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Thanks Clint. I suppose subscribe was a poor word choice. We don't feed the products ourselves, we have a 3rd party handle it for us. We're currently feeding to Google and Bing. Even though we don't pay for those leads I don't want a bump in bounce rate. You confirmed my thoughts. I appreciate the input.

If you have your sitemap.xml and have submitted it to both Google and Bing, then you should be fine.

Here's a dated thread (2009) from Rand. And another from a daily blog a few days ago. Rand's blog #2 is what concerns me. Take this page for example (Alan, hold your breath this is a CMS site). The intent is to channel the juice to those pages. Every page on our site has a similar link strategy. I've tried to link according to the product "neighborhood" or to similar/related pages. The only exception is the link to our western horse tack page. I've tried to link to the western tack page from just about every other product and category page. The result is a sizable increase in page authority, but just recently the page rank has dropped significantly. My understanding from other threads is that a person can "stuff" anchor text and accrue a penalty for it. Alan, is your article suggesting an html sitemap is not necessary if I'm conducting targeted linking on product and category pages?

Same thing happened to Zuckerberg.....

Excellent BJ. Thanks for the input. The Geo landing pages are a great idea and I should be using them. Would you mind giving us a couple of links to some Geo landing pages you think are effective - your own or someone else if you're not comfortable putting it here? I'd like to see a good solid blog or two on building effective money-making landing pages.

I use H1 tags on category pages. Typically, category pages have short tail keywords and could use some reinforcement.  I could use an H1 tag on product pages in the descripton area, but haven't found it necessary since its in the title and product names are typically long tail. I don't know how prevalent it is, but I've not heard of using an H1 tag on a product name. I'm not suggesting its wrong or would hurt anything. We rank well for products. I just don't use the practice myself and don't see the point in it.

He's shortening the url from johnsmithwidgets.com to johnsmith.com. Literally, the first part of the url is a name. Very bland and generic. His long url is established, has decent page and domain authority and good natural link profile. He purchased the short domain and I don't know how he intends to use it. I just think he wants to have the short version available for user convenience. Ideally, wouldn't he want links to continue to his long domain?

What if the affiliate links are follow but they go to an specific subdomain which disallows robots via robots.txt. Can those kind of links hurt the main domain? Thanks in advanced. Jabi

No go today with SOPA: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=development+sanbox

Google passes link value through the 301 redirect to the destination page. Since there is no longer a page with content where there used to be, they do not take into consideration the former content of the page. I didn't mean to post the URL, I typically wouldn't on here. You could always post a bit.ly link and remove it or something like that as well. Keep in mind that OSE has a couple week delay or longer on showing new links, so you're looking at links built in December or earlier. If they really are actively building links right now, there will be a delay in seeing those.

Putting up a notice on the homepage and allowing users to go in and delete their information is great. I'd definitely set a time limit on that based on how often the majority of users come to your site, say if you know your return customers come back every month than you leave it up for 30 days, if it's every 3 months, you leave it for 90. I'd be very clear in the copy what you're doing with the customer information and insure their privacy and respect of their information. If you're migrating that information to your other site, let them know. If you're deleting it, let them know to. Same with the email newsletter people. Send them a notice via email and let them know about the site closing, what's happening with customer accounts, and if you're moving their emails to another newsletter. If you are, you might consider having them re-opt in for that newsletter. After the time period, I'd 301 redirect it instead of building a 404 page. This is going to be better for your SEO and the vast majority of your customers will already know that you closed the site and that they could visit your other site. 301s are permanent redirects. They are valid as long as the file that redirects them is live on the web.

Hi AWCthreads, Your question was: "Does the absence of keywords in the url significantly impact the page rank of an article?" Now if we talk about Google PageRank, then you should not worry about it. But if we look at search engines rankings, then you should. Using your keywords in the URl, gathering every +signal for the search engines may help you in gathering higher on-page SEO score, which will eventually lead to a higher ranking also for the targeted keywords. I hope it helped, Istvan

I agree with EGOL and would add my belief that you should use any text you feel is most beneficial when using internal linking. Generally it will be exact match. I would make no effort to vary the text unless it was helpful for users. Why? The entire concept of varying anchor text is based on Google knowing that links which are earned naturally are not under your control and therefore the anchor text will vary. Since all the links on your site are 100% under your control, the rules for external links should not apply. Let me clarify this is my logical thinking on the subject and I have no evidence to support this statement, but I do follow it myself.

I'm listing categories and sub-categories in it. If I wanted to create another page, what is the best practice for doing that?

Thanks again Back Burner. Have a great holiday season!