Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Many thanks David. Regards Blaine

It's really a process of experimenting over time to find out the method that results in the most URLs indexed that in turn brings the most relevant traffic.  Personally I wouldn't have one for each category, yet without tests there's no conclusive reasoning either way.

The domains in question were all previously owned by me in my webmaster tools account long before this happened. I've since gone and put in an address change request for the site that has the 301s on it to point to the new site. I'm feeling like I got stuck with a false positive here, but it is taking forever to get re-reviewed. Of course, it is grilling season now, so I'm losing tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per day that we are out of the index. I realize the answer is probably no, but does anyone have any tips on how to speed up the review process? I could lose a quarter million dollars over the course of a week or two.

Have you tried SEM Rush yet? It is a good place to build a list of several thousand keywords that you do not currently get traffic for by giving you competitive analysis on sites that compete with you. There is also Hit Tail which builds lists of long tail terms that people already use to search for your site, so that you can add these terms to the list of things you want to optimize for. Let me know what you think about these two tools, so that I can get an idea of what to recommend next if these do not fit the bill

Shared IPs can cause issues with reverse lookups, which could make spiders confuse you with sites sharing that IP. Admittedly, it's rare, but there have been cases of penalties jumping within an IP, for example. I suspect that, as IP sharing grows, Google is getting better about this, but I generally like to avoid it.

Most studies seem to contradict each other at least a little on this but they all give a general idea like this one... not sure how accurate it is, but I found it ages ago at http://www.seoresearcher.com/distribution-of-clicks-on-googles-serps-and-eye-tracking-analysis.htm organic-ctr.jpg

I tried Mike's suggestion (thank you Mike, and Jordan).  It didn't work -- first few times anyway.  Then I took the Suite # out of the address (to change the address, but with only a slight edit) and tried verification again.  Again, only the phone option was offered.  I tried Mike's suggestion again, failed the phone verification and this time -- Google DID come back with the postcard option.  Yahoo! I'm not sure whether the multiple tries is what did the trick or if the address edit did it.  I hope the address edit hasn't made things worse.

Thank a lot!

To date there is no detecting "fake" accounts because they go to great length to imitate real people's accounts. Facebook has no interested in outing them because they love to boast the 500 million+ user base they have. If they deleted the millions of fake accounts out there that number would take a hit. So they don't mind. Outside of Facebook, how could any outside source ever detect a fake account? So as it stands, you would be safe from anything that could be considered black hate by buying facebook fans, friends, shares and likes. Should you? That's up to you. But you definitely can and you definitely won't get penalized for it...at least for now

Thanks! Do you have any links to posts that state that or have details? I completely agree and I am going to push for a home page redesign, but I need some good, solid information before making the recommendation. All the articles that I've read mention it, but don't have a lot of details about it.

If you have a windows server, you cannot run php on those pages. You need a Linux server for this. This means you cannot put PHP in a subdirectory or folder. They are correct that it would have to be a subdomain, hosted on a linux server. You can redirect a URL from your subdomain to a subdirectory URL, but if the content is in php, you cannot put the same content from the subdomain into a subfolder. Using a subdomain is not the end of the world. It is not ideal, but it won't kill you. Your best bet would be to try and change your hosting to be on a linux server, then use a subdirectory. If not, you have no choice really.

That is an awful directory. None of the entries in the categories I looked at were even close, they were all over the place. Google has figured this out I would guess because of a very high number of reciprocal links. Most spammy directories require a reciprocal link to be included, so they likely have several hundred or even thousands of domains linking to them. Google would naturally penalize this. OSE doesn't seem to have a way to categorize reciprocal links, but that would be very incredible if they could. Imagine being able to see your followed links, nofollowed links, and right in there with it, your reciprocal links. Then they could reduce the authority of sites with over 90% reciprocal links or something. Would be good for an SEO to know as well especially when taking over a website you haven't done work on before. That's good info.

I have wondered about this - my impression is that since Google is quite insistent on tracking fully-qualified sub-domains that the impact of creating CNAME records for a related sub-domain would be limited. Our blog is hosted via dreamhost, whereas our store is on Volusion - a prepackeaged shopping cart solution. To implement a blog in the same domain, we'd have to create a CNAME record like blog.mysite.com and of course, have a link to it from www.myseite.com. So far, I've always believed that this would only allow for - as you said - "a portion of the value" of the links... is there any reason to believe otherwise?

It's easy to implement. I've broken the content up into multiple sitemaps before as a diagnostic tool as well, to see which sections of the site are getting most of their pages indexed and which sections of the site have few pages indexed.

In Latam I use Dattatec.com