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In a recent statement (sorry, don't have the link to hand) Google's Matt Cutts indicated that 301-redirects pass the same amount of rank influence as a normal link does. So there'd be no benefit to using links instead of 301s anyway. Paul

You should try to avoid soft 404s since they are confusing for users as well as for search engines. A good solution is to use custom 404 pages, that way you can return the correct code to the bots and provide some useful content for your users. Also, you should try to redirect some of those 404s to pages with related content in your website, check for the ones that carry the most link juice, traffic, etc. Read on: Soft 404 errors Farewell to soft 404s Creating useful 404 pages Customizing your 404 page HTTP Status Codes Best Practices

Here is a great article from Miriam Ellis who is one of the moderators on SEOmoz http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403 It will explain a lot of the strategies that Karl has mentioned here in depth. Good response Karl.

That's very odd - I'm afraid I haven't seen anything like that. A couple of questions: (1) Does your analytics data match the GWT data? If so, can you segment it at all? (2) Is there any reason Thursday might be meaningful? For example, do you publish new content on Thursday or resubmit your sitemap (sometimes, even little things can have an impact)? (3) Do your logs show anything suspicious, such as bot activity on Thursdays? Do your logs match this data at all? If all three are "no", I'd venture to say it's a GWT glitch and not to lose sleep over it. If it is a Penguin update test (and I'm not seeing evidence of a weekly pattern), you should see the impression changes in your analytics and logs. They shouldn't just be an artifact in GWT.

Hi Vz, Yes, I do think this could cause problems. It seems you are not actually having to solve an issue like this, but are just curious about it. In my opinion, this is the type of issue one would either need to take up with the RERs at the Google Map Maker Forum (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/map-maker), or try to get direct help with from Google staff at the Google Data Issues phone number (http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs). Additionally, it might be necessary to talk to whichever directories are automatically changing the city name to see if something can be done about this. Inconsistent NAP is a major issue, so resolution, if possible, would be very important.

one thing to keep in mind is server down time and server speed.  A lot of websites can be affected by having a slow host or the website being deindexed for significant downtime.  I have a client right now that is on network solutions and had his site deindexed because it was down for 5 days because of a unix environment issue.  The website is still taking 8-12 seconds to load and is killing his traffic.  We are in the process of moving it now ;).

Yes, Its count. I remember once Matt had explained about (-) and (_) in to the URL formation. It means there is something for URL formation. It's also true by logic of search engines.

I guess not, at least they shouldn't. But they were caught doing pretty ugly stuff They could still use your IP to personalize search, there's nothing wrong there.

Perhaps a can sneak a cheeky 2nd question in here, do you know any good firefox add ons to display page rank

My biggest competitors have a much ldata number of links than me but having looked at there link profiles I think 50% of them are a bit dodgy and I have a nice clean if a bit sparce link profile yet I seem to be the one stuck behind. My content was the issue but it has been getting much better. Still ont great but better than my competitors. I hope the next updates help me but I assume I will get messed up by google again! Lol.

I'll try answer your questions in the order you had them I don't think this would be a problem.  It's only natural that people would set themselves to the task of fixing all of their location data at one time. Again, I don't think this is a problem.  There are people out there who are naturally this detail oriented, and would just naturally have perfect listings. This could be a problem.  Is your legal business name "Business Name Location?"  If it is, then you shouldn't have to worry about it, but if you are trying to stuff a keyword in there you do have a problem. As long as you set your places profile to show that you do business at the their location you are ok with this one. From my experience they will just slap the local on top of my normal organic listing.  The only time this doesn't happen is some of my internal pages where I get both a local and universal result. Social Media for SEO is still in debate, but the vast majority of SEO's agree that it does have at least a small impact.  That being said, I wouldn't attribute this to your problems unless all of your competitors have massive followings with tons of interaction. Google isn't nice enough to announce all of their changes, so the only people that would have any idea are the ones with research departments.  That being said, I haven't heard of any, but I'm sure they are constantly tweaking it.  The only big announcement was Matt Cutts saying that merchant quality was going to become an indicator sometime this year. I can feel your pain here.  My company works on a lot of businesses in the same vertical, and the CMS's in this vertical create thousands of pages with the same exact title tags.  My first month is usually spent indexing the site numerous times to try find all the stray Titles that need to be changed.  From my experience this will have a negative impact on your search results.  I'd work quickly to fix the issue.

Hi Christy - I will check OSE and see...

First thing to do is truly determine if you really need to remove those links, and second is to determine what your brand is.  Start by reading this post by Marie Haynes earlier this week: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too If NLP California is your brand and what people call you, most likely there is no problem having links to your site with anchor text NLP California.

As far as Google choosing their own title tag, they've been doing that for years now, even to sites such as Apple.com. Barry Schwartz has written about it a few times, including at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html

Are you looking to offer an affiliate program for your products, or to join other affiliate programs to sell products from other companies and get paid a commission? I have provided an answer for either situation... Having an affiliate program for your products (i.e. becoming a merchant) should not hurt your rankings. There are many options to get started, including open-source, custom-built and affiliate network programs like Commission Junction, Share-a-Sale and Linkshare. Joining affiliate programs as an affiliate shouldn't harm rankings in and of itself, but this all depends on what you do, as Jason described below.

Valuable information.  Nice work!

Actually, Google position is this: Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone. (cited from here). So, where the hosting is not relevant, or so relevant as it could be once. Said that, the IP has a weight, hence you can always associate a IP of your targeted country to your site, even if you are hosting it in your own server (in another country than the targeted one). Finally, as said by the others, Google looks up at the users IP in order to present what it could be the most useful for him (geo-targeting personalization).

In what way does the industry you are in influence search engine results (that you've found)? It's not something I've thought of before but does make a lot of sense. We're seeing between 6-8% average on Bing in the travel industry, or at least in this travel company..

Yes, I was specifically referring to Penguin.  I am seeing uplift in rankings for specific keyword phrases that dropped last October.  These keywords had backlinks disavowed in March 2013.

First, I would do keyword research to look for some long-tail keywords. Then, I would do an analysis on who is ranking for those keywords. Then, I would start developing new internal pages on the site as well as new content targeting those keywords. Start sending out guest blog posts, press releases, and link bait as ways to gain new inbound links. Build these more specific keywords into your site. You should be on your way to higher rankings as long as your links are coming from quality websites. You can also work to improve your on-page SEO even further.