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Thanks again for your input Sha. I got there in the end!

Is this not effectively cloaking? Not at all. You are offering a very legitimate choice to users and you offer the same choice to bots. The option is clearly designed to maximize the user experience, not to manipulate search rankings. Googlebot has the ability to choose an option even thought it normally will not. Googlebot even has the ability to complete simple online forms entering a name, address, phone number, yes/no options, etc. I am confident it will understand your design. It is not all that different in concept to sites which offer content in various languages based on a manual choice.

Thank you!

First...... before you do anything... Run analytics on both versions of the homepage to see how much traffic they are bringing in, where it is coming from and if it is converting. Only then are you in a position to decide what to do. If one page has very different traffic than the other you might lose more by redirecting than improving the page and running it separately.

Surely it helps, but it is not enough. As for authority that link could in an internal page, with less pr and PA then the home page obviously. Surely it helps a lot at domain authority level and in trust rank.

Hi again Robert, God of All Things Code is away from the office for a while today, so will need to wait a little longer for his input. A couple of things that happened since my last post though: Those twitching antennae just wouldn't stop nudging me to look a little further as everything I see with this site is saying "template" to me. Add to that the URL rewrites which hide the actual URL's and the broken pdf files...so i went digging a little further and ... Aha! Not a template, but a "Theme". The entire site is built in Wordpress! Now, I am pretty sure that the broken pdf's are the result of the Wordpress URL rewrites changing the directory name in combination with the hard coded links. If this is the case, then it ought to be just a matter of adding a rule to the .htaccess file to deal specifically with the pdf's. The order in which the rules appear will determine whether the issue is resolved or not. I'll let you know as soon as I've confirmed the specifics with my Boss. Hope that helps, Sha

Hi Greg, from my own experience I would follow Robert's advice and build the micro-sites.  But only 301 redirect them once they are ranking well independently.  To get them to rank you will need to publish some relevant content (not spam) and build up some quality backlinks to each. I would advise against simply forwarding them, type in traffic will probably be minimal.

Great, I'm going to try that, thanks a lot!

The bullshit detector is showing a 95% likelihood of this being bullshit. I agree with most of the others here who point out that they are probably doing forum/comment spam, and junk directories. Finding a good SEO and link building service is going to be difficult if you focus only on the quantity of links. Like Thomas said, sometimes a handful of really good links is all you need. A good SEO company or consultant will be able to find those.  Instead of number of links, focus more on proven results. Ask for examples of results (not link counts, but traffic, keyword position, or conversion data) or references from clients who have been helped. THEN dig a little deeper and make sure they won't be doing things to get you in trouble.

Heh - beers away! Happy to help

Hi Sha & Gianluca, Thanks for the thoughtful responses. I guess my only thing with Wistia is that it looks kind of expensive. If it were cheap, I would for sure go with it. Gianluca, we've embedded youtube on our site before. Are you saying that if I did what I always did, but submitted a video sitemap to Google showing x video on x page, I'd get the video result benefit in Google's serps? If that's all it takes,  I feel silly for not doing that before! Best...Michael

Hi Ryan, Thank you so much for your help. This makes perfect sense and I believe this would be a much better strategy and was honestly something I hadn't considered. Really appreciate it!

That response indicates there is no manual action being taken by Google. That means your site is receiving an algorithmic penalty. Your site's re-appearance had nothing to do with your reconsideration request being filed. I think Gianluca shares a good assessment as to why your site may have issues. Try to present your page for users, not search engines. Someone has clearly spent a lot of time stuffing the title, meta tags and page with a lot of unappealing content which appears to exist to manipulate search engine rankings. Try following Gianluca's advice and your rankings should stabilize.

I appreciate your explanation Gianluca but I still feel my response was appropriate. Your original suggestion was by participating in blog commenting, I would more likely be viewed as an expert. As I shared, I have no need or desire to be viewed as an expert at this time. I share my knowledge and readers can draw their own conclusion. You suggest blog commenting leads to higher visibility, higher trust in the community, natural outreach, branding, generating traffic to my site, etc. I have never sought nor desired any of those things. My past mindset has always been I am one person with a full workload and am quite content. I am visible to my clients. I am trusted by my clients. I don't have a need for anything else right now. I appreciate you are trying to share your experiences. I noticed you are a heavy participant in blog commenting. I don't wish to discourage you from an activity you enjoy or find productive. As for EGOL's reply, I think you misunderstood. He shared with Q&A you know you are helping someone directly. With a blog comment, it may never been seen. Even if it is seen, readers may not find it helpful. How often do you go back to a blog article after having read it to check the comments? I never do. This is one of the great aspects of SEOmoz. It offers something for everyone. Some people just use the tools, or the blogs. Others want a bit of everything. Best wishes.

It does not matter, 301 will transfere most of your link juice, but you will ose a bit, 301's leak a little each time. but what i would do, rather then 301, is simply link from all relevant content to the page you want to rank with relevant link text, SE's will see that that page is the important one for that term. If it is duplicate then i would remove it

Thanks That code looks very easy but I tested it on a "test" site and the site went off-line. Now I am too scared to test it on the main site. I will contact the hosting company as Ryan suggested. Cheers