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Consider posting excellent content in a dedicated area of the merchants site..... great articles such as... "How to select a mountain bike tire for sand, mud, rocky, road or leaf litter surfaces" "How to change a mountain bike tire in 60 seconds" A sporting goods site could have hundreds of these articles that answer common customer questions and demonstrate expertise and credibility.  They also sell products such as the tools needed to change that tire. Mountain bike blogs will link to these articles individually or as a collection if you have done a great job.  Ask them to write one for you and they will link to it bragging (and you get free content). These will be articles with lots of photos, quotes from experienced riders, short video and more.   They can attract links from mountain bike clubs, manufacturers, bloggers and more.

I would say that integrating it with the site would be the best option.  When dealing with eCommerce I like to think that the least confusing you can make the process the better they will accept it.  Unless what you sell is extremely interesting no one is going to read it but the SEO rich pages you can create will be priceless in serps. The big issue is when they find their way to your site through the blog content do you want them to be on some weird page that seems questionably attached to your eCommerce page or one that is integrated with it fully.

We never give content away.  Never have, and never will. If you have great content promote it heavily on your own site.  Submit it to sites such as slashdot, stumble, digg, reddit as appropriate.  Make it very easy for visitors to tweet, like and share.  Other than that I don't market my content, instead I spend that time to produce more. Links accumulate slowly at first but then once you start getting a little traffic the links arrive a bit faster. That's my experience.

I have the same problem with one of my websites. Can someone please shed some light on this topic...

One method: Install JMeter on a remote machine in a VERY remote location and perform regular performance tests with it. Downside to this method: Values may not be exact as JMeter is not a browser but a site testing tool, so values may differ significantly from your browser experience. http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/ Another method: Webservices such as yottaa.com. They offer performance testing and monitoring. I think they also might be using a JMeter implementation, at least it sounds like it www.yottaa.com This may be the easiest solution, and I'd definitely give it a spin, but maybe you shouldn't rely on their data as your only source. Third method: Build your own testing tool based on Googles PageSpeed SDK. http://code.google.com/p/page-speed/ That would be my favourite, but you need someone with coding experience Sure, these were all rather advanced options (except for yottaa.com) but if you want to have reliable data you should take your time and use a proper tool.

The majority of their links could all be pointing to their home page and they may not have many deep links, which can explain why the page authority for their home page is higher than the domain authority.

mm but what if we are talking about the same page?

Thanks everyone, especially for the tips regarding apps for the Ipad.

The advantage of guest blogging is you are exposing your site to an established audience. If you take any given topic there are going to be power users who have may receive RSS feeds from all authoritative sources and visit many sites; however, most people will have one or two favorite sites and stick with them. By adding an occasional guest blog to a site, you are presenting yourself to the site's audience. Those who find your article helpful or interesting may follow a link back to your site. That is what I consider to be the primary advantage of guest blogging. If that link is followed, then you have also diversified your link portfolio a bit as well.

The only thing internal site links can realistically do is adjust how PR flows within your own site. If you wanted to stretch for a corner case, you could have an island page or deep page that was not indexed or seen previously, but since you created a link to that page then it is seen. If that page had issues with it's content or links, then a penalty could be involved. Based on your replies and the small amount of ranking drop, I really don't think a penalty is involved. The maximum it would be is a discounting of links. If not do you know of any alhorithm changes in the past week? With around 500 algorithm changes each year, there seem to be changes every week. I am not aware of any major changes but minor ones happen all the time.

I'd recommend implementing 301 at the server level e.g. in IIS settings rather than the code level. There are loads of guides on this - just search for "301 iis6 redirect" on your favourite search engine. Hope this helps.

It's better to sort out the problem in the source rather than patching it with rel canonical. One thing you can do to help the situation is to teach Google about your URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools: url-parameters.PNG

gone?

Some companies have a lot of sites covering various topics, for example, http://ninemsn.com.au/ The "100 links per page" is a very old rule back from the days when crawling web pages was much less sophisticated then it is now. Search engines have the ability to crawl hundreds of pages. The example you are using is a site with a DA of 85 and is in the top 1000 most trafficked sites in the world. This site can support the crawling of 100s of links. Unless your site has an exceptionally high DA, you probably want to reduce your links to the minimal amount necessary to ensure a quality user experience. As you examine your links, determine which links are actually used. There are tools such as CrazyEgg that can help you evaluate your site. Imagine a site with 1000 pages and a link to all 1000 pages from the navigation bar. What you are telling search engines and users is that all 1000 pages are equally important. That probably is not the case. The most important pages and categories should have a link, but the lesser pages would require an additional click. Should these headers be implemented in javascript? Search engines can crawl most javascript. The best practice would be to reduce the links as mentioned above. Search engines reward sites which improve the user experience by providing higher rankings. If you offer 200 links and 150 of them are not used, you are bleeding PR and your site will not rank as well overall, which is by design. I'd prefer to reduce the number of links, but sometimes company policies don't allow this. Your role as a SEO is to educate the company on the importance of the changes you recommend. If a company refuses to implement your recommendations, then there is not much you can do about it.