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Great. I'll investigate the localization options and 'criminal law'. Thanks a lot for the help!

We built everything custom in php. The second link I posted uses another directory "/wine/" which doesn't exist yet. That is the direction we'd like to go eventually where it would not have an underscore anymore. We would use mod_rewrite to do this. You probably selected the second link which doesn't exist yet if you couldn't access our site. Thanks for your response, -tom

Hi Nick, Thanks so much! Is there any advantage for shorter URLs over long ones? My site is on IIS6, How can I remove the .aspx extension in IIS6?

Well linking out to any site so long as it is relative is no big deal... I would just tell them to nofollow the link (you still get anchor text importance and traffic from the link and they lose nothing).

Google are hoping to use rel=author as a ranking factor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgFb6Y-UJUI&feature=youtu.be&t=57s) I think that in the (near) future this will start playing a role, and the attribute will become a standard like nofollow is. If you trust your freelance writers, and think they'll be able to created a trusted, authoritative profile, go for it. If you're not sure about the quality of work they deliver elsewhere, for other clients, you might want to consider creating your own profile attached to your site, and use that as the author attribute. That way you'll have a bit more control.

In addition to what Tyler said about the subdomain having no impact, the issue is that CNAME isn't actually redirecting anyone. So the traffic that is coming to food.amazon.com isn't really directing to food.com. It's merely renaming that page url. In the event that you set it up that way, then sometime later removed the CNAME, and started food.com off on it's own, you would not inherit any of the domain authority from food.amazon.com. You'd essentially be starting from scratch with food.com.

thanks very much Ryan - Brett

Sorry to answer a question with another question, why would you like your search results to get crawled or indexed? If I remember right back in 2007 Google put up filters for this due to the prominence of search results from the big shopping sites like amazon and bizrate serving up search pages and dominating the 1st page of queries like dvd players etc. The use of robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines is highly recommended. I would go with this unless you have a reason to serve these results. Hope this helps

thanks for the additional input Eric. Google + button also on my site

What exactly do you mean by "bad?" They are both undesired. You certainly won't be penalized for having a 404 specifically, but you may see a decrease in ranking if it affects your site structure or if the pages you lost were passing along page authority to other pages. You should do everything you can to limit both. Both are equally bad. Let me know if I understood the question correctly. Cheers!

Hi there, I'm assuming you are trying to do pagerank sculpting (or something related..) - which was made a little more tough in recent years. I'll base my answer around this assumption, so feel free to correct me if this isn't the case. There are several methods to make a link uncrawlable: AJAX - Googlebot will not read any calls through AJAX. If you can load your link through an external call, it would be completely hidden. Javascript - Obfuscate links with Javascript that masks the link. You can do any number of solutions here, including using tags with a title of your URL, which upon clicking, goes that that URL. Simple and effective. Redirects - I haven't tested this last idea, and it may not work. You might be able to redirect to another page in your website, which is then set to not be indexed. Then redirect to the intended page through a query string. In theory it should work, but obviously not as good as the previous methods I described. Let me know if you have questions. I'd be glad to help further. Cheers!

No it will no be a problem. Even if the search results show duplicate content, to show a sample of pages is fine.

Yes, particularly McAfee and Verisign. This is my belief and not necessarily commonly accepted (yet) amongst the SEO community. I base this belief on a few things: Panda. The questions asked of Panda reviewers were of the type "Would you trust this site with your credit card information". There are studies which clearly demonstrate improved CTR based on the addition of symbols, which tells me these symbols have a positive influence on these decisions. Additionally, the inclusion of these badges are an item which Google can easily track. It is also easy for Google to separate out authentic badges from the many sites who fake it (i.e. show the trust badge image but do not offer the functionality). Security. I sincerely believe sites with McAfee and VeriSign are more secure. I have a client who actually accepted direct credit card payments without SSL on his site. Doing such is a major violation of credit card acceptance, but somehow he managed to do it (prior to hiring me) and he got nailed. Someone hit his site with malware which stole credit card information. He fixed the problem but of course the malware issue impacts rankings. If I can ever make the time I intend to write an article on this topic as I have done quite a bit of research. In my opinion VeriSign and McAfee's value is significantly higher then other SSL certificates due to their recognition amongst users. Trustwave, GoDaddy and other providers may offer a similar service, but it is very clear to me those badges do not offer the same recognition as do Verisign and McAfee. I just worked with a client who, on my recommendation, turned down a free eCommodo SSL and purchased a Verisign badge for $266. The bottom line is if that Verisign badge yields one extra customer per year, it pays for itself. This particular client sells a $60 product which is purchased monthly and has a high profit margin. Also McAfee and Verisign (Norton) both have an extension with millions of users each. Users of their AV software will have sites with their trust badges highlighted with their "Seal in Search" feature. Clearly this function is designed to influence CTR and each company provides numbers to show support that conclusion. As far as ranking, I can't say whether Google uses this information as a ranking factor but I know they could and perhaps even should. If I was Google, I would address users with those browser extensions installed by boosting the rankings for sites with the specific seals. In April of next year the Verisign Seal will change it's name to Norton. If Norton does not do any advertising, this may cause a significant drop in that seal's recognition and value. It's a big unknown at this point.

Do you have root access to the server? If you do then a rewrite map is a lot faster then a bunch of rewrite rules & conditions. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritemap You can always just add comments with the hash tag: # what each thing does and group them. That would be cleaner.

There is nothing you can do to stop it. In order for the link to have value, you need search engines to have visibility to the link. If search engines can see the link, the world can see it. What you can do is ensure the content on your site is of the highest quality which your competitors will have a difficult time matching, and earning links based on your site's quality. You can also raise the level of quality surrounding your site's products or services and earn links accordingly.

Hi, thanks for the good suggestion.. yes i should improve the content, also i vll learn how to perform on-page optimisation

The only benefit in having these on one domain is sharing the link popularity from the one domain verses having to focus on link building and branding for both. I suspect the french version needs much less link popularity then the .com. If both sites already have good link building and ranking i would see no reason to merge them.

Would the "no snippet" tag help with the PR 0 issue? Here's some more info.  We still have some pages that rank for the spam keywords - they have yet to be re-indexed.  However many of the pages that have PR0 don't actually rank for the spam keywords, these pages are clean and have been re-indexed.  Lastly, the hackers had hacked a network of sites and created thousands of cross-links.  In our case, they were linking to "pages" that didn't really exist on our site -  but they were spoofing the bots.  When we removed the hack, I ended up with 4,500+ 404's because of links from other hacked sites to pages that didn't actually exist on mine. I'm happy to provide specific examples if that helps.  Thanks!