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**I get the recent change where adding a nofollow to one link wont increase the juice passed to other links. ** When nofollow was introduced it was possible to "sculpt" pagerank by nofollowing links - and that directed their pagerank elsewhere. Then Google decided that the pagerank on a nofollowed link would evaporate and they didn't tell anyone about it.... until Matt Cutts admitted one day that the pagerank on nofollow links evaporated. How do they do it today and how they will do it tomorrow is anybody's guess. So, I would invest my time and strategy on making a great website.

Hi Jamie OK, recently updated the sitemap and linked up all the pages we completed within yesterday (about 16 original content bits). I am HOPING they all go up together, 2 or 3 pages a day is killer. Thanks

It was Google organic traffic as a whole that spiked. 4 or 5 keywords brought in the extra traffic, and these are keywords I usually rank in position 8 or 9 for.

Hi Claire, So, in essence - i don't think this is a great idea, primarily because i think it carries enormous risks that will be difficult to manage if you take this approach at scale. Firstly, what happens if your free clients don't rank following the on-page work and linkbuilding you do? Assumedly, as they're a free client, there is no contract involved here - so if the work you do doesn't help, then they will likely refuse you access to their site to build links out on while presenting you with a large reputation risk if they decide to negatively "out" your practice. Moreover, the lack of contract again means that you will have no legitimate complaint if they decide, a few months after your work with them, that they want to remove the links and articles you have placed on their site. Are you being upfront with the free clients about the sites you will link out to on their site? If it's not in their niche, or worse something highly spammy - i can imagine a lot of them getting upset about you using their site to advertise on. Additionally, this seems like a very expensive and time consuming way to build links for your existing paying clients. if you have to do more SEO and linkbuilding work every time you need to get a new link from a site - you'll be putting in dozens of man hours for only a handful of links on PR2 blogs that you are at risk of losing at the whim of an unhappy webmaster. If however, the plan is to have basically free access to a site after you've  done a little bit of SEO work - then you're basically just taking advantage of the free sites that sign up and again risk losing it all if a few of them become unhappy. It seems to me that a better way to approach the concept would be to find these decent blogs/sites and then build a strong guest posting relationship with them, offering them quality content in exchange for links. This way, the content containing the links becomes the value you are exchanging, rather than the somewhat intangible SEO work and it's clear what both sides are getting out of the deal on an ongoing basis. Alternatively, there's nothing wrong with brokering relationships between sites that you work with, allowing them to guest post for each other and strike up an ongoing relationship; I would just be wary of leaving yourself as the middleman, unprotected by any contract or basic trade agreement. Hope that's helpful, Phil

Rather than a penalty, they will choose one to rank over the other. You dont need a 301 and a canonical, you have one or the other, the difference being that a canonical does not redirect the user to the other page, iot just tells the search engine to give credit to the other page. It takes time for the search engine to fix tis, if you are ranking for both pages, then II would suggest you have not waited long enouth, when all is finalized, you will only find one page in the index.

For long tail queries I don't worry about junk sites beating me.  Because I know that I will get them over time.

Glad I'm not alone, and I'm surprised I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere. I have no idea what the timeline is for a news story to move into its natural search result. Some seem to take as long as a week while others only take a day or two.

Hopefully this article will set you on the right path. We have done it to a few clients websites that have changed. Same thing - just not domain based in your scenario.... same thing applies though. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration Read through it and if you have any other questions let us know. Carlos

[quote]If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?[/quote] Simply google will not use the rich snippets, don't think it will get penalised. You can test here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets If you works there it should work in the serps. We finally got our schema done a few weeks ago, and with in a few days google was using them on our more popular pages.  I don't think schema/rich snippets, effects you rankings, just makes your link more attractive/clickable for the user.

Can also confirm that the domain is indexed in Google.co.uk.

Hi Rhys, Taking a look at your site, your links all seemed natural and within reason. ( I did think the homepage was a little light on content - mostly just navigation and quick links to products. But that's another conversation. "Best practice" is to consolidate your non-important links into a format that makes sense and is human friendly. Rand wrote a post about footer links awhile ago that still works today: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience I wrote about this in another Q&A thread a short time back. Today, you don't hear much about PageRank sculpting. Most SEOs don't bother with it, partly because of it's decreased effectiveness, but also in part because there are more effective ways of controlling the influence of links. ...Link "equity" or PageRank, (or MozRank), is only one small factor in the overall value of a link. Anchor text, position on the page, and a host of other factors all influence how much influence any given link can wield. Here's a good introduction on the subject (again from Rand) If you "no-follow" your important contact pages (about us, etc) Google may have trouble finding and crawling those pages. Because these are both valuable pieces of content and trust signals for your site, this probably isn't the outcome you want. To summarize: Adding nofollow in your case doesn't make sense. It really only makes sense in a very few cases, and isn't as effective in controlling ranking signals as many people would like to believe. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

I remember several years ago working on a site for my brother, and we did actually have a higher toolbar page rank on a couple of interior pages than we did on the home page. I don't know how you would search for that or why you would want to, however. I can tell you how I believe it happened to this site. My brother had had a personal site that evolved into a business site. He kept his product information on that personal site, and had an oscommerce store set up on the business domain in a subfolder. For years, the home page was just a placeholder, or even a redirect to the subfolder (I can't remember which). We took the business portions of the personal site and redirected them to the appropriate pages and subfolders on the business site. For a while, those pages and subfolders had a higher toolbar PR than the homepage itself did. People linked directly to those product and category pages, and there was the redirect from the personal site, yet the home page had little attention.

Another great resource to add to my list. Already implemented some of the suggestions.

I agree with this really people are obsessed with Page Rank and Domain Authority.....SEOr's need to get their head around the fact that traffic is what REALLY matters. What if you had a site with a DA of 100 but got no traffic? So OP what you need to really think about since you have started your seo campaign have you been able to increase your rankings and therefore have you been able to increase your traffic? Ignore D.A for now.......