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This will be a sacrifice of his domain. A 301 is the way to go.  Any links and any traffic that he has could benefit PageX directly and your overall site slightly. The value of this redirect would depend upon his traffic and the number and quality of links pointing to his website.  If he has a good site with good links and rankings you will make out big time.   If this site has no traffic and links then you will not gain much. What about his content?  Does he have any great articles or other things that might attract search volume and links.  Maybe he would allow you to republish them.  Then redirecting their original URLs to those new pages on your site would work well.  Or, to same-topic pages on your site if his content of similar or lower quality as yours. Check on his historic traffic and traffic sources by viewing his google analytics or running log analysis.   This can identify valuable pages and streams of traffic.

Scrapebox is an excellent tool for blog and forum discovery. SENukeX doesn't really help at all in that department and is really only a decent tool if you find creative ways to use it like building your own blog networks.

Using Ezine as a source of content will load up your domain with duplicate content.  These pages will not pull traffic unless your domain is stronger than any other domain that has the same content. If you submit content to Ezine that will put the content on a lot of other domains, most of them will remove your links and the rest probably have links that are almost worthless. I think that Ezine is a good recommend to your competitor.

You do not want to no-follow the image link. There are two methods which you can use: 1. Re-order your html code so the anchor text link appears first. Feel free to use CSS or whatever means necessary to achieve this effect. For example, on my site my navigation bar is located at the bottom of the html but it still appears at the top of my site. 2. You can add an anchor link to the end of your html. Example: mysite.com/example#. Several people have theorized this method works and some have offered test results as evidence. I would use the first method if possible but otherwise this is an option.

As you know, Google does not release their analytics data. However, I have a site that started losing a lot of traffic when google started putting the shopping blurb in the #2 position.  Also another site that started losing a lot of traffic when they added the "Brands" and "Stores" lilnks above the #1 position. Perhaps the best that you can tell client is that lots of webmasters see the same thing happening.

Seems to me like the third party reviews are still making an impact on the rankings, it is just that google is no longer displaying them due to legal reasons.

I don't think this is correct. ? is an attempt at using a RegEx in Robots file which I don't think works. Further, if it was a properly formed regex, it would be ? is a special character for the user agent to mean all.  For the disallow line, I believe you have to use a specific directory or page. http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html I could be wrong, but the info on this site has been my understanding from the past too.

Hi Ryan (x2) Looked at that faqme system and thanks for the tip but would have to agree that faqme looks very seo unfriendly. We've found a couple which we're looking at and I will update with the 'chosen one' soon. Thanks again guys for your help. Trevor

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded our Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information about the directory update and link building via directories at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

Isn't your Blog basically viewed as one page? Posting on your site has some value in adding more SEOo content (Title Tags, Meta stuff) as long as its well organized.

Alright, sounds like I should keep the URL structure. My reason in thinking about removing it was that I don't really want to have the menu structure of: Services Web Design SEO Internet Marketing I want Web Design, SEO, and Internet Marketing to be main menu items to draw attention to them. Maybe I'll leave the services page but only link to it from the footer. I guess that provides flexibility for the future if I add services.

That is great advice, but difficult to scale when evaluating thousands of keywords...

Thanks for all your input. I have noindex, nofollowed all of the suspect stuff and asked for my paid link to be removed. Hopefully this will resurrect things. Regards, Marcus

exactly, so in this case you are completely safe.

Yeah I've used the LDA tool in the past and found it helpful as a guide.  If I had to guess I would say LDA is giving their page a higher ranking because they have the line "Mfr. APW WYOTT" in every part listing on this page. Meanwhile we have broken our parts up into subcategories to make it easier for actual users to find what they're looking for, and we therefore lose all of the relevant product content to the subcategories. I think what I'll do is add content below the subcategories on these pages that is both useful to the visitor and keyword rich for the search engines.