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Hello Conrad, It's really hard to determine how long it takes for a certain page to rank..it depends on a lot of factors..Some of them are: domain age-root domain link profile - on page factors - links to that page with optimized anchor text etc etc/ I think you should try and get good quality links to the homepage and the category pages you want to rank for, diverse the anchor text..i.e. don't have 20.000 links pointing to one page with the same anchor text. In order to speed up rankings you need social accelerators in place  i.e. tweeter campaign strategies that will enable you to target the pages you want and receive a lot of retweets which could help you rank high. Hope this helps Ari

Reagrdless of external or internal. lets say you have 4 links Link 1 goes to page A Link 2 goes to page B Link 3 goes to page C Link 4 goes to page C Lets leave out that the first lionk passes a bit more then the second, page C will get 50% of the PR. But it will only get the link text relevancy of the first link to it. But if you linked to page C like this pagec.html#someAnchor and pagec.html#someotherAnchor then you will get the link text relevancy for both links

Agreeing with the previous post adn in addition: If you have dynamic links yor targeted pages get a different PR and anchor text value that can cause a fluctuation in your rankings that can be quite emberrasing i think. If you choose static links you can justify the targetted pages, forward value to those pages that really need them, and you can place your links in the beginning of the text fields so that they forward more pagerank than links in the bottom. I would choose static as I would like to alays kno hich page I am proposing, how and where I am proposing it. In addition to these technical Factors you have a better chance of guiding visitors through related material on your site. Cheers

yes maybe i was a bit quiest to dismisss the social sites.

If your back links have disapeared i would say that they have been removed, i dont think google removes links, just discounts tham, but i could be wrong

Thanks for the reply Alan. We'll wait for them to crawl the site again.

It just seems so very unfair they are ranking number one like this, How do you know that is what is responsible for their rankings? ...one of our big competitors... That's what my money is on.

Thanks! Interesting article.

I never like to limit anything. Before you merge or remove pages you should look at analytitcs to be sure that you know the TOTAL TRAFFIC for these pages and not simply the traffic for the targeted keyword.  It is possible that these pages have enormous long tail traffic. This is not a simple.. yes... no.... question.  All of these pages have value in many ways.

It is Bing that says it is incorrect, not me. "To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you.  But, it doesn’t help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages, yet correctly across a few others on your website." You are correct in that it does say, "no need for that" and says the use is incorect. So why do it?

Colt, many of your blog posts have multiple links to the home page and all are using the same anchor text. That on the surface looks a little spammy. That might be sending up a red flag to someone,  because I know that if I were a customer reading them for the first time, and since they're all in red, I'd be thinking something along that line too. Good luck finding the issue, Lowell

This was a panda issue. It's fixed now. We lowered the outbound link count and cleaned up the site as a whole. Traffic is at about 70% of what it was.