longer there. If it is still there, they have to look through the page for what they really wanted.

Hi, can I ask what you used to look at the backlink profile so that I can check this too? Thanks.

i just ran a diagnostic - no errors, no duplicate content, nothing..