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Thank you for taking the time to respond, and with such well thought out answer. I suppose the original author would not be so bothered about 3 Quarks Daily as at least they link to & request readers to visit the original site for the full article, which is obviously more than The New Dawn Liberia Site. Do you feel that creating such a site (3 Quarks Daily) as a readers resource of the best articles on a specific topic from across the web is a legitimate way to build a website (for personal pleasure not profit)? and what are your thoughts on copyright issues? How would you feel if others re-posted your content in this way? It is interesting that Google does not penalize duplicate content websites, and in this specific example surprising that those re-posting others content can rank higher. (sorry for asking so many questions)

Thank you.

Well, it's going to make registrars a ton of money, that's for sure.  So the financial incentive is there, for them.  Big corporations will eat it up too - and why shouldn't they?  It offers a great branding perspective, and because of the somewhat selective nature of who will be allowed to actually register for these TLDs, adds a definite legitimacy factor to any company fortunate enough to get one.

I don't think ajax used in a search boxx will affect your site Unless you are using ajax in a module/widget on every page for content and changing that content then maybe but I am not  sure. As for your other metrics you can use heat maps and surveys to see that.

vishalkhialani, a quick note that only higher education institutions can get a .edu extension, it's not available to just anyone who wants to pick one up.

Thank you all very much...My traffic and conversions actually has been quite awesome for the last 12 months..Good enough that this site is the sole support of my family and 7 kids. Again i wouldnt be here where i am today if it was not for yhou guys..

Yes. Bing is ... um.. kind of "picky" about what they index. If you browse through the Bing webmaster tools forums, you can lean a lot about how they choose which pages to keep in their index. Here are a few highlights: #1 Bing will remove a site from it's index if it finds too many erors in your site map (404 errors, etc...) #2 Bing will remove a page from it's index if it doesn't rank high enough. Bing will actually remove a page from it's index if there are (quote) "700 million pages that rank higher then you" . Apparently the thought behind this, is that Bing doesn't want to use space to save a site that isn't ranking yet anyway...  Once you build some more links to your page try resubmitting your sitemap. #3 Bing is always "testing". Bing wil actually move you around the serps to test how people react to you. Bing will mesure the bounce rate of your page, how long people stay on your page, and the general way that people react to your page.  If your page doens't pass the "Bing tests" then they might remove you from their index. So in summery, Bing is trying to keep their serps unique by making it harder to get included in them. They are testing user interaction and they make decisions based on those tests. I know you can try to re-submit your sitemap to Bing after you've made some changes... Best Of Luck.

I'd take a look at the Panda tag for Search Engine Roundtable to keep up with all of the latest Panda update news. Barry's quick with covering things, and does talk to Google to confirm if there is an update. http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda

Everything has straightened out and the results are steadily climbing to the top. I had never seen it before and have not noticed it since so I suppose it was a fluke.

To achieve those different geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools you have to add every subdirectory as a different site, otherwise you can only target one country for the top-domain. You should add marketing.com/de and marketing.com/fr as separate sites to GWT and set the geolocation for each folder to the right country.

Yes I did, thank you for the information. I had a feeling that could be it but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing anything.

This used to work superbly until about 2003.  Then google was able to identify these sites and would drop all of the pages except one or two. Cookie cutter pages are no longer useful.

Hi Diane, I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Have you been able to improve traffic to this site, or have you put it on the back burner? I still see the IN2TOWN CHEAP FLIGHTS header and Yemeni security checks article when I look at the site now.

I looked at the links Interestingly someone said that Wordpress sites have been hit particularlyhard. I know that wordpress sites do tend to have problems with duplicate content due to the categories and tags, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Also someone else said that even if your site is not hurt if the sites linking to you are, that this would hurt your traffic. This might be my situation as my decline in traffic is more moderate than what others have reported whose own sites were bitten by Panda. Does anyone else have any ideas?

Interesting point! However, we are creating a mobile site in html5 to serve smartphones only. On a seperate domain, m.example.com. From what I have read Google treats smartphones as desktops due to thier advanced web browser capabilities. So no need to bother with googlebot.mobile right? Googlebot should index the site once I create a normal sitemap.xml. My concern is that the mobile site pulls the same content as the main site which is already indexed. Would this create duplicate content? If so, what can I do?

I don't have a percentage but I read somewhere that nearly 1/2 of the "buyers" on Google look at shopping results. I think that shopping is important.... and becoming even more important over time. The down site for me is that to get good sales from that channel you have to be very competitive on price.

Cheers bozzie311, I'll look into that - much appreciated!