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Google is less clear most likely because they're still mostly stuck in the belief that they shouldn't reveal clarity and expect site owners to figure it out.  Which inevitably leads, every year, to more and more "what used to be acceptable isn't" complaints.

Except some tactics never were acceptable and Google's just now getting around to addressing some that they previously never considered or never got a chance to.

My latest effort is all about "does this look natural".  That of course, is then filtered through "does this look natural as Google views things in their algorithmic attempt to emulate a human's perspective.

Madison

When looking at a page, do all you can to put yourself in the shoes of average visitors.  If, in their eyes, a page is overwhelming, confusing, or appears to be more ads/links than pure, quality content, that's a key indicator.

When I look at the site, that's how I feel as a user.  You've got text ads all over the place, in-text ads (the worst kind of confusing links ever invented), continually repeated keywords as links in the content, honestly it's just a mess.

My best suggestion is to really thin it out, until as a USER, you say - wow - great information here, not distracted by so many things..."

Do that and you'll see better visitor counts, higher rankings over time (barring other factors), and more clicks on the links you have remaining on the page.

I'm known for my verbose writing, and even I try to keep my articles under 1,000 words.  My best series though, on SEO audits, was four articles that averaged 1500 words each. It was a very focused technical series though - something that people were willing to take the time to read as each new part was published.

The problem with very long articles is keeping people's attention in today's multitasking world.

And if the site was truly hit by Panda, you can let your client know that every major search industry leader says to ensure recovery from Panda, every SEO best practice that can be done needs to be done.  There is no single factor to focus on.  So if there are boxes on pages that have no relevance to those pages, and are even POSSIBLY causing problems such as topical dilution, or in this case, keyword stuffery, they need to go.

So even if you remove them and there is a subsequent minor hit, the more important issue is long term recovery from Panda in this case.

Take any site out of the search engines and see what happens.  Whether it's a 301 or a 302 redirect will determine the long term impact.  302s tell the search engines "this page has temporarily moved".  Which is all good and fine for a matter of hours, maybe even a couple days.  After that, all bets are off.

Users will be disoriented.  Expecting to come to an actual site, and being sent to a Facebook page will be disorienting and alienating.  It will be annoying and off-putting to users.  Many users may very well never come back to the main site afterward.

Intentionally redirecting users who expect to come to a company site is deceptive.  And extremely unprofessional.  It breaks an expected user experience trust.

Doing it with an entire site could cause all sorts of red flags from a search engine perspective. Because of those very user deception and alienation issues.

Redirecting an entire site to Facebook is very unwise from an SEO perspective, from a user experience perspective, from a brand cohesiveness perspective.  Bad. bad. Bad.

You can optimize for any geo-area(s) you actually serve even if your physical address is in the next town/area.  What you can't do without violating terms of service is list your site in Google's maps (or Google+ local) for a town you don't have a physical location in.

I'm in complete agreement with NinjaMarketer on this one.  Also consider chambers of commerce, other high quality business or industry specific directories, on a case by case basis.  Each one needs to be properly evaluated to ensure the highest quality possible, along with the most relevance - either geographically, or market focused.  There is no "easy" or "quick fix" path to this process if you want to get maximum value.

Just because a software platform or CMS allows you to do something doesn't necessarily mean it's good for best practices SEO.  That's a very important concept to understand.

The reality is every major platform out there is built with all sorts of functionality and features that could potentially harm SEO because none of them were built with SEO as the primary focus.  And even if that had been the case, SEO is constantly changing in enough ways that it would be even more challenging for those developers to keep up with it, given that there's not very often enough early consensus when algorithm change occur to then roll out an upgrade accordingly.

So. Having said that, I highly suggest that posting duplicate content in its entirety is NOT a wise notion from an SEO best practices perspective.  And in turn, every "feature" you discover needs to be given the same evaluation respect.

