Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes, they give the content area the most weight in regard to individual page topical focus, however search engines do evaluate  every word on a page, including content within the source view that visitors don't see.  This is why having too much content in header, sidebar and footer areas, or too much code at the source view level causes topical confusion / topical dilution and is considered during the duplicate content evaluation process as well.

The best I can offer in regard to how often a phrase should appear on a page is "does this feel like I repeat this phrase too much?"  If you've got the same phrase repeated fifteen times just in the content area, there should be a valid reason other than just SEO reasoning for that.  And a LOT of text around those.

All you need to do is check to see if any of the product pages are still listed in the Google or Bing index.  I'd expect they probably are.  If so, 301 redirects need to be implemented.  The best way to do this is if the old url structure was http://www.yourdomain.com/catalog/xyzproduct.aspx  then do a search on site:www.yourdomain.com/catalog/   that will show pages still indexed under that folder structure.

301 Redirects should never be pointed at an IP address, they should only be pointed at a resolved domain.

The slides will be going up at some point in the next few days.  And I'll have a follow-up post that includes the notes for each slide.  In the mean time, I did an article on Search Marketing Wisdom yesterday directly related to the last slide in that deck.

and grabbing those social profiles through knowem is also good proactive online reputation management

In addition to Steve having pointed out that the PR you see is totally invalid, and not truly reflective of your real situation, I'd also say that if it's only been back online a couple days, it's way too early to even begin to determine how the site holds up.  Nowadays Google assigns an initial estimated ranking value to each page on the site, and the site overall, but then other algorithms are run over the course of days, if not weeks.  These provide additional input to either confirm, deny or otherwise cause a modification to that initial assessment.

Then there's the reality that in all that time, if other sites that compete for the same phrases undergo changes themselves in that general time-frame, that too would cause shifting.

Personally I don't put too much weight in ANY "ranking" data.  Whether it's MozRank, Keyword search results ranking, or any other kind.  All of it's just a general guide.

The only thing that truly matters nowadays for the vast majority of situations is - am I getting a volume of organic search traffic that suits my needs, goals? And from there, is that traffic highly relevant, to the point where those visitors become conversions - meaning how many of them take that next step after arriving that I am seeking? Such as filling out specific forms, or making specific purchases, or whatever the metric is.

that data, over time, is what matters way more than ranking numbers.

Just my experience.

Your RSS title should match the titles of the content displayed in your web site's on-site view. While it's possible to have a programmer write a custom script to generate alternate titles, it sounds like you would want to have unique titles for every city you want to rank for, even if the content the RSS is delivering was not originally written based on that.  So if my understanding is correct, that could cause problems and your site could be red-flagged for that.

just to clarify regarding my input - my perspective is based on my experience with client sites on all scales, small, medium, large and mega sites.

To me it's more important to see how things work on our own sites and evolve them over time as compared to purely looking for what others do or say as it's own reason for taking action.

spammers work on volume.  Send out a million email messages, and if 1% fall for the hype, it's cost effective.  Over time, it can be profitable due to that volume.

Add in the fact that such services still tend to offer some actual results value (less and less every year), and "competing" against such companies is a seemingly monumental challenge.  It's also tempting to want to consider playing the same game.

I need to emphasize how insanely complex it is for a company to play in that field and even come close to being viable for a long-term business strategy.  The rules are ALWAYS changing. And just when you think you have a model that works, all it takes is a single algorithm change to wipe out your entire model.

Go ahead and play that game if you think you have the smarts to do so.  Personally, I laugh because it's a model based on completely unscrupulous tactics that are ultimately doomed to fail.  So if all you want is a money-grab and have the willingness to do so and still sleep at night, that's a choice you can make, yet it's a choice made by people I have no desire to know or do business with.  Let alone consider equals or friends or peers in this industry.

Alternately, by offering superior ethical services (if you rail at the word "ethical" you can stop reading now - you're in that "no desire to know" category), and stand proud on that truth, and promote it, and laud it, you'll find enough business from companies who only want to work with such companies.

I understand Muhammed.  Seeing a 301 even though you've changed things can be quite a concern.  The most important thing is that your site is listed in Google, and clicking the link from there does go to the right page, and I've confirmed that it's properly set.

