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What about using it just a a simple place to keep your targeted keyword for a given page while you are working? So if you have a number of hand coded page and want to quickly go through and put in what you are going for there before you start changing the page to suit. I'm not sure why you would care if competitors knew? If your page is optimized your keyword phrase for that page is in the title and the h1 so they can crawl your site if they want and get all of them anyway.

Some resources to help you below: The International SEO Checklist International SEO : White Board Friday

You will have to refer to the 'multi week' update which was implemented on about June 24th. These changes affected PMD a lot and then recovered a bit on/after July 4th. You will have to figure out what is going on with your on page optimization, links and so forth.

I second 99designs.com - Terrific resource. The people behind Flippa and Sitepoint. Also, somebody I have worked with several times over the last couple years and a friend www.nutsitlab.com

I think Alan and EGOL have summed it up nicely for you. I have looked at a lot of Panda hit sites and one of the most common issues were e-commerce sites that consisted of primarily of stock product descriptions.  Why would Google want to rank a site highly that just contains information that hundreds of other sites have? If you've got a large chunk of your site containing duplicate descriptions like this then you can attract a Panda flag which can cause your whole site to not rank well, not just the product pages. You could use the duplicate product descriptions if you had a large amount of original and helpful text around it.  However, no one knows what the ratio is.  If you have the ability to rewrite the product descriptions this is by far the best thing to do.

Very helpful answer thanks (even though it wasn;t me who asked the question!).  If a forum allows lots of low quality dofollow backlinks, e.g. in signatures, would they be penalised?

The algorithm on all search engines is going to be a black box to SEO's. The best we can do is run experiments and extrapolate theories from the data. When I've tried to look into this specific subject, I never found any really good, trust-worthy reports on how exactly the Yahoo or Bing algorithms are different than Google. If someone else can show this, I would be stoked and owe them a beer. That being said my impression is that the Google algorithm is more advanced and more tricky than the other two. If my assumption is correct, it could be that your process of removing links that Google finds questionable is hurting your rankings in the other engines that don't detect bad links as good as Google. What you should focus on is what all the engines undoubtedly value in common: Links from high quality sites that are relevant to your page Creating content that people share, spend time on, and don't bounce off from. Vague and cliche, I realize, but old tired truths usually are.

Are those images for search results (i.e. product thumbnails) or actual product pages? A link would help to understand how your site currently looks. If you have not done it yet, I would run you page through webpagetest.org (or pagespeed) and then look at obvious optimisations (CDN, HTTP cache directives, image-size optimisations) first. It sounds to me that you are "caching" multiple products in JS and based on user interaction show then the relevant content. Depending on how this is done, you might actually not get any SEO value from this.

AirnWater, I doubt you will be penalized.  You have to remember that the majority of Facebook is still closed off to Google and it's Spiders, so how would it be able to penalize your fanpage?  Facebook is still far away from ever letting Google completely crawl it, so it won't be able to see your individual posts. To answer your other question about the contest overall, I would ask what is your mission statement for the contest and what are you doing?  If a client simply asked you to gain fans to their Facebook page, I see no problem in doing this, but if you're trying to drive sales this is completely different.  I will like a Soap page for free soap, but that doesn't mean that their content will be attractive to me.  I simply wanted the free soap.  You have me for free soap and not for the engagement, you have to be careful here now because fans might expect free things from you all the time. If you still want to continue a contest to increase your fan count though, I don't see why you couldn't hold one every two months.  That's enough time to increase your fan count, while not being a complete saleout. To get engagement, your money might be better suited elsewhere, in this case(maybe PPC).  I would also work on more fill in the blank posts on Facebook or like posts, to increase edgerank.

That is certainly an interesting way of asking for a removal, but I could see a potential for it backfiring as well -- having people talk about your client having an infected site, for example. I suggest reading how Ryan Kent dealt with removing links, and keeping very detailed records of the attempts to remove links, and his ability to get part of the penalty lifted in this Q&A at http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links

I think it is a little early to do a universal 301 redirect of all of those sites to your main site. Some of my sites affected last month have already started to come back. I would try to continue to get them to come back a bit. You could get some more topical content on them and maybe clean them up a bit. Then wait. If that still does not work and you don't want to maintain or track them you could do 301 redirects. I dont think you will pass any penalties. I have done this myself and did not see any ill effect. It seems that when penalties happen they tend to be to a directory or a domain. The penalty does not seem to get passed along. Anyone else seen any bad things happen when a 301 redirect was done?

From what I understand of Panda is that Panda is an algorithm update therefore the same exact site built on a different domain will most likely suffer the same fate. Google rarely delivers reviewed penalties. Human hands are rarely involved. You are playing a video game against a machine. The machine will react about the same way every single time. 301s only help push forward some link juice. They don't seem to pass all of the link juice forward. They will pass all of the traffic forward.

Did you manage to finish your research on this particular subject? if so i would be extremely interested in hearing about your findings.