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Super thanks for the heads up. I will start an new topic.

You are very welcome!

Thanks, Tait. Does the Wordpress plugin you mentioned actually add open graph tags?  Because if not, here's one that I found that does - and works quite well: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ogp/ Worth reading the plugin page on the author's website to make sure you have the installation set up right.

Externally hosting images will not be a major problem and ALT text will be seen as part of your page content.

Yes, they give the content area the most weight in regard to individual page topical focus, however search engines do evaluate  every word on a page, including content within the source view that visitors don't see.  This is why having too much content in header, sidebar and footer areas, or too much code at the source view level causes topical confusion / topical dilution and is considered during the duplicate content evaluation process as well. The best I can offer in regard to how often a phrase should appear on a page is "does this feel like I repeat this phrase too much?"  If you've got the same phrase repeated fifteen times just in the content area, there should be a valid reason other than just SEO reasoning for that.  And a LOT of text around those.

Thanks a lot, it was the &gl=US bit that I was after. Hadn't heard of the FF pluggin but it seems like an easy option. Cheers!

That's a tough one, huh Irina? If sites are only agreeing to link via payment, I'd try to add some value by looking for content sharing opportunities and slightly more robust ways of purchasing an associated link than just the link alone. This way there's some justification to the payment and the link can be considered residual.  It sounds like you're doing all the right things so far. 

PA = Page Authority and DA = Domain Authority. These are values SEOmoz use to "emulate" PageRank (emulate may not be the best choice of words). you can get access to these metrics via the SEOmoz toolbar or opensiteexplorer

While not 100% effective you can tell Google to ignore the ?dealer parameter in Webmaster Tools but that would involve setting up the parameter differently so it looks like ?dealer=1234 rather than ?dealer1234, so not sure how big a pain that is. Otherwise you can set up a canonical tag so that the canonical version of the page is always /index.aspx for every parameter. Ideally do both if it will help you get the links in. You should lose very little of the link juice by ignoring the parameter and using canonical. EDIT: Here's a little bit on parameter handling - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=147959 - complete with clever Barenaked Ladies reference

Aran has pretty much hit the nail on the head, the main purpose of a sitemap from a SEO point of view is to submit it to Google Webmaster tools to help Google find all of the pages on your website. Of course sitemaps are also useful from a users point of view and helps people to quickly find a page on your site. I would defiantly recommend you stick to one sitemap per domain. Regarding redirects - these should help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

Thanks for the help! - Perfect advice!

the past couple years, industry thinking had it that architecture should be as flat as possible.  I never held that belief, and all my clients who employed the "2 - 3 layers, 4 at most" policy all sailed through the Panda update. The issue is as much about deep internal linking as it is about topical organization and a major signal about topical relationships is in folder keyword seeding, along with breadcrumb navigation, supported by inbound links pointing to that 2nd and 3rd layer.

Same opinion as everyone else here, it is not just about webmaster tools, you should use a 301 redirect from one versionm to the other too As for whcih version to use, in my opionion it doesn't matter from an SEO standpoint which you use really, so it's down to a business decision based on what you feel is aesthetically more pleasing, or more useful to you. WITH ONE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION. If you are in the situation that you have lots and lots of quality links to either version (www or non-www) then I would tend to lean towards that version. Obviously so long as you are putting a 301 redirect (are you on a linux server by the way?) then in time the weight of the links from one version (www or non-www) should be passed to the other version, via the permanently moved header status that Google will find. Even so, to keep things running smoothly, personally, I would go for a balance between what I think looks best, and which version has the most backlinks at present. Whichever you choose, setup the 301 from the other version, to the version you go with.

Interesting thread. So now after the more recent Panda update, is that another dip I see in those same graphs There's gotta be something with wrong with the data. Most of the data I've seen from Google Trends and Compete is laughable. So any further updates? How has Panda affected SEO websites? And why? Is it all the incestuous linking? Thinking out loud here... is it possible that Google has some way to benchmark what the mean/median/average links there are per industry and THEN it uses those to figure out what a websites link count is worth? (Know what I mean?) eg. SEO industry mean = 300 real links, so above 300 higher authority, but dentist websites mean = 60 real links, so different way to measure authority? Point is, links and their worth could also be classified and measured by industry.

You could try other CSS methods to hide the content, like setting the height to 0 or positioning the element off screen.