Quite often SEO requires patience.  Something I personally have difficulty with

If the type of products or services offered are most likely to be known from a search intent perspective as being geo-location relevant, the answer is yes, this can help, but only to the extent that the content is truly optimized for that geo-location relationship.  Just slapping "NYC" into a Title, and maybe on the page itself isn't necessarily enough - so you'd want to be sure to recognize that fact.

If I have a category California Hotels, sub-category San Francisco Hotels, then having links in a sub-navigation bar to each (if there's only a handful), each of those links reinforces the strength of the top level Hotels, 2nd level California, and third level San Francisco related phrases.  They all support each other.

If, on the other hand, I have a link to "nearby hotels", that implies I'm going from a single hotel details page to a uniquely filtered "geo" category page that shows hotels based on some criteria - it might be all San Francisco, or all within a distance radius, or all within a zip code radius.

Even if it's all other hotels in San Francisco, it's not a link pointing to another (or several) same-level page(s).  It's pointing one layer higher.

That's a filter more than a properly constructed category drill-down.  And it implies that the page I'm on will NOT be listed on that target of the "nearby" link.

To add to Banar's recommendation, I'll offer that Google has been focused more on quality of trust signals in the past year and change than ever - a big part of that is "how natural does the link profile look?"   Too much emphasis on brand only, or only one or two phrases across all or even most of your anchor text is an unnatural pattern.  So too is obtaining links purely or mostly from the "low hanging fruit" you describe.  You need variety of anchor text, variety of pages links point to, and variety of sources links come from.

Yahoo actually applies their own criteria to the results.  It's one of the "features" they claimed set them apart from Bing when the deal was consummated.

I personally have not ever felt it would be necessary to do something like that. The only thing that matters is if the search engines see your proper setup and accept it.  So monitor Google Webmaster Tools and how they treat your sitemap files - you say they've already been submitted so GWT should see them - that system will let you know if there's a problem from their view.

Whether other sites that are not the big three search engines have a problem is not important to your having them the way you do - they are only files that the search engines need.

Having all listed and linked is ideal for SEO, however you rapidly cross into usability problems if there are more than a handful. (Would you want 50 or hundred links in a sidebar nav? ) When a site is so big that there are more than a handful that could be linked from that sidebar, it's actually best practice to NOT have any others linked from the sidebar, else you confuse users even more (listing only some, but not all). User Experience is paramount when making these decisions. Even at the expense of SEO in some cases. And if that happens, other tactics need to be employed. Like having a separate, dedicated funnel for "featured properties". Which requires even more unique content in that funnel. But it at least boosts the ranking value for those properties included.

Google does not show a list of all links they track for a site.  It's only a sampling.

Gemma,

There could be serveral issues causing this.  It's why I always cross-reference error counts with what Google Webmaster Tools reports.  If both GWT and the Moz reports line up within a ballpark range, I'd definitely suggest looking into it, and if they don't and GWT reports a much lower volume consistently over time, you will have saved a lot of time, grief and energy.  So start with that.

When you say "table text", do you mean a process where you consolidate many pages into fewer pages, and where the content is presented in a way that gives one page much more depth of content?

If so, consolidating many pages into fewer pages is helpful in certain situations.

If individual pages themselves do not have enough text as a stand-alone page, you can consolidate them into fewer pages as long as the primary focus (topic /main keyword) across each of those is very much similar.  If there is too diverse a focus across pages, consolidating them can cause topical confusion on the consolidated page.

That's the primary consideration I go with when evaluating content for SEO.

Also, what about user experience - is it better with many pages, or is it better with consolidated content? That too matters and in fact, helps reinforce the issue of topical focus quality or harms it by making things confused (a page trying to do too many things for too many reasons).

Etsy's got a good structure with their category and sub-category sidebar that balances SEO and user experience.  note though that when you get deep into the individual Etsy stores, that's gone, because it would dilute the individual store owner's account focus and distract users.

Think "unnatural patterns".  The trick to SEO is knowing how to spot unnatural patterns.  If you've got 5 sites, and you get 50 links pointing to each one, where those 50 come from the same root domains, that's definitely an unnatural pattern.

Given that SEO is vastly complex, it may not be a big deal if you're doing a full spread of other link building that's unique to each of your 5 sites.