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Each search engine has it's own search algorithm. In some cases things are similar, but I do not think they can be correlated.

Contrary to what authors want to see and what Google says, the Google algos are not very good at ranking the content owner's website first in the search results.   Instead, optimization and strength usually win. Like you, I really dislike that. Lots of affiliates are really good at optimization and they often have strong websites.  They also like to use the text of the affiliate program's website instead of writing their own.  The more affiliates republish your content the more likely you are to rank poorly. So, you can either live with this and enjoy the sales that the affiliates produce or you can be a hardass and refuse to pay any affiliate who uses your content.   If you do that a lot of affiliates will start promoting your competitor's products. If you tell affiliates that they must rel=canonical their pages to your website then their pages will not rank in the SERPs.  Many of them will quit your program the moment you demand that. When you recruit affiliates you can get really smart people to go up against your competitors... but at the same time there will be some damage done to your own direct sales.  It boils down to this....   When you hire mercenaries, they are going to run the battle on their terms or cross over to your competitor.  You will be hit with some friendly fire.

Why are you trying to reduce the number of links on your homepage? It sounds like you are doing rather well already if you are ranked #1 on Google for different keywords. If you are referring to the site listed in your profile (re: mattresses, bed, etc.), you do have a lot of links in your top navigation; however, I think it does a great job of sorting pages from a usability standpoint. If you have links in navigation and in the area below with the images, that is fine - as long as you feel you have designed it this way for users. I read somewhere that Google only counts the first internal link on a page to pass link juice - so if you have 5 links to "bed frames" you aren't going to get any extra link juice... just the initial link receives it. Long story short - if you believe that the top navigation does a good job of sorting your content to make it easy for users to find - keep it. If you think that the images and links of your top selling products make sense for your users - keep it. If you are worried about going over 100 links per page, I think the main reason for that "rule" is 1) it can make crawling more difficult for Google and 2) so you don't create link farms. As long as your website is being indexed properly and you are ranking well... I wouldn't worry about it. Hope this helps. Mike

The answer, unfortunately, is it depends, Archers. If your PPC campaign isn't targeting any of your higher ranking organic non-branded terms, you won't likely see any effect on them at all. If you have a number of high-ranking organic non-branded organic terms that you also target in your PPC, you'll usually see at least a slight drop in traffic from those organic terms as the PPC essentially "cannibalises" some of them. (Though in many cases, having a strong organic result can boost PPC clicks and vice versa - the "maximising shelf space" aspect of having 2 high-ranking listings on a SERP.) If your PPC is targeting some of your lower-ranking organic terms, you will often see a traffic drop from those lower organic terms as the PPC ad will often "claim the click" from the first page before a visitor gets to the lower pages to see your organic listing. But this is often the primary purpose of PPC - to "buy" a higher ranked listing than you could achieve organically, so the tradeoff in organic traffic is relatively small and expected. Hope that makes sense? Paul

From what I've read, they're indexing Facebook and Disqus comments on blogs.  On the site I work on, on certain pages we load the main page contents via AJAX, and Google is reading and indexing that content. I'd be wary of taking the time to put together HTML snapshots, as Google is getting better and better at this.  You could set up a prototype of your AJAX solution and wait and see if Googlebot can index the AJAX loaded content.

This was recently mentioned on another Q&A post; you'll want to check it out. You may not get "credit" for the backlinks to your competitors domain, depending on the situation.