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Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality? What benefit does this activity have for users? None. When you focus your efforts on activities that do not offer any benefit to users, but instead the primary focus is to manipulate search results, it is called Black Hat SEO. This activity is establishing a link network. Search engines such as Google are very aware of this method and, when you are caught, your site will receive a penalty. I would recommend focusing your time and effort on activities which benefit visitors.

This is a known bug in the software. This response from a Linkscape engineer can help explain what's going on. http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains

Thanks Ryan, I can play with the widget code for the Facebook. Yes, I am doing an entire site redesign but I wanted to run a few things over here at SEOMoz as well. It is pretty comprehensive based on all the topics and content and so it is taking a while. My designer so rocks--and has some great ideas.

If you use a server running IIS as an example it's very easy to redirect from the www. subdomain to the root domain or vice versa. You should probably redirect to the version that currently holds the most authority and rank. The MozBar can help you establish which one this is.

You should read this http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139066#301 Google seem to prefer 301 re-directs where possible, but in your case it may be much more straight forward to use the canonical tag. It was created pretty much for times where you have variations on a product (such as different colour shoes but otherwise identical, each with a separate page)

I would recommend taking a look at slash vs non slash pages and seeing how many non slash pages on your site are listed as 404'ing. Look at your 404'd pages in Google Webmaster Tools. If this happened to one URL chances it happened to many across your site and if so this is a big issue but can be resolved very easily by appending the slash to the end of all URLs. Some code might have broken or been improperly or accidentally changed by a webmaster, because if the slash URL version was originally there then that used to be the standard and something technical caused it to go away. This could have broken if you changed from Microsoft to Linux or vice-versa - the .htaccess file or modrewrite would stop working if that was the case.

Since the search engines aren't very good with videos yet, that is the reason behind the practice. For clients, I also always try to include a brief summary below to help out a bit more. Never hurts to cover all the bases!

We did not get more details on that - I assume it may raise some flags if you suddenly redirect 20 domains. I'm not sure if or why is that, that's why I decided to ask a follow-up question. Btw, thank you both for your replies!

If I were you I'd start with a new google account just to be sure that nothing negative is carried across... but that may just be my sceptical view. Being very pre-cautious if I wanted to make sure that nothing negative affected the quality site, I would also probably put the lesser quality sites into a different analytics account. But like Barry says, if they're hosted on the same server dedicated server or in the same IP range than google can make an educated guess that they're linked. In the longer term, why don't you begin bring the other sites up to the same standard of quality as the best one, then you've got nothing to fear.

Wahey! Great Stuff Keri. Didn't realise that! Thanks

Thanks! I have some pages that contein h1, h2, h3 and h4. And I have other pages that dont't have h3 but they do have H2 and H4. Is it a seo mistake? Thanks!

It's not particularly important. "Blog" doesn't offer any sort of semantic importance to the content underneath. Singular and dense category landing pages are the goal with this strategy. That's more important than creating a URL distinction between your blog and static content.

Hi Antonio, The best way to check if the site is using cloaking is to go into your Google Webmaster Tools acccount and "Fetch as Googlebot", then compare the code to see if googlebot is being shown the same code as the user. However in this case, I would suggest that your concerns are being prompted by the use of CSS to hide text within the page so that it is not visible to the user. I located this in your main.css file #homepage-content { position: absolute; height: 1px; width: 1px; overflow: hidden; top: 0; left: 0; } Basically, this is a massive amount of text which has been shoved into a div that measures 1 pixel x 1 pixel in the top left corner of the page. This is a practice which is not viewed kindly by search engines. As to improving optimization there are a couple of things that are fairly obvious: Using Flash for the rotating images is not our preferred option for a couple of reasons. First, any user with an Apple iOS device will see only blank spaces as these devices do not support Flash. Second, bots are not able to retrieve information from Flash documents in the most cases. jQuery is a much better option as the presentation is visible to everyone and also allows you to obtain some SEO value from image file names, alt tags and inserted text. The majority of the images in the flash presentation do not really represent what people expect from a  "Resort". If you want people to convert then you need to engage them and I think that the images that are being used now are not helpful in selling the product. Hope this helps, Sha

Some quick notes regarding your site: you have a flash-based page but you have the HTML code fully supporting a non-flash version of the page too. Very well designed. You are using 11 H1 tags. Try changing to 1. The other tags should be H2 or H3. your Resorts menu shows the other brands have their own primary domains, not subdomains as you suggested. You could merge all your sites into one. This would offer the advantage of combining your DA into one site, allowing all pages to rank better. I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. You are right. The website is using black hat tactics. In the future if you can share EXACTLY what leads you to this belief, it would probably make finding the problem easier. As you can see, the home page shows almost no text. Even with the flash disabled, the home page appears the same but the image viewer shows a single image instead of a slide show. The html shows a large amount of text which is hidden in a div called "homepage-content". The div is set to be invisible: height 1px, width 1px, overflow hidden, etc. This behavior will be detected by search engines and directly lead to a severe penalty. Most likely the site will be pulled from the index.

Adding noindex to search (dynamically) created pages will prevent the problem ever existing.  However not all CMS tools allow or this to be done.

Not seen it in action, but I like it. I like it a lot First thoughts are that it'll never been usable on a massive scale (I'd be worried about security and people gaming the system for points if the rewards are any good), but for smaller sites I think it's very clever.

Will do. I might do an hour of link building on the weekend just to get Google to it a bit quicker. I do rank for another EMD, which is at position 4, I built it in couple hours and did 1 hour link building, O and it has 8 affiliate links point out as well. Its been stable for months now at that position, which says to me if its an EMD and its a .co.uk, GAME ON!

Very good suggestion. With organic CTRs, you never know (at least I am not aware of a tool that would show you...) which snippet Google shows, i.e. if it was your description or some other text from the site, so experimenting with different descriptions would not give you reliable results. But with AdWords, you have full control over the ad copy that is being shown.