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Don't no-follow your navigation links, there is no benifit anymore to trying to sculpt pagerank in such a manner anymore. The potential link juice is 'spent' on the link regardless if it is sollowed or not, it's just that no-followed sites don't recive it. Save no-follow only for when your linking to sites you would not want to be assossiated with. If you want pages out of the index, use meta noindex as opposed to robots.txt. I would index your login page so people who are googling for it can find it. On member profiles it would depend if they are reasonably valuable content or no. If it's 99% duplicated content then I would consider no-indexing them. If they have bios and such, then it's probably fine to leave them indexed.

The recent crackdown on link networks has been pretty harsh in some cases. Unfortunately, there's not a ton you can do about bad links like that, especially if the sites have been de-indexed. Cutting your links from pages that aren't indexed probably won't have much impact (and often isn't even feasible). In that case, you're going to just have to focus on positive link-building tactics for a while and hope to turn it around. If you do suspect a link-based problem, then switching your paid links to nofollow might be a good bet. I would especially suggest this if you're going to file for reconsideration with Google (otherwise, they'll probably see those links and ignore the request). It's tough, though, since it's possible those links are also helping you right now. At the level of any one link, it's almost impossible to tell. I think this recent interview with Jim Boykin has some good advice. He's definitely dabbled on the black-hat side, so I think it's an honest appraisal of the situation: http://www.seobook.com/jim-boykin-interview

By achieving target you mean you've already gotten your client to the first page, number 1 spot for his primary keywords? If yes and I were in your position I would track the conversions he is getting at the moment and then focus on related long tail keywords. The one thing I would do if i were asked to deliver results ASAP with this budget though is to set up a PPC campaign. If your client is already ranking under keywords that are generating business, why not double that presence with sponsored links? (This is one of our most basic strategies and it works beautifully for us)

With Joomla all the url's use $mosConfig_live_site in configuration.php at the start of the URL's and then everything is routed through index.php with query strings. If you're doing a 301 redirect you might want to have a go at using the following in your .htaccess file, without knowing what your redirecting to what is difficult  to provide a correct answer. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^option=com_content&task=view&id=76&Itemid=110$ RewriteRule ^index.php$ /your-new-page/? [R=301,NC,L] ID is the content ID and Itemid is the id of the link in your menu to that page. Hope this helps.

In short, it changes everything - a complete game changer. Shows google means business. That' fair enough, but the fcat is that there a huge number of clearly paid for links and clearly recip links that google still seems to classify as natural. They should make it clear - if say 20% of your links are clearly unnatural, or more, then you get a warning, if it then goes up to 40% a small penalty and so on. Google instead plays the game, and plays with people's sites and their livelihoods. Seo just became a lot harder and more expensive and uncertain. This may well mean people instead favour ppc. Funny that, because who benefits from ppc - you got it, google !

Yes most of the incoming relevant links are going to www version. I think you are right just wanted a second opinion. Yes we made the changes last weekend.

I thought about the lag in updated info from Google, but that page (with the exact url) has been there for over 5 years. Also its not just the about page, it is literally every other page on their site except for their homepage is a void of reported pagerank. I guess I am going to chalk this one up to an error in Google's external PR reporting system. I have seen PR delays, but I have never seen Google report only the homepage (of a site this big) has any sort of PR.

Hi! I see that a good part of your reply is based off of this October 2010 blog post at http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/seo-for-bing-versus-google/. I'd love to see any more recent information that you might have, as well as personal experience.

I would use the meta description tag synergistically with the intent of the page. if the audience I was trying to reach was local the keyword phrase I'm optimizing for might be "Acupuncture for pregnancy in Chester" or if I wanted traffic from all over it might be "Benefits of Acupuncture during preganancy". Let's assume local. In that case my title tag might be... <title>Acupuncture for Pregnancy Chester | Company Name</title> Of course, I'd include the relevant terms in my H1 tag, again in my content (bolded) with great, relevant copy. (PS - I didn't count my characters for the title or meta description - remember to stay within the character limit recommendations) Basically the content of the title tag, meta description, H1, bold and content should flow from your keyword research and intended audience. That's my take on it, Mark

Think they are only referring to the +1 badges which by default are on SERPS. The Google+ badge doesn't appear to have a presence (at least on the searches I've made). Google badges should be crawled as a rich snippet in my opinion - I had thought they were but now not so sure.

