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Every document I have seen all agrees that canonical tags are followed when the tag is used appropriately. The tag could be misused either intentionally or unintentionally in which case it would not be honored. The tag is meant to connect pages which offer identical information, very similar information, or the same information presented in a different format such as a modified sort order, or a print version. I have never seen nor even heard of an instance where a properly used canonical tag was not respected by Google or Bing.

Hello PMC. I've seen you around SEOmoz for the past couple months and I recall your struggles with Google Places. If I may make a suggestion...the SEO world is unfortunately full of a huge variation in quality. I would hesitate to grab anyone based on a nice website. Since you have a large focus on local SEO and Google Places, my recommendation would be to do some google searches on those subjects. Instead of looking for websites, find blog articles and forum posts which cover those topics. Look for someone who repeatedly shares articles on those topics or responds to Q&As. Another though to share is if you find someone you have confidence in but their rates are too high, consider hiring them for just an evaluation of your site and talk about your goals. You may be able to do a lot of the implementation work yourself and save some money that way. Another idea for your business. In Las Vegas there are a lot of show animals. I am unsure if your clinic focuses only on traditional pets or if you are able to service some of the tigers, dolphins and other show animals. It can be great PR to share that you are the official vet for Casino XYZ.

Hey guys, Yep, Keri is correct, unfortunately We found a bug in ourJuly index with our new crawlers - they were crawling binary files as if they were links and, since they are not normal links, the crawler couldn't handle them very well. We have made some updates to our crawling so it will go deeper into sites. The reason for these odd inbound links from high-authority sites is due to the crawler reaching much deeper into sites where there are more download (i.e. binary) links. The first issue is the crawler is counting a binary file as a link, but the larger issue, is that the crawler doesn’t really know how to handle these types of files. This bug is causing some links to be improperly associated with certain domains. This is why you’re seeing inbound links to pages that don’t really exist. There are two steps to addressing this issue: changing how the crawler sees these file types and then fixing how the crawler handles these file types. We have made improvements to our algorithm so that we will be able to handle the majority of these files correctly, however, this update will need a few more weeks to propagate. The fix for this issue probably won’t be seen for another update, meaning late September. Our improvements should catch most of the issues, but there still could be a few cases we haven't addressed. If this happens, don't hesitate to let us know; we love feedback since it helps us improve and make our index even better! The next step is to fix how our crawlers handle binary file links and prevent them from being improperly associated with certain domains. We are in the process of working through that issue right now. We’re doing everything we can to resolve this bug as we know it is alarming to see these phantom inbound links.Thanks for your patience!Carin

I agree with staying away from the link exchange page idea. However, I would think that you could find legitimate links from local sources, especially if you have any existing offline partnerships with them. Do you sponsor any little league teams or do any charity work? Do you offer free storage for women referred from the battered women's shelter (I know of movers that provide free moving for battered moving)? Anything like that you can ask for a link back from the people as a way for them to show their support. Natural links would also come from people involved in real estate, property management, student housing -- anyone that frequently deals with people that move and need a place to store things.

Thanks, I will have to try it out as well.

I agree with Anthony. Focus on communities, forums and blogs that are highest of quality, in line with your market's interests and yours so you're more inclined to be consistent with your efforts to build links.

Saw this on Yoast's blog: "Auto generating a snippet is a "shortcut", and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway)." Question answered

A cleaner way to do this is to use a print css file. In your HTML you call it like so: <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="print" href="our-print-version.css"> Then you have only one document for both print and screen, and you can 301 one of your duplicates back to the original.

Sadly, I'm in Montana, and have very few bushes around, so option D) is out of questions How is the new domain ranking for other keywords?  Maybe like 4 slice toaster, or whatever phrase gets a lot of traffic?  If it's ranking high for other phrases I would use it as a temporary test dummy.  Pretty up the website, and find out which phrases, designs, etc. convert the best while you improve your original /toaster website.  Once you have all the data you need, and a highly improved /toaster page, just 301 it over. However, if you don't have that much time, I'd just 301 it over, and go on with your day.  There's always room for hopes and dreams, but this whole 24 hours in a day thing can get in the way if you don't have help. If you choose to redirect, I would definitely put it on the inner /toasters page.  It looks like you already have a good amount of links pointing to your home page, and not many to the inner page.

