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personally I find it works best to name them as you listed in #1 since when you mouse over the images it will show that text. you may also title it to be more descriptive so the user know what they are being linked to. the alternate text you want to be the text you would use as if it was a text link, so also the format of #1 however the difference from the title choice is that the title may be better to be more descriptive to improve the user experience. hope this helps

Are you able to pass along a URL for this? It's a little hard to troubleshoot without knowing more details. If you're still having this problem and don't want to share the URL here, drop a note to the help desk at help@seomoz.org and they can also try to sort it out for you.

Two problems you are experiencing and there is a common thing happening here. your deleting/not implementing the "old" redirects. as you know when you redirect page A... as long as there is a website on that domain. you have to always have that redirect. there is no threshold where if you implement a 301 redirect to a page for after a year for example there is no need for it. This is a good video i posted in the references from matt cutts. you can concluded "in a way" a 301 redirect will never be deleted especially "when Goog start receiving mix signals about this domain" so the solution to your problem is you need to implement these old redirect you had before hope this helps watch?v=QyQs3tz7ZKo

I don't think there is. Title tags and meta descriptions get cut off on the search engine results page at a certain point so that's why they have a recommended limit. As long as you don't go mad, whatever it takes to explain what is in the image. Afterall, the alt tag is there to say what the image is to people who can't see it - so just optimise from that user-friendly sense rather than thinking too much about SEO - get your keywords in if you can and if it makes sense.

Interesting stuff. You're right it is probably more down to the diversity factor. Hope you keep your good positions

problem fixed ..

I don't know that there is one best answer for this. For a given site, I'd try a couple of things. If I'm using a CMS for shopping cart, look at the documentation and see if it references parameters used. A shopping cart often uses parameters, as does anything that involves sorting results in different orders. I'd do a site:domain.com search on the site and look at the URLs that are indexed and see if any are indexed with parameters, and determine if those need to be indexed or should be excluded.

Everything has straightened out and the results are steadily climbing to the top. I had never seen it before and have not noticed it since so I suppose it was a fluke.

Steer clear of duplicate content. If the article is a high quality one then in my opinion it doesn't belong in an article directory - it belongs on a blog or site with a solid readership who can then respond and promote it. If you're creating lower quality articles for the sole purpose of article directory submission then I would still say one submit the one, there aren't many benefits from duplicating this content.

Interesting note to add to this, I did just notice via Google Webmaster Tools, that our blog had been hacked and 150 or so of our blog posts were injected with hidden link spam.  In webmaster tools it said that the 2nd biggest keyword within our site was Viagra.  So that is definately playing into these drops in rankings I'm guessing within the last couple of months.

I commissioned around half a dozen pieces from TextBroker and I was utterly unimpressed. The pieces were not insightful, had very little thought behind them, and looked like they'd been written in about two minutes flat. On one of the pieces I paid for the top level "professional" service, and still the piece was very weak. I asked for it to be revised, but the revision did little to improve things. I'm steering clear.

Thank you!

Thanks Emily, Going to give the Facebook ads a try

If the site were still up, you could verify it in Google Webmaster Tools, put up a robots.txt for that subdomain that excludes crawlers from crawling anything, then go into GWT and request the entire subdomain be removed.

Best practice is a single per page and using CSS to style.