Taking James' suggestion a step further, my policy is to have the main page include each person's name, title and a short version bio, where each of those links to the individual bio, that should have a unique, longer form bio - enough to justify the individual pages where they're seen as truly content rich.  that's a combination home-run.

I agree with Rand's '09 article in general, however there are some things I think take it a bit too far (such as redirecting PDF documents for link juice).  If a PDF is truly the most relevant content on a topic, I believe it should be indexed.

The biggest factor is that if we get completely bogged down in this process just for SEO sake, we lose focus on user experience.

It's right up there with page and link sculpting - to me, it's a waste of time and harms user experience.  And the time spent going that far is, in my opinion, in 2011 much better spent on other SEO tactics.  Not just because Google has changed how they deal with nofollow links.

Google is supposedly now merging multiple listings.  Check out an article on this update.

if you already have any content for the Arabic domain, it will not hurt to start building links to what you've got.  It can only help because it's a long process to get long-term link value, and starting now will give you the foundation that you can build on later.

While Mike is generally correct, I would add that if you have extensive disclaimer, terms and conditions text in the footer of your site's pages (as compared to having a separate dedicated page just for those) even though Google is "fairly good" at figuring out it's purpose, it can weaken individual page unique topical focus, especially when individual pages don't have enough volume of unique content.

Because it's a "maybe" issue in that regard, I personally always recommend that clients have a link to those rather than replicating the text across multiple pages.

Brad Callen is touted as a "guru" across a number of "questionable" sites around the web.  the claim you're referencing is one of the ways he hypes his product to unsuspecting people looking for magic bullet methods to riches online.

Ryan,

This is what happens here as you well know.  We're not being paid for hours of review, evaluation and consideration.  So sometimes we don't get that "let me sit on this for a couple days" opportunity to formulate a well crafted, re-arranged response...

As a testament to the concept of a highly informative resource page a-la the TNJ example, I went there to see what it was like, and just read the entire page's content, it was that interesting.  So that would be a good start, though the 2nd "very ugly" example is of course, more likely for long-term success.  Throw in an infographic of facts related to the topic you're creating resource pages for, and then promote through social media.

The concept it's got to be highly note-worthy, unique, or uniquely grouped content.

Yes - sign up for the Bing Webmaster Tools service - similar to Google Webmaster Tools.  If there are issues or problems Bing encounters that's where you'll get reports on them.

And if you are lacking regarding inbound links pointing to inner pages, you'll see gains in Google and Bing by getting some.  Bing likes to see exact match anchor text links that come from other sites already ranking well in the Bing eco-system. So do some research when finding inbound link sources - to see how they're doing in Bing.

Generally speaking, search engines expect to see a combination of long-lasting content and regularly added new content.  At least some of that content should be accessible through site-wide navigation.  How much of it depends on the competitive landscape.

Users generally expect enough core (page level) content to give them confidence and trust in a site's ownership.

Given that combination of factors, it's usually best to have at least a couple or few pages that don't change significantly over time.  And "About" page, and a "Contact" page should be the minimum used, regardless of competitive landscape factors.

The home page itself can, if desired, consist mostly snippets from the most recent blog articles.  There should, either on the home page, or on a main blog landing page, as well as throughout all article pages, be a list of the top categories of articles.

Alternately, you could have the home page itself be informational and generally not change over time.

Again, a lot depends on the competitive landscape specific to your targeted keywords.

The "nearby hotels to consider" feature is a user thing.  It may or may not pass quality page rank.

In some cases, that extra link could dilute the topical focus / strength of the page it's on.

So if I get to resort X's page, and there's a link to "nearby hotels", there's an implied relationship.  Good for users.  But for SEO, sure it's related stuff, yet maybe not laser focus related.

Another example is blog posts that end with a following box "related articles" and that box contains three or five links to other articles.  Maybe they're highly related, maybe loosely.  If they're loosely related, sure it MIGHT be good to help users.  Yet it probably dilutes this article's topical focus.

Let's see.  It's a link selling network.  Google can follow networks.  Patterns.  IPs.  Names. Sites.