The post seems to have been updated with a retraction of sorts, saying that it's rare but can happen, which is my stance (indeed I mentioned it in a question a couple of days ago). I actually think it's more rare now than it used to be, but there was a time when you could do a lot of harm to someone by pointing these bad links at them. Alas I'm not going to be able to back that up with any solid examples, because I was too much of a n00b and on the fringes of SEO when I first learned about it 4 or 5 years ago and it's not something I've been a participant in myself since. EDIT: What I will say though is we're not talking about getting low quality sites pointing links in to you, that's almost never likely to harm you. Pharmacy links, malware, spyware, paid networks and such like which can be traced back to an offending site are more along the lines you want to think about. Spending time setting that kind of thing up and putting just the right amount of effort into making it difficult, but not impossible, to trace to a competitor was the sort of thing people were being paid a decent amont of money to do.

Not totally sure. You may find it will help the root domain if the sub-domain links back to the root domain and you still let the pages get followed.

That I did my friend. That I did.

Thanks for your response Tom. Essentially there is only one query string variation that is live and linked to for the 10 pounds url. /10-pounds-products/     =>     /10-pounds-productss/?display=cost&value=10 The text content is identical on both URLs however the query results are obviously different. I don't think there is a way to remove the canonical tag aside from removing the plugin so I may have to go with changing it to the query string. Ideally I would like for users to see the non-query version in the SERPs and the click through to the the query version of the page. Not sure that's possible now though I will speak to the developer to see if this issue is avoidable. Thanks again Rosh

Indexation of ad-server code may prove tricky as often it will have a generic & dynamic make-up (i.e. JavaScript). It depends on how you set-up the code and ultimately how your engine will serve the code to end users. What you are wanting to achieve is definitely possible through automation (whether via an ad-server or a custom script). The variable is just how the ad-server you use serves the listings. (You might like to try DoubleClick or OpenX first. Both are free). Best of luck! Anthony

You need to show Google why the homepage is most important for that term. I haven't looked in depth, but here are a couple of things... Has Google added your brand name to the title tag here on the SERPs? "Store info : Football Shirts, Kits & Maglia - Calcio Italia Shop_" - _www.calcioitaliashop.com/store_info.htm I notice it's not the same within your coded title tag. If you've recently removed the brand from your About Us page that could help. See here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization I haven't checked your link profile but is it possible there are more links (or more powerful links) to your About Us page, rather than your home page? If so, getting this reversed will help, or as it's a new site, perhaps this hasn't happened yet. Setting up profiles with social networks and adding the link to your homepage will help show Google that that is the most important page. You could also create a Google Places profile with a link to the homepage, if you haven't already. Bolding "Calcio Italia Shop" on your About Us makes it look like that page is important for that term. You could remove that bolding or change it to "Calcio Italia Store" (there seems to be some confusion over what your brand name is?) and add "Calcio Italia Shop" to a H1 tag on your homepage. These little things will help send the right signals, but I don't think it's something you need to worry about long-term - I think Google will eventually figure out the homepage is best to rank for the brand name as that should naturally build up more page authority. Also, I'd make it readable and put your brand name in the meta description of your homepage. The meta description isn't there to stuff keywords into, it's there to encourage people to click through from the SERPs. It should be around 155 characters max, the search engines chop more off.

Rand posted a nice video a while back on Whiteboard Fridays' about the effects of out linking.  The basic jist of it is that you can link out to quality domains without any real benefit or being penalized - however - if you like to poor quality domains then it reflects poorly upon you. Sorry I can't find the link right now, I'll post it up if I find it!