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Thanks everyone. Feedback much appreciated. I think I will go with a separate stylesheet which won't be responsive, but at least give IE8 users a better experience. If I see a high bounce rate or poor engagement with IE8 users, then I will probably add a overlay with browser message. Cheers, Alex

Thanks for the comments. I would agree but he told me he has been paying someone to help him work with Google to remove the penalties. He said he wished he would have talked with me first because I gave him the same advice you would have given. He said that Google finally got back with him and said his site should be on the "up and up" soon. Thanks for sharing.

Perfect!  That's precisely what I was looking for.  I wasn't aware that Disqus worked outside of the WP plugin. I'll give it a shot.  Thanks!

Going responsive is the way to go if you ask me and most other SEO's out there. I'm not sure i fully understand your question though. Responsive design doesn't have any issues with Javascript in most cases. It would depend a lot on what the Javascript would try to do. As Andy has stated above Google can now read and execute AJAX and Javascript which is great. The only thing you should be careful is when implementing more Javascript is whether the website will still function as expected on devices/browsers that don't (fully) support Javascript. There are simple fallbacks and such so that all of your users get served great content and not just the ones with the most modern devices and browsers. Excellent book for more information on this is: Designing with Progressive Enhancement. Must read for any front-end web developer if you ask me.

HI, Magento can have a bit of a steep learning curve so unless you want the developer learning on the job I would say you will want to see either a solid portfolio of sites already developed in Magento and/or Magento certification. There are quite a few individual Magento certified developers out there now, so it is worth looking to see if there are some in your area.

Hi Bob, I want to apologize for the misinformation I gave you. I misread your question and apologize for that. Paul, I apologize if I miss led Bob. I misread it, and all I can do at this point is apologize. I put the work in because I read the question I thought they were speaking of something else. So that's why I spent the time to Try and answer it. I've spoken to Keri privately and while I can't say I will never misinterpret something  again ever I am definitely doing things to prevent that from happening. All the best, Thomas

If you are a smaller firm and you wear all the hats, here are instructions on how to give yourself a hug (yes--real instructions).

I know of no valid reason not to use Google Webmaster Tools - there's way too much paranoia on this subject, IMO. If you're knowingly doing something extremely black-hat, then maybe, but Google can detect most of that without GWT. GWT isn't adding any kind of tracking to your site - it's just revealing to you what they already know, for the most part. The nice thing about GWT is that it can help validate the XML sitemap and, once validated, help you figure out what's getting indexed. I suspect these other tools are just looking for some default name for the file, and you're using a non-default one. You can map it, as Thomas said, or you can just tell Google what the filename is. Beyond the SEs, I'm not sure who really needs to process your XML sitemap.

Oke, i see your point. Perhaps you would find your answer in this article-> http://www.e-nor.com/blog/google-analytics/time-on-site-2-0-tracking-conversion-duration-in-google-analytics I would also recommend reading the following article -> http://blog.custora.com/2012/10/dont-look-at-average-time-to-conversion/ They have some valid points in there. I hope my answers have been of assistance

Hi Dan, I know this is an old question but I wanted to ask if using MultiSite and Domain Mapping had any negative impact on search rankings? Or do the search engines treat the mapped domain as a completely unique domain? Thanks in advance.

My website that is ranking well has errors too: Result: 59 Errors, 4 warning(s) So far the site is still ranking well so i am not very worried. But i know my friend who engaged in an India SEO company to solve his problem.

Have been very disappointed with Bluehost.  LOTS of downtime in the last 6 months.

If you have old wordpress databases sitting around, it would only be a problem if you still have the WP that's connected to them still around also. If so, anyone (or a bot) that visits the old installs would be pulling data from the DB and thus draining a small fraction of resources away from your current install of WP. This shouldn't be a problem, considering you mentioned they are experimental and I assume are not in production. The more pull on the database, the more bogged down your server could become at a given time; usually not an issue unless you get sudden spikes of traffic on your experimental WP installs; which would slow production WP down. Hope that made sense.

Hi Jimmy, I do not have any hard data to refute what you are experiencing; however, I will share it is highly likely the spike is related to other factors and the TLD being .org or .com is completely unrelated. It would be an exceptionally major change for Google to change how they value TLDs. Such a change would be front page news on all the SEO sites.

Hi Filip, Check this article out - http://blog.kissmetrics.com/100-conversion-optimization-case-studies/ - 100 case studies broken down in simple format. By having 100 case studies one can really see there is no right / wrong and one approach for all websites, but at the same time some outstanding tips and observations. 1 thing I have learned: keep it simple, ideally focus on 1-2 main messages on your homepage, even though you burn to highlight 10 different things you feel is so great about your business.

Hi Bob, This effect is done using a background image. The image being used is this one: http://www.3dcart.com/images/5/main-panorama3.jpg It has a width of 2500 and height of 444. This ensures that it takes up the whole screen on devices less than 2500px wide (which is most of them). The image has feathering on the left and right - which allows it to fade to the same as the black background on devices largest than 2500px. The site specifies the image, width and background colour in their CSS file: .panel0 {      height: 444px;      background: #18100d url(../images/5/main-panorama3.jpg) no-repeat center top; } and to display the background image - they use HTML similar to this: [SOME STUFF] I hope that helps.

I'd second your recommendation for Appthemes' Vantage. I've used it before with a client and it's a great theme. The developers are pretty responsive (if you'll pardon the pun) to questions as well.

Not bad for the homepage as far as I know - but it does seem to be bad for the internal pages you link to as any 'juice' that is passed is diluted by the amount of links you have. Internal linking & navigation is good, but don't overdo it with spammy footer links that all point to keyword-rich anchors back to your site, especially repeated ones.

To make it look good they hired a good designer and spend time and money doing CRO.  You can see in the links below the technologies behind the scenes. However produce a great website is not about the technology it's about knowing the theories about designing a website.  A professional using only Microsoft Pain as tool will do far better than some one with all the tools in the world  that only knows how to use the tool, one can master every single feature of Photoshop for example and still  make poor designs is not about knowing the tools is about knowing design. http://builtwith.com/?http%3A%2F%2Fwww.quicksprout.com%2Fthe-advanced-guide-to-seo%2F http://builtwith.com/?http%3A%2F%2Fbacklinko.com%2Flink-building

Thanks everyone! I think I'll go ahead and try to make the change for at least some of the urls that aren't performing well to see if shortening them helps. I'll report back what I find. Thanks again! Ruben