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Hi Daniel, Thanks for the message. I have the interior page linked from the homepage (and a lot of other pages) via a footer. Are you thinking that the footer is not up to the task? Thanks...Mike

I know that Google rarely updates toolbar PR You understand this.  It is an important consideration. I suppose the site could have also earned a lot of quality links since the last update. If you thought that one email message would get you a PR0 link on loc.gov you would not want to pass it up - even if that page had zero outside links?

you can pause it and change the settings to only show active campaigns

I may be wrong, but I believe the competitive analysis link report is based on the Linkscape index. Every month or so they reindex the web. Sometimes they don't visit all the same pages that they visited the previous month, so they might miss out on some links one month that they found the previous month. This "sampling" of the web is identical to what Google has to do, although their sample is much larger and is indexed more often. This is why your rankings too can dance around in Google. The same is true for Domain Authority. A good metric that we often use is what we call Competitor Comparison Rank. Basically, choose 5 or 10 competitors and track them along your site. Each month, find the average of their domain authorities and the average number of backlinks. Then, subtract your backlinks and authority from their backlinks and authority. Is the gap growing larger or smaller? Are you falling behind or pushing ahead? This is a safer way of doing it because if SEOMoz just crawls fewer pages in one month than they did the previous, it would appear that you lost links, when in reality they just spidered fewer of them. Your competitors would appear to have lost links as well. It is all about comparison. After all, it is a competition.

Thanks for your thoughts, Alan.  Much appreciated. I agree that "quality" is the key.

It's safe to include rel="canonical" on all canonical versions of your site and will not cause any problems. I have done this and tested many times. If you run a template based website such as WordPress it would be much easier if all pages referred to their own canonical version (even if it be itself).

Hoping someone can answer these questions. We've got some AJAX coding on our site too and I'm concerned it's going to cause a lot of indexing problems. The obvious answer is to see if you can find another way to build your site where it will be viewable, but often times (and in my case too) that isn't possible from a development standpoint.

Hi Chris, It all depends on your budget - you're likely to find resources on oDesk that will give you far lower quotes than you'll receive from the higher profile members of the SEOMoz community. Having said that, I've yet to find anyone over there who really knows what they're doing with SEO (although I'm sure there are people, just not in the usual $3/hr price bracket). If you're looking for help from a Mozzer I'd advise contacting a few people who post on the QA forum or comment on blogs and asking them to spend a few minutes doing a high level review of your site. If you like what you hear start to explore the option of putting them on a monthly retainer / day rate and work out some outline costs. (Self promotion alert): I'd be more than happy to help out - just drop me an email / tweet / contact form from my site. Matt

Hi there! This is more of a customer service question than an SEO question, so I'm going to open a customer service ticket for you at the email address associated with your account. You should receive an email from customer service speedy-quick! In the future, if you have a question about our site or tools, please email it to help@seomoz.org to get faster service. Thank you!

I was afraid I needed  dedicated ips, had that before then switched, we switch back. It may be impossible to have separate names and addresses, can you let let know what source I can go to to get the latest on this. Things are too critical to risk based on any opinion, including mine. Thanks for responding again.

Hey Matt, thanks for your answer! Just did a test and it doesn´t work very well...did some tests with domains I already know and they didnt show me the 301 redirect domains... Any other options? Thanks, Greg

Wow thanks everyone for the immediate and very insightful answers. Cheers!

Alexander, I think you may have answered your own question.  If Matt Cutts says they are fine but don't use them to increase your potential keyword percentage, I wouldn't do it.  If you utilize a tag cloud to help navigate your site/posts/pages then go for it. As always, it always comes down to quality, unique content.  There is no way of getting around it, so just build excellent site navigation, and proper linkage in your homepage content and you're set. Best of luck.

Yeah, it's been generally positive. I'd always used elance in the past, although that was primarily for development tasks, so moving to oDesk was a bit of a worry at first. If you do a time-based project you're at relatively low risk as you get screenshots every few minutes of what your staff are working on. (ie. If they're looking at YouTube videos you'll be able to see and refuse to pay them). A lot of people will offer services for very little outlay so it's worth spending time investigating their feedback and interviewing candidates properly. I generally keep it quite informal and just try to work out if the person I'm talking to is able to string a sentence together and have a bit of banter. If they are I'll give them a week's trial limited to 10 hours or so and see what the results are like. Virtual assistants are really low risk as the outlay is so low... at worst you lose $30 and at best you find someone that will work with you for the next year or two doing all the tasks that you don't have the time or inclination to do yourself. In the past I've always done the outreach part of a link building task myself, although there are those that take the view that it's possible to outsource this effecively so I'm giving it a try at the moment. Will most likely YouMoz how I get on at some point Matt

First of all, you should try and visit the website using Google Webmaster Tools (with the 'visit as Google Bot' tool). If it shows a HTTP 301 redirect to the .com website, you'll know everything is working fine but your site just hasn't been indexed yet since the change. If it shows anything else (probably the holding page), there might be something wrong with the way you redirect. You can try using one of the plugins to check for HTTP statuses (FireBug and Chrome's developer tools have basic features, FireFox's Live HTTP Headers plugin can show you more). See what is says the HTTP status is, and try and fix it.