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No worries... you can give me a thumbs up and a "this answered my question" if you like... I want that SEOmoz t-shirt lol.

Thanks Keri. Makes sense to split the article. Keep the top half on the home page and leave the rest of the article on the "read more" link. That way there is not duplicate content and is just a continuation instead of a repeat for the customer.

omg thanks for sharing these articles. i am literally sitting here, laughing while i read them. just at the ridiculousness of it all. does everyone get a friendly letter if they are selling links or is only forbes receiving such a thing? seems like favoritism if that's the case. not cool imo. i'll go with the super squeaky clean and no-follow mine, and grumble all the way so much bad behavior out there (or people who just don't know about no-follow) that it's really tough to find high pr sites that are willing to write about you AND are following all of the no-follow rules on their content (let alone not selling text links lol)...

The only additional suggestion I'd make here is that maybe you 301 redirect to the closest current product instead of the winery page. If they're looking for a 2006 vintage and you now have the 2007 vintage, possibly redirect to the 2007 vintage.

If as Steve points out we are understanding you correctly then multiple product pages with each one focused and optimised for each product is better than a long page featuring multiple products IF people are liekly to be searching for the product name. Each page gives you a URL, title tage, alt tag and page worth of content to optimise and focus on that product. If you are worried that the page may be a little light on content then perhaps the descriptions need to be fleshed out.

Hey Paul- If you are already receiving an A grade for the page, I don't see why you would need to drop those 13 characters before it. Remember that those words can entice users to click on your site in the SERPs if it looks more attractive than your competitors. For example, look at the SEOmoz Title: "SEO Software. Simplified." Im sure simplified is not one of their major target keywords, but helps both users and search engines.

Yes. This is perfectly normal and common behaviour. In fact Matt Cutts confirms this in one of his videos on Webmaster Help channel on YouTube. Without knowing the exact technical details it's hard to know whether there is a risk for sure or not. The problem you have is the fact that Googlebot may not act as a geo user and you may end up with US or English language content only in index. Sitemaps or site structure will be a handy solution in that case.

My suggestion: redirect mobile browsers to the HTML version as well as for the search bots. If the browser is not a search bot or a mobile device, and has Flash installed then redirect to the Flash version (not using a 301!) with a parameter to take the person to the same content on the Flash site (in the swf you can read the parameter and load the relevant part). Mobile users or search bots arriving via those links with parameters can be 301'd to the HTML version. Now mobile users and search bot get a nice HTML version. Flash users get the 'rich' experience. Search engines can crawl all the content nicely. Furthermore, it would stand up to a manual review. Many more details in answer to a similar question here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/converse-com-flash-and-html-version-of-site-bad-idea

Hi! Yes, our crawler does read wildcards in a robots.txt file. This change was made in the past 3 months or so. Hope that helps! Jen

Thanks, Keri. No, it's a hand-built blog. No CMS. I think the googlebot is doing a good job of indexing my site. The site is small and when I search for my content I do find it in google. I was pretty sure that google worked the way you describe. So it sounds like sitemaps are an optional hint, and perhaps not needed for relatively small sites (couple hundred pages of well linked content). Thanks.

I would seriously not be concerned about it. If you are a florist and the name of your company is something like "YourName Inc", it would be perfectly fine to add florists. Now, if you add "Same Day Roses Valentines Mothers Day Anniversary Flowers" you might get into some hot water.

There are myriad factors involved in geographical search engine rankings, including links from ccTLDs (other .uk or .au domains), localized language usage, settings in Google Webmaster Tools, etc. Your competitor simply has better metrics for .au than you do.Go get some clean .au links.

Thank you for the reminder about http://getlisted.org/  . What a great resource it is.