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It's worth looking at the Webinar video on Sitemaps for this one. It's just a month old so it's completely up to date. http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/getting-value-from-xml-sitemaps Sitemaps aren't just a case listing every page on your site anymore, they require a bit of thought and attention.

One of our sites has be quite well scraped already, and because we use absolute linking throughout the site we are getting a few links from the sites in question. I don't anticipate the links being worth a great deal but they may be helpful. Provided that you're using absolute linking and your content is getting crawled first it shouldn't be a problem. People will always copy good content, and it probably takes less time for them to scrape and set a site up than it does for you to do do something about it.

I have a client who saw big drops beginning the 11th even though they're U.S. based.  A portion of their visits come from international sources.  We're still in evaluation mode though because the site had no significant drops on the initial Panda update here in the U.S. Preliminary checks of other data show it might partially be a Panda issue, but not completely - oddly enough beginning on the 11th they also had a serious lag time in content loading due to advertiser scripts, which I'm thinking is a big factor as well. Something that I have been speculating on with several new clients is the gradual degradation concept.  My theory is many of their links coming from other sites that got hit has caused a rolling drop effect.  Since none of my longer term clients have seen any significant drop though it's a more difficult assessment.

First, PR that you're going by is TBPR - Tool Bar Page Rank.  This number is not the actual PageRank that Google assigns, which is private and never revealed.  Also, the TBPR is not updated very often.  Google have said they update it "infrequently" - typically only a couple / few times a year. So that drop is not a very good indicator as to what's happening on the site. Beyond that, your real PageRank is not the only thing to consider.  The real assessment should come from reviewing visitor activity - how much traffic comes from organic listings, cross-compared to how many keyword phrases they use to find the site. And that should only be measured when held up against total conversions - whatever calls to action you have.  Because even a drop in organic visits might not be a bad thing if the total conversions increases due to a higher quality visitor base.

Thank you Daniel. I know it's been awhile, but now just getting back to this. You pretty much substantiated what I thought to be true for the first part. I have heard of some workaround 301s when going from something like Blogger to a self hosted version. And I do believe that WordPress.com has a paid option to redirect all traffic if you go to a self-hosted blog. Thanks again!

this is always not the best answer. I've seen cases where the click has too many pages and it takes a long time to get to a product. A lot of the products too are similar so I combined a lot of parts together and hes getting 67% higher ctr and 3x more sales and phone calls.

So basically you're asking if Google Adwords and/or MSN Adcenter ignore stop words for the purpose of match types? I've never heard that they do, so I believe that your ad would not show in the examples you gave.

Hi Keri Thank you for your succinct and very helpful answer - no wonder I couldn't find it, but did find out a lot on how to prune Wysteria!! Best wishes

OSE tends to update every 1-2 months. What I do is use linkdiagnosis.com to pull links that are indexed in CSV format, then use OSE to get authority, mozRank and Trust stats. This way you can get all your newly crawled links and get the great OSE insight.

It's a little dated as far as the images and interface info, but "The Ultimate Guide to Adwords" published by Entrepreneur Press is a fantastic book for teaching PPC fundamentals.

2 on my team - we do mostly audits, with a portion of time also devoted to client training and related consulting.  Most of our clients (all the way up to some of the biggest sites imaginable), only have one to a few people on their in-house teams.

In addition to Daniel's response, I'll offer that having the same description on every pagination version page is not helpful, though if there are enough unique products on each page, and each has a caption and or price, and you optimize each product thumbnail alt attribute, it's not necessarily a duplicate content thing as much an annoyance factor for some users. Ideally it's best to have a unique description on every page, or only have the full text description on the default category page.  Be sure however to append every page Title, URL and h1 with "Page X" as an additional way to communicate both the uniqueness of each page and for users to know where in the pagination sequence they are.