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A thought to consider is you may have links that you are not seeing. There are also bookmarks users may have along with e-mails which can offer a link to each page. Every product page represents potential sales. If a user who does follow a bookmark or link finds the page they expect, there is a much higher likelihood they may make a purchase on their next visit. If users are dumped on the home page they may close the browser window. Think about how you would react if a friend sent you a "hey, look at this great product" e-mail link and you found yourself on the home page of a company with 8000 products. It comes down to what type of company you are and how you wish to balance costs versus service. Is this a one person company who lists 8000 products and dropships orders from various suppliers? Or are you a large company with a warehouse which carries thousands of products and has a large staff. In the latter case, I would ensure all the pages are properly redirected. Keep in mind your redirects don't necessarily mean 8000 lines of individual code. Depending on your old and new URL structure, it is possible your entire site can be redirected with a single regex expression, or a relatively few of them.

Well the simple answer is that I made a mistake. It popped up again today and after doing some research yesterday and this morning I realized it is being populated by an extension that I have for chrome (started wondering about that when it showed up today in Chrome but not FF). The social stats are being populated by the SEO Site Tools extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/diahigjngdnkdgajdbpjdeomopbpkjjc Evidently this feature works intermittently as I have never seen it before and it only worked once yesterday and only on this page and I have been using it for about a month (for some odd reason it doesn't work on any other page). So apologies for getting you all excited. If you want to read more about the tool SEJ did a review on it a while back: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-seo-tool-that-may-make-you-switch-to-google-chrome/20672/ Cheers

Thanks for the response, that answer from Rand is definitely helpful. Do you (or anyone else!) have actual experience of this penalty and getting past it? I guess I'm looking for some positive assurance before I start on backlinking that could potentially not fix anything

I agree 100% with what Theo is saying. The use of CSS to replace images has gotten to a point (from a purely aesthetic standpoint) that you cant tell the difference anymore. It is effective and considered best practice to use text when possible. It compounds your pages SEO weight and can edge out your competition if they are using images as opposed to CSS to render text in its place. Style Sheets RULE!

The other implication that most international sites have is the way they handle content and different languages.  You don't want to also create duplicate content issues of your site by increasing your content exponentially using either machine or user generated translations.  We of course, always prefer user generated translations. Another thing to check out is a post on the SEOMoz blog about handling duplicate content.  The area I specifically wanted to point out is the Link rel=alternate section http://www.example.com/path" /> This can be used to tell search engines that those pieces of content are just translated versions of another piece of content so there is no confusion.

SEOmoz showed a higher correlation between shares then likes in the last report they did on this, though it was only slightly higher. I have not seen anything directly, but I assume it's more difficult to get something shared and as such Google would probably value shares more then likes.

I'm interested n seeing your infographic. Can you post a link to it or send it to me?

That's fine. Thanks.

Hi Wayne, Are you still looking for more information, or did the responses so far meet your needs? Let us know if you'd like more input, or mark this thread as answered. Thanks!

Loved this article on the subject. Check out the hashtag tip. http://www.seo.com/blog/testing-link-priority-rule/

Back in the day I would say it's two datacentres being queried. Then again I've seen algorithm testing do the same thing. Latest observation was the PageRank stuffup by Google and it was interesting to see results jump up and down as they were recalculating it. Not a factor guys huh! Think twice

what causes it?  There are new web sites popping up all the time.  And existing sites are already out there with new content on those all the time as well. While some content, specifically that classified as "evergreen" deserves to be found, the task of determining what older content deserves to remain high as compared to other content is extremely difficult - far from perfect.

In my limited experience it's about clarity, not density. EGOL  makes a good point, if your page is clear and well written about its subject, in general you should be alright.

well, i read a post that said that, the second link to a page has no anchor text value. e.g. if the anchor text DOGS, links to pageX, and the anchor text DOG COLLARS links to pagex (further down), then only the first anchor text will be applied to the link vector. So, on a typical YouTube style right nav bar, you have the thumbnail and the title clickable. Given that the title text would have no value, i simply made the thumbnail the only clickable element on the whole right nav bar assembly. Good idea of bad idea? Thanks!

You could implement the canonical tag to eliminate the self-created duplicate content. Hope this helps!

EGOL... Thanks for your quick reply! While many of the links in the footer of www.AlohaWhistler.com (used as an example) are valuable and interesting some of them don't link to "money" pages. e.g. we see footer links to "Homes", "Condos", "Townhomes", etc as important and such pages are listed higher in the page but other links may be valuable to some visitors but not as vital to pump link juice to (e.g. "Our Team", "Reviews", etc.) I have always been unsure about the balance of adding some links in footers, etc that may be value to some visitors but aren't really a priority for link juice / search engine rankings. Normally I would only be concerned about reducing the number of footer links if we start seeing reports of "too many on-page links". I welcome any discussion about this.

I've been told that Google will rank a page higher for a local query if the address on the page has the city in it that was typed into the search bar.  If the address on the bottom of the page is  an Austin address, then a search phrase with Houston in it should cause the Austin addressed page to rank lower.  The Google Local page that i was going point the social icon to on our Houston page is our home office in Austin.  I wasn't sure if Google would see that their Local Page was an Austin address and cause my Houston page to rank lower for Houston searches.  That's kind of hard to explain, do you follow me?

In Google Adwords if the destination URL is changed then it resets the history for that keyword and the campaign. Was Wondering if simply adding the utm_ parameter in Adcenter would have the same result...