Welcome to the Q&A Forum

SEO by yoast, as mentioned, has all the features of many paid plugins from 2010, plus more. Also, use W3 Total Cache, and be sure to minimize your CSS/JS. This will significantly reduce page load + headspace. Be sure to WWW canonical fix as well, which can be done via htaccess or a plugin if you're code adverse. Directory submissions are fine, but they are low value. In-context links and video should be your primary focus.

Crawling the web can be complex and problems can pop up like they did this month. We are working to increase the speed at which we release updates and this crawl we ran into a problem that forced us to start over, hence the longer delay.  Otherwise it was going to be out on the 11th of July.  Sorry for the delay.

One of my websites got knocked off the first page. Another website got listed on the first page. We believe Panda is rewarding sites that are optimized, updated and continually improved using white hate best practices. We are confident that in the long run, Panda is making it a level playing field for legitimate websites.

Amazing!   lol

I'm going to head this route....thanks a lot for your help!

My best guess would be to read the great article on copywriting by cyrus shepard: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-super-easy-seo-copywriting-tips-for-link-building . The following principles could be used for writing a good description: 2. Why Headline Formulas Work 3. Get 20% More with Numbers 4. Free and Easy Power Words 10. Be Honest The page targeted keywords should be in the title.

I would also speed up your crawl rate with Google in GWT.  Yes, you can remove certain pages, but Google will need to re-index all the other pages that use to link to them.

Dr. Pete also wrote a good post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many.

Yes, Google indexes XML files. You can try a search using filetype:xml I am not an expert on RSS files but I believe the XML versions use the <rss>tag. If I were to take a guess, I would say Google can easily examine the file (they read pdf's for example) and determine if it is an RSS feed.</rss>

Thanks for everyone's responses! I believe I have solved the mystery. I went into my analytics and found that traffic had been sent from cnn.com, edition.cnn.com and weather.cnn.com. EGOL had mentioned the widgets that news sites will often use to link to relevant stories. Turns out I found a widget on the weather page that is administered by outside.in - a service that localizes content. I added our blog's feed to outside.in months ago and completely forgot about it. So, I'm assuming, someone who was searching weather or news in the Portland area perhaps would see our most recent post on Portland food carts. I'm assuming these widgets don't pass any link juice, but I'm so glad to have the traffic and exposure. I suggest anyone who ever writes localized content should sign up for outside.in - your post might just show up on cnn.com.  

Eu usaria .com.br, porque as pessoas tendem a digitar o dominio algumas vezes direto na URL e essas pessoas tentar por .com.br. Eu tambem pensaria em outro dominio mais curto, pela minha experiencia dominio grande tende a ser dificil de gravar na cabeca do ser humano. Eu usaria .com.br , ate porque o dominio esta em portugues entao ngm fora do brasil buscara por isso. Faz sentido?

Thanks again Bevelwise...you've been extremely helpful. We just signed up for PRO account and it's totally worth it! Awesome resource.

On a forum site I have, "post" is one of my most common words. My personal opinion is that I wouldn't worry about it too much as long as some of the other stuff IS on target, and you're also not seeing signs that your site is hacked (it is time to get worried if you see pharma words as significant keywords).

Thanks for that, but as we have multiple pages for a given article the drop down menu option needs to be there just wondering how we can make this search friendly, maybe have the links linkable...would that work?

Is it a relevant website?  Or would your link just be in amongst a bunch of other irrelevant websites hoping to reap some PR? The name of the game is relevance.  When approaching a site for a backlink, check their backlinks too to see where they are coming from. Ages ago, before I really knew what I was doing (and I'm still learning after all these years), I managed to get my website a link on a homepage that was a PR9.  I was pumped.  However, the site had absolutely, and I mean absolutely nothing to do with the niche of my site.  All-in-all, that link did nothing for me. After learning from that mistake, I only seek out sites that are in my niche, and have have links pointing to them that are also in my niche.  Keeps it in a nice trusted grouping of complete relevancy.