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Can you tell us the URL of the site in question? That can help us to help you, because we can look at the site and maybe spot something like an improper robots.txt or site architecture that makes it hard for a robot to crawl.

Yes it makes sense. Incoming links do contribute to your domain as a whole, but if you're targeting competitive keywords you're likely to need some links to the pages themselves. Also, if all of your links go to one page of your website, it looks suspicious to search engines, much better to spread them out a bit. Paul

I would also add the importance of no-followed links. Based of what I've seen around a percentage between 2% and 10% of no followed links makes your website "natural". Moreover, I'd mention the importance of the proportion of internal and external links. Again, based on my experience (not official and tested data) a natural proportion would be around: 7%-25% external and rest internal. We could make an important distinction: are we talking about "root domain", "sub-domain" or "page level"? The proportion of the link ingredients is different for each of them...

Definitely keep an eye on this section as new parameters can pop up depending on plugins etc used with WP. WP can be a real nightmare. Look in to W3 Total Cache plugin to help with page load speeds. I've used it with great success on a few sites.

I have not come across any "enterprise" commenting system either, that surprises me because it should exist. I am looking for a system that caters for really large websites. Disqus and Facebook are good but from a SEO perspective they have no value.

This YouMoz post about setting up complex advanced segments for brand names might give you some ideas. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guide-to-setting-up-advanced-segments-in-google-analytics-for-complex-brand-names That post focuses on how to look at just branded or just non-branded queries. You might find it useful to take a similar approach but instead of branded filter for keywords that include location, hours, etc.

Definitely agreed. There are lots of clues pointing to the existence of a penalty, but I can't figure out what the penalty would be.

I'd email help@seomoz.org with your account information and treat this as a bug report and see what they can figure out.

At 10:07pm tonight.  Check then and you'll be first on SERP. Obviously kidding, I have no certain idea just like the first two responses.  Consider some of the other factors - sites that re-post the TechCrunch article, number of shares you get on Twitter, whether or not any of the linking sites get "news" status from Google. It's like studying an elementary particle... one thing in theory but they don't exist in isolation long enough to be sure in our reverse engineering of Google's thinking.      With a surge of links from reputable sites, I'd expect a surge in rankings on some keywords within a couple days, with longer status near top if you continue to get referenced/links and a return to lower results if you don't.

I would optimize your product pages for Google, and you don't have to be worried about what Google is posting based off of your feeds. I am not 100% sure on this, but I believe Google will sometimes pull the lowest priced and/or the most frequently updated product feeds. Otherwise they tend to group the product from 8-20 stores or whatever. Your product descriptions get updated when they get changed within your feed. It is best to have your feed get automatically pulled by Google every day, then Google will give you a boost in rankings because your information is among the freshest and most accurate. These are just opinions based on experience however, I have no data to back it up really. Check out this qa post here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-tips-for-optimizing-your-google-product-feeds

I have used Brandpoint about 10 times. Yes, they used to be called ARA content. Their writers are professional journalists and they write very high quality articles on your behalf after you fill out a questionnaire and do a phone interview with them. Their background is in creating "mat" articles for community newspaper editors to pick stories to run for the purpose of having more content to run ads around. They're still in that business but they also now offer this online service. The articles do appear on about 600 sites, and yes it is advertorial. The sites are almost entirely local TV station websites, but also some online newspapers, such as the newly added LA times. I ran a test last year, linking to a very specific term to see if it helped rank a page for a specific term and it did have a noticeable impact. You won't get any traffic from the links, but the links do show up in opensiteexplorer as good quality backlinks to your site. I've wondered if Google will devalue or penalize this now with the Panda and Penguin, but I haven't seen a problem with it yet.

Hi, I suggest feed burner. I've never read anything but I feel like it helps get your links indexed quickly since Google runs it. You can also submit your RSS to various RSS pingers. Also get your RSS set up on your Facebook pages, linkedin profile or other social media sites that have the option to pull in RSS. Good luck.

There can be other duplications of pages so it is advised to have the canonical tag on each page. It's also good for other reasons as well so yea click the option for the canonical tag.