I think that Google holds more weight on the number of linking root domains to your site as a ranking factor. That being said I think internal vs external links within the site is another important ranking factor that would need to be reviewed. It's hard to say whether Google is using that information or not, and if it is, it would be difficult to know how much weight Google puts on it. I would suggest you look into link relationships http://gmpg.org/xfn/intro for your site links. It has been hinted that Google may start using XFN relationship tags in its algorithm and it wouldn't hurt to add these to links where relevant.

Actually my question (should have made it clearer) is why is my site ranking so much better in the past few months even though all the important analytics numbers have simultaneously been changing for the worse? It would appear that the various pundies were wrong about how Panda really works. Paul

Yes, I understand. I would check the domains being redirected to see if they have any history associated with them. If they have been linked from anywhere on the web, then Google knows they exist. If not, they are pretty much (almost) like brand new domains. This process would also make sure and help you find if there was nothing fishy/spammy going on with those domains in the past. I would still do a staggered redirect depending upon how many you are planning to do. As you said few dozen, I would just spend some time looking them up and based on the results, select the ones that have most type-in traffic first. And then in a few weeks, check to see how it's working for you and if you want to redirect more of those.

Thumbed up Matt and Moosa - I think I'd make sure first that the PA/DA is telling the whole story. PA, for example, doesn't take into account possible Google devaluations or penalties (which we can't really measure). That PA of 80 may be over-estimated for a lot of reasons. It may be that you have a solid link profile, but your on-page targeting is lacking. There are a lot of ways to target without switching to a partial-match domain. Now, would a partial-match domain help a bit? Probably, for now, but Google seems to be dialing that down slowly (exact-match domains really are too powerful, and are still being abused like crazy). Keep in mind, though, that the 301-redirect does carry risk, and may not transfer all of the link-juice. Also, if you 301-redirect just this one powerful page, it could impact your main site's Domain Authority and potentially harm your other rankings on that site (if that page has a huge concentration of the site's links).

Ahh, i misread that date.

Hi Kate, In my experience you may have problems with getting your sites to rank in their respective locales. I've also seen sites like this treated as duplicate content (even though they shouldn't be really). There's a couple of things that I'd recommend that you do: Target the sites via webmaster tools to US / UK as appropriate see - http://www.seo-chicks.com/1463/geotargeting-on-the-same-domain-using-xml-sitemaps.html Take steps to ensure you're targeting the right keywords (there are plenty of differences between US and UK English) Implement rel-alternate hreflang see - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html Include local signals - e.g. local telephone numbers, bricks and mortar addresses etc to help the search engines understand which locales you're targeting I hope this helps, Hannah

CodeAcademy also recently  introduced free online coding classes that you can check out - it may be a good way to apply the learnings from your readings. It takes practice and dedication - and repetition - to learn coding. You have to train yourself to properly apply the code. HTML and CSS are the best places to start, then move onto PHP http://www.codecademy.com/courses/html-one-o-one

Yes I agree they work great. But this topic has been openly discussed way too many times..including directly with Matt Cutts at Pubcon. In short, the effects of EMD have changed a lot from 2 years ago...and it will continue to decrease. It's not that they will get penalized (although in a way they will)..it would basically mean that the "magical" effect will go away but they will still have an advantage in my opinion. Here's how: Let's say your website is abc.com and keyword is Blue Widgets. If somebody links to you, the link code will be: Blue Widgets vs if your domain was BlueWidgets.com the link would be: Blue Widgets or Click Here You see what I am talking about. That advantage would always be there. Having your keywords in every incoming link, even if it's not an anchor text link.

Yep I have actually done this (kinda! as a test). EMD after 3 months of ranking 3rd, redirected it to a non-EMD. They swapped places for about 2 weeks... then it dropped 10+ pages deep. I cant help but think, if I had increased link building effort over the 2 weeks it might have stayed up.