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I would "noindex" everything but your categories on a blog/news site.

I would say it doesn't matter unless of course you are having a domain like www.this-is-my-colourful-nice-seo-friendly-website.com. We use ours to say -online.com just to seperate it out. However our new domain doesn't have one in and we have two words together. As long as you have something people can search on or recognise I think it will be ok.

I think your best off starting with an SEOmoz crawl on your site. Then if you need any help with specific errors we can help you with that. Your asking for a site audit which can take a lot more time than if you were to do a crawl and link with your Google analytics account.

If the drop started April 23 then it's not likely to be Penguin.  However, it's a tough call because you could have had a natural drop that started on April 23 and then got augmented on the 24th.  But, there were Panda refreshes on April 19 and 27th.  I'm pretty reluctant to call it either without a real in depth look at your analytics. Penguin is generally a keyword specific drop, so if you can pinpoint that you have dropped for particular keywords that have been overoptimized in your backlink profile then you could go in this direction.  However, the backlinks that you pointed out originally all seem to have your url as anchor text so I have a hard time believing that this is Penguin.  (With that being said, I haven't done a full analysis of your site and backlink profile.) What made me wonder if this was Panda was that your inner pages have very little content above the fold.  All of the content above the fold seems to be the same for each page.  And then, the content that is below the fold is mostly brief product descriptions - not a lot that Google can recognize as substantial content. Again, I'd be really hesitant to go removing links in this case.  If this were my site I'd do the following: -have a really thorough look at my analytics to see if the traffic drop can be attributed to one or more particular keywords -if yes, then I'd start cleaning up links that contained those keywords as anchors. -if no, then I'd start changing my pages so that there is more substantial content, especially above the fold, for each of these pages.  I'd also go looking for other places where I could be violating the quality guidelines on page such as hidden text, etc.  Then, once this was cleared up I'd wait for the next Panda refresh to see if I had recovered.

http://www.worldofbooks.com.au The cache is now showing as not found at all

Regarding the 301s, I originally thought you were talking about redirecting your penalized domain to a new domain.  I'm not 100% sure on what you are doing here, but as mentioned by Ian, don't redirect 404s to your home page...create a custom 404 for that use. If you've got pages you want to get deindexed, you can tell Google in your webmaster tools to removed certain pages from the index. I didn't have time to do a complete check of your backlinks but you can be pretty certain that if you've been hit by Penguin you've got an issue with backlinks.  If you look at your site in OSE, and order the links by anchor text you can see that you've got a high percentage of anchor texted links as opposed to url links.  That's where I'd start - get some of those anchor texted links changed to url links for a start.

the term is used as the name of the page in the URL. Can you please show where that is occurring? The full URL to the page is "http://theboardgamers.co.uk/". In Google.co.uk you rank #1 for the term "the board gamers". You should recognize "board games" is a different keyword. the H1 tag at the top of the page is an exact match I believe you are mistaken. You are using an image in a H1 tag. Please refer to this Q&A: http://www.seomoz.org/q/would-you-use-images-inside-h1-tags. Even if Google was to consider your ALT tag as the H1 text, it would not be an exact match. An "exact match" is exactly as it sounds, a perfect text match. Any changes, includes the change of tense, plurality, spaces, etc. would affect the search results. Any advice on this one? As an eCommerce homepage I obviously can't go writing paragraphs full of information about board games. The people visiting aren't looking/needing that (on my site). There is a variety of methods to improve your relevancy in this area. Just a few to consider: you have a rotating banner at the top of the page. You could replace it with a banner that is helpful to your users and search rankings. One possibility would be a background with the following HTML text "All your favorite board games in one place! The Board Gamers" your image names and alt tags should probably be reviewed you can focus your home page on your brand, "TheBoardGamers" and provide a "Board Games" page You can offer a short snippet of text describing your site I clearly need to add a block of text/content somewhere but I find it hard to think what to write without doing it for the sake of getting keywords in there. It is great you are including your users in the thought process. They should be first and foremost in your mind.

Can you share your website URL for checking too many on page link issue. And For Trackback, Yoast has written very nice post, how Wordpress handle trackback (302). How you make it 301. Here is the URL : http://yoast.com/google-wordpress-and-trackback-urls/ Hope this will solve your problem...

Michael Gray has written nice post on masking affiliate links. In that he has explain how and why to cloak affiliate links. Here is the link: http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/cloaking-affiliate-links/

Ah, this is a very good question. If you're looking to measure links by pure link count, then OSE will never match the number of links you find in Google Webmaster Tools. On average, OSE accounts for anywhere between 20-60% of links typically recorded in GWT. But GWT is a terrible way to measure link building campaigns. The problem is, Webmaster Tools records "junk" links equally with high value links, and there's no guarantee or seeming degree of consistency with the links they do choose to report. I have 1000's of links in many of my Webmaster Tools accounts, and most of them aren't worth anything. On the other hand, OSE assigns a "weight" to each link, in terms of different metrics such as MozRank and Domain Authority, so you can get a feel for how much value is passed by that link. And OSE tends to focus on links and those areas of the web that actually pass ranking value, while ignoring many of the less valuable, spam and garbage links. OSE metrics are highly correlated with a site's ability to rank, and are often adjusted according to Google's algorythm through correlation analysis. So if you build more links, they will show up in GWT, but you'll never know how much they are worth. On the other hand, if you raise your domain authority, this is likely correlated with a rise in rankings (assuming  your site is well optimized) Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

It is required that affiliates with a site do list on the site somewhere that you may get a commission for items purchased from links on your site and that it does contain Affiliate links. If you put this in your tems of service under disclosure Should be fine. If you want to be totally honest and upfront with your Visitors you could also put a mention of it in your about me section And ensure your visitors that even though you may get a commission If someone makes a purchase from a link on your site that you would Never endorse a product unless you believed in it 100%. Or you Could only promote products and services that you actually do use Yourself. And disclose that as well. The more upfront and honest you are online the better off you will be.

H1's are used as Headings ideally, If you are targeting a keyword on a page its good to use the keyword within the H1 (with diversity) Here is one of our product pages: http://www.macdecals.com/macbook-breast-cancer-ribbon