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Yeah, and we have no idea what's at play.  I mean, if we look around the net and see who is abusing with CSS hiding and who isn't my guess is that 95% of people abuse it...and if I'm Google I'm going to go ahead and put it an automatic point deduction somehow based on how many of those I see, then hope that people who manually rate these sites 'undo' the auto deduction.  At least, that's what would make the most sense. I wouldn't risk it, but that's just me.  I'm sure the alt tag in the h1 would do just fine and doesn't 'hide' anything...Although...you could certainly abuse that as well since it's mostly hidden, lol.  Just use a flippin google fonts or a cufon font replacement and make it as close to what you want as possible.  The less images the better!  My competitor could easily make their h1 image into text and it would probably look even better than the image they use.

May I suggest you an additional CMS for your consideration ,which provides you with all your requirements too. Drupal from Drupal.org

in this case simply canonical tag the less optimized pages to the main page you want to represent your site this would be the representative URL most likely: mysite.com/product.html I would lose the .html extension too.

In the sense that a report is alerting that there are too many links on a page though is going to be because it is warning of authority leakage more than anything else though. Granted, the insertion of 'just' in my previous statement probably misleads... I agree though that if you were to link every page to every page, it would just cause a royal headache to crawlers - why one would do that though is beyond me.

I agree with you saying : as easy as possible! that's the key and in this instance,I wouldn't bother with external commenting systems.Keep it simple and let them comment directly on your site. This will bring you many advantages in the long term.

@ John - Sounds like a useful experiment for someone who can code and wants YouMoz exposure. @ G.L.A. -  G's "business model" is to use search to sell ads and not to provide the "best" results.   I would not be surprised at all if G is now penalizing large contact forms, contact forms above the fold, etc. at least as harshly as some of the earlier Panda updates penalized over use of AdWords.  If Adwords ads are not immune under certain conditions, why would contact forms for the site itself be treated more generously assuming all other things are equal ?

Good Points, Steven... Also did you build a new Google Sitemap.xml file to submit to Google as well build an .htaccess file for 301 redirects for old no longer URL' s to forward the new pages. Check your Google Webmaster Tools for any errors, alerts and or 404 pages.

Ok thanks, I just did it as always thought it was good practice.

Thanks for the answer, it will take some time but i believe i can remove those links. I cant believe that a link at the footer of my clients website "Design by.." would be such a problem. Of course is combination of reasons in my case, as other websites of competitors have thousands of these links and haven't been penaltize. So do you suggest that i shall remove those links and submit a reconsideration? Or remove them build some better links and content and wait a few more weeks if something change? Does anyone have an idea how much time these penalties last? Thanks.

I will use a canonical tag, but my concern indexing the pages.

I agree Alan, Mega Menu's are a good way to dilate the link equity of your page and in most cases it isn't needed at all. Keep the top-level navigation simple and have a submenu on all pages that contain links relevant to that section. EG: Mega Menu could be: Home Mens (Mens Tops, Mens Jeans, Mens Coats), Women (Womens Tops, Womens Jeans etc) Contact us In this example it would be better to have one top level menu for: Home | Mens | Women | Contact us Then when your in the men or women section show links to "Tops", "Jeans" and "Coats". That way those links are relevant to the section you're in and reinforces the structure of that section to search engines. After giving it further thought I would suggest not having a mega menu at all, because it may harm your SEO on-page optimisation efforts in the long term.

I think Matt's absolutely right (although Alan's warning are definitely worth noting). It really depends a lot on what "change" means. Even "just a template" could mean that your navigation options move, change, increase/decrease, and that can change your internal PR flow. IF the navigation is the same, and IF you aren't adding a lot of ad space, and IF your content, titles, URLs stay roughly the same, and IF you 301-redirect properly (or don't need to, because URLs aren't changing), then you may see very little long-term impact. You may see a bounce/shuffle as Google re-evaluates the site - any change can trigger short-term bounce. Other things to keep in mind: (1) Make sure the new template doesn't radically alter load-times. (2) If you're adding new content, that should be fine, but if you add a lot of content, you could dilute your index, create duplicates, etc. Plus, you'll be linking to that new content, which may draw internal PR from other pages. It's always a balancing act. Not to make it sound grim. Plenty of people change their sites with no harm and even for the better (especially if it's better for users). Just go in with your eyes open and plan carefully.

4. How long people are staying on the page This is a good post, which covers the basics of Google Analytics goal setup, but you basically want to set "duration" as the goal metric to track and then specify a minimum time you want to track. http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/how-to-setup-goals-in-google-analytics.html If you have any further questions let me know.

Without knowing the terms, or the type of content it is hard to say what would work best. I know that if you rank well for the topic in general you will rank well for localized terms using localized landing pages if each page has unique enough content. So if you rank well for Blue Widget Company, and you setup a section of the site for "locations" or "Service Areas" and then build out a "Dallas Blue Widgets" page that talks about your location in Dallas, your contact info, and staff that serve Dallas, and Maybe a short story on what you have done for people in Dallas you should do relatively well. From there you can link back to your generic "Blue Widget" page. Obviously the success of that strategy will depend on how competitive each market is for that term, and probably on how unique your regional content is as well. If there is anything to be learned from the panda update it should be that going the route of serving the user with your local content is Key. So providing "service areas" and then creating somewhat unique content for that market should be a good way to go. This also helps you consolidate all of your links. I would rather spend time writing 50x unique pieces of content than try to get good links for EACH site. Just my thoughts anyway. EDIT: This way is also MUCH easier to track in analytics, and helps you consolidate all of your tracking, so for efficiency, and for flexibility I say this route wins in the long run

If you do a directory i would look at some of the larger directories and get some ideas. Yelp.com citygrid.com http://hotvsnot.com/

I've had the same experience. I have WP Tables Reloaded, and am seeing some of the table info in snippets in Google even. If you search [site:strikemodels.com/products] you'll see several examples.