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I wish that were the case, but the site wasn't down. I looked into the errors, they were redirecting to a subdomain that no longer exists.

First, PR that you're going by is TBPR - Tool Bar Page Rank.  This number is not the actual PageRank that Google assigns, which is private and never revealed.  Also, the TBPR is not updated very often.  Google have said they update it "infrequently" - typically only a couple / few times a year. So that drop is not a very good indicator as to what's happening on the site. Beyond that, your real PageRank is not the only thing to consider.  The real assessment should come from reviewing visitor activity - how much traffic comes from organic listings, cross-compared to how many keyword phrases they use to find the site. And that should only be measured when held up against total conversions - whatever calls to action you have.  Because even a drop in organic visits might not be a bad thing if the total conversions increases due to a higher quality visitor base.

My rule of thumb is anything visible and on page should be optimised for the users experience.  If it's going to help them consolidate the knowledge that they've just got from your site then it is beneficial. It will not help you in climbing the SERPS, as link juice and other metrics does not pass backwards in a link.

thanks for the reply, that was my thinking really - so its a case of registering almost a personal account, but then that links me to my company as well, as i dont want to be making up names, etc - bit of a tricky one really!

Hi Tony, If the "Sign In" form is an element included on the page that you set to rel=canonical, the other instances of the sign in form should be neutralized (in terms of triggering duplicate content errors). Usually, something as small as a sign in form doesn't constitute enough content to trigger the "duplicate" warning. The SE's algo has to account for certain elements that are useful on each page (for example, navigation bars). They are more concerned with people scraping large amounts of written content from other sites or just recycling large portions of their own site for SEO purposes.

This is an interesting article Theo.. I guess what you are saying and they way I am interpreting it is that domain authority and trust are more important. Which I agree with. However I would still think there is some milage in this.

I personally wouldn't rely on the advice of just one company that 'your domain is toxic' (whatever that might mean). In order to make such a drastic move, I'd first get a second opinion on this, or run the site through some tools. Perhaps the company doing the SEO just isn't capable enough to get your higher rankings? What arguments are they presenting that might be causing the 'toxicity' for your domain?

If this was a problem then all Word Press websites in the world would be penalised. What you're trying to do is common business sense and it imposes no risk given that your statement about content being unique is true. I say go ahead and make awesome sites now that you have the right technology.

Daniel and Tom- Thanks a million! I'll take your advice and use the cross url rel canonical element. I wasn't sure if it would work- but based on your input I did some searches and found Google's response to Matt Cutts original statement about not working across urls- and it looks like Google decided to support it, just as you said. Here is the link I tracked down: Google Webmaster Blog- Rel Canonical across domains Thanks again guys!

Thanks Danny. That would mean though that I would lose traffic from Google images.  Can you think of a way to have an image gallery without html links?  If I would use Javascript links, Google wouldn't find the big images either....

Amazing thanks for the quick response! You just listed exactly what I had in mind but needed to confirm. Thanks for your input

Just because someone uses a term such as samurai, ninja, rockstar or the like as part of their name doesn't actually make them any better or even right. The first external link on a page has been shown in some testing to be given more weighting than remaining links but this is for external links not internal links. So in theory you want to be the first external link on a site linking to yours. I have not come across the above suggestion as a best practice and if you check the sites of a number of big name SEO's they haven't done this and if it was a best practice you would expect them to.

Thank you Keri,  I had read about speed issues with Magento before, but I thought they had been mostly resolved. I think I am going to stick to my asp.net solution.....  it's a decision, anyway.

I would set your post title as the H1. That is my personal preference and what i do for my clients. H1 gets a little more weight than an H2, though it is not much simply because it's too easy to stuff.

I'm not sure if this meets your needs, but it is something to look at if you haven't seen it already. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemaps-for-videos/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flv-embed/