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Our normal site structure works fairly well for most of what we sell, but for some reason not for Widgets. The idea is just to shake it up and try something new. But like you said, I'm stopping and thinking about every aspect of this since it is something new. I'm trying to pick it apart from all angles before proceeding. Thanks for the insight!

I own a company and usually write my own blogs but not every time. The times I don't I pay to have them written and thus own the copy. Can an author be a company and the link point to the company about us page?

I would go to that meeting with some examples.... Joe Schmoe dentist has articles about this and this and this on his site. Ask what are his specialties?  What expertise does she want to share?  Pet peeves? This is your dentist's opportunity to improve the dental health of every person who visits his/her website.

Does anyone know if Mark and Barry's answers still hold true (nearly 1 year later)? We have a disproportionate amount of NoFollowed Linking Root Domains and I'm worried that it's having a negative effect on our rankings. Thanks! Eric

Hey Ryan, thanks for the tips.  However as I mentioned I know I haven't done any on page optimization for those terms. I was already in the serps, then updated my title tags a few times while I was doing different keyword searches and then changing my mind.  Then I disappeared from the serps. So I guess I should have been more clear. I am wondering if there is some sort of google penalty for changing your main title tags around too much.  I don't think there is, but if I am not going to get back for those terms no matter what I do, I didn't want to spend time trying to optimize for those if it was pointless. It is just weird that I was at least in the results and as soon as I was going to optimize and changed the title and description, then bam I was totally gone. Thought maybe someone would have a guess, but if not, I can move forward and optimize for those and give it a month and see if I show back up.

I own the SERP for my brand name. But i have lot of mini-domains like brandtrends.com and my goal is, to increase the authority of my main domain, and make it more reputable, we write on different niche, we have journalists etc.. the content is completelty different and is completely white hat. I think trends.brand.com maybe i can hire it under brand.com domain, on the top #5 of SERP. What do you mean Davis? it's better to do this or not? Because my mini-domain have PA:40 minimum, and if i have on subdomains, i think it would be better. Tell me your opinion .. THanks

Do you use your webmaster tools data?  This is where I get content ideas.  I see what keywords are already bringing in some data, or ranking somewhere from #5-20 and then I build good content around those keywords. What some people do is write some "teaser" blog posts to see what attracts attention.  So, for example, you could write a blog post about "high sleepers" and see what kind of traffic you get.  Then, write one about "loft beds" and see what happens.  You may be surprised and find that you are getting searches for something that you didn't optimize for.  This is totally made up, but let's say you find that you are getting hits for "high beds".  Well, then you may choose to take that term and write a comprehensive article highly targeted for "high beds". That's what I'd do, but I'm sure there are others who use some tools out there.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  10 days ago Adwords sent us an email confirming the review had taken place and the account was now active (but 10 days later we are still suspended in our dashboard).  We are now in the process of setting up new accounts....

Here's a little tidbit. At SMX Advanced today, Stephan Weitz, Head of Search at Bing, confirmed two things I asked. 1.  He was recently interviewed by Eric Enge, owner of Stone Temple consulting.  In that interview, Stephan said that Bing is moving from how they currently interpret words in content as nouns, to where they want to understand words as they relate to actions - to understand web site intent - to then match that more accurately to searcher intent. After I read that interview, schema.org was announced - a way to help search engines better understand the intent of the content.  And those to concepts clicked in my head - so I asked him - do schema.org and their desire to understand web site intent (as described in that interview) go hand in hand?  Are they directly related?  He said yes - schema.org is the key to it all. 2. He also confirmed that "schema.org is not a ranking factor now, but it will become a ranking factor.  THAT is huge.  Why? because people will be required to implement it because failing to do so will harm their rankings.  Adopting a microdata solution is no longer a "it would be nice if you did".  it's going to be a standard practice. The search engines, in one shot, with schema.org, drew a new line in the sand.  Either get with the program, or suffer.  Not today, but it WILL happen. My experience with other evolving changes to this industry over the 10 years I've been involved with SEO is that when a major shift occurs, it's usually about a year before it's critical for best practices SEO. When May Day happened, I saw the writing on the wall back then - and spent the next six to 9 months helping various clients change their site architecture accordingly.  None of those clients lost rankings when Panda happened.  Several clients I got who came to me AFTER panda, who were seriously harmed by Panda, saw a plunge as a result of May Day.  It was the advance writing on the wall for Panda in many ways.  At least in my experience. So that's why I am now more confident than ever that people in this industry have a year to generally get on board.  Those who can do it within six to nine months will have a competitive advantage.

Theoretically, yes. The 301 should tell search engines that the site is moved, so all factors previously attributed to Site A should now instead be attributed to Site B (with a minor loss). Although already done, you could double check that you followed the best practise for moving a site laid out here, but if you're waiting to see toolbar PR, then you'll be waiting a while to see any updates (probably). Is the site ranking for anything the old site used to? If so, you shoudl be fine, if not, double check the link and see if there's anything else you can do.

Matt Cutts once said that "A" link can not hurt your ranking. What he didn't say was your link profile, or a bunch of links can not hurt your ranking. Here is a good older discussion on this from Q.A. http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/37193/are-paid-links-from-prsites-and-directories-bad There are valuable directories. You have to be pretty picky. There are a lot of posts and training on this in the site. Picking up a DMOZ listing and Yahoo directory are great (as noted).  I think one thing you want to watch is the c-blocks they are on.  One directory company may have 100's of sites on a c-clock, and this can harm your trust ranking. Long story short,  make your link profile as natural as you can.  Paid directories can fit into that, as well as blogs, forums, press releases, no follow and follow links. But do try and go for quality at all times.

Those are called "site links".   Google awards them when a page of your site is very dominant for a specific search query.  The homepage sometimes has them and interior pages can have them too. The example in the URL that you provided shows seven site links (there is often six or eight in that configuration).  There can also be a smaller set of three or four site links such as these.... http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=gbT&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=seo+blog&oq=seo+blog&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=79939l82050l0l12l11l1l0l0l0l249l1720l0.5.4 Google awards site links when they identify potential links that will help people access specific pages of your site directly from the SERPs. Here is more info straight from Google... http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334

When you say "Google Webmaster tools," is it inside the seomoz pro dashboard? Or do I need to create a google webmaster account? If you have a website, you should definitely have a Google WMT account. Go to www.google.com/webmasters and register your site. It is a must for anyone who cares about SEO for their site and related analytics. For the SEOmoz report, I asked that same question to SEOmoz help. The reply I received was: "it sounds you made a change to the way your site is indexed by Google directly in Webmaster Tools. Since we don't have access to GWT, we can't account for any changes that you've made in there, unfortunately. Furthermore, these issues are still present for crawlers other than Googlebot, so if you want to make sure those fixes are indexed by Bing/Yahoo, make sure to submit the fixes to their index tools or make the changes directly on your site. On the other hand, if you don't care about those search engines, feel free to just ignore our warnings. Our software is over-inclusive of errors so that you can choose which errors/warnings/issues to act on and how. We'd rather give you too much information than too little!" With the ?pg=2 parameter, is there a way for google not to treat it as two URLs with same title and at the same time make both appear in search results? In Google WMT you can see the Parameter Action as Don't Ignore. You would then need to fix the Duplicate Title issue on your site. I am not advising this approach, but merely responding to your question of how to do it.