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Well, this is an opinion question but I'd go with PlayHazel.com.  Again though, this one is just opinion and I'm just thinking, "Which would I be more prone click?"

And hello to you too.

Be sure to check out the Moz blog.  I should warn you ... a trial is awesome but their tool is pretty addictive so be prepared to pay for it.

And good luck !

Google prioritized by the importance content plays on your site (i.e. how prominent it is in your navigation and hierarchy) but given time ... they crawl as much of your site as possible.

So the short answer is no from a crawling standpoint but from a ranking standpoint ... it's a serious consideration.  Of course, if you link to all your pages just to push them up then it's a nightmare for visitors and you dilute the PageRank flow for the key pages so it's a balancing act.

Manual actions aren't update based, they happen on an ongoing basis when someone at Google looks at the site and decides it's in violation of their guidelines.

Good luck !

My pleasure and keep up the great work.

One can never write off an algo change of course (especially given that there were 3 Panda updates from late August though September) but if so it was probably a case of you having good content (congrats) and solid links from domains that held their value through the updates and being rewarded during this period via the decline of others.

Or one could simply say, "We have good content and links from good sites so our rankings improved."

It seems to me that this is more just decent SEO getting rewarded over time.  Knowing when your site jumped up would help though.

Good point.  I've taken that approach that if I use it well, it'll work well and until it's replaced and not working - will continue to.

But as with all things SEO ... one always needs to pay attention to what's going on around you.

I've always used it as a "this person is responsible for this content" which helps clarify things.  Yes having an author deemed an authority helps of course but on the other side, they'll never be an authority if they don't start somewhere and your own blog is a good spot to work from as a starting point.

Re: taking inspiration from the work of others, as long as that person or work is getting credit for it (i.e. stat sources noted, etc.) then there's nothing wrong with it.  That author write that piece so they get the credit.  the author of the stats (for example) will get the credit for their work on their own site (re: authorship).

This is of course opinion as content ownership has a whack of grey areas but if you know your sector, what you can and can't ethically do, and properly credit your sources in the post - you shouldn't have any problems.

Authorship and publisher are different things.  the author tag tells Google who wrote a piece, the publisher tag tells Google who owns the site and it only needs to be put on the homepage (as far as I know ... anyone have any different feedback?)

You can read about the difference at http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2013/02/05/the-difference-between-rel-author-amp-rel-publisher.aspx in more detail but in short ... they don't do the same thing and I don't think the publisher tag is going to do what you want it to.

Hope that helps !

I'd have to see more detail to know what the 404 issue is but let me jump in and say that a big problem with the way you've done it is 301ing every page on the domain to the homepage of the new site.  This is saying, "Hey Google, we're not worried about sending the visitors to a page that contains information they want."  I can't say for sure of course (darn Google and their tight lips) but I'd bet dollars to donuts that they're devaluing all your links assuming that nothing is relevant since they can't assume relevancy from the way the redirect site-wide are being handled.

The 301's domain also have a "less than ideal" domains to backlinks ratio so that's likely stacking on top.

Can't answer the question here but thought I'd comment on what might be causing some of your problems.

There are definitely sites that are (to quote George Orwell) "more equal than others".

Wordpress would be hooped is those types of links were catalysts to a penalty ... at least in a level world. I dont' think anyone could say with 100% certainty that it won't bite you in the butt so nofollow is probably the route to go.

As an SEo I never do it but that's more to the question, do I want to say, "Hey Google, here's a site that's been SEO'd."  From the perspective of a web designer simply taking credit for their work, I've only seen it cause issues recently if they're followed links and anchor heavy.  From my experience, branded links seem to work fine but mix it up.

That said, who knows what's coming.  If you want to play it safe - nofollow is the way to go.  But then, you probably knew that.

Back in 2007 Matt Cutts announced at Pubcon that sub-domains and folders were to be treated the same.  Of course, that didn't exactly happen as it was supposed to but the principle is sound.  If what you're worried about is how weight is passing then it's pretty much a level field where you're left to chose the one that makes the most sense for your backend.  I personally tend to lean on sub-directories whenever possible for predictability and simplicity.

I will note that I have quite recently seen penalties against a sub-domain on a large-scale site affect the rankings on the domain as a whole so there's definitely crossover in domain authority and trust.

The quickest answer to your question is, yes the domain will benefit from the sub-domain.  But it's probably still easier to use a folder.

While the exact definition of "stronger" generally falls on pure authority and strength, it is skewing more to perceived user intent.  What I mean by this is that if Google infers that the user is looking to purchase a product they would be more prone to rank Amazon however if they believe the user is simply looking for product information they would rank the Samsung site.

I a lot of generic queries it's difficult for Google to determine, at least early in the search cycle where they may not have a pre-defined idea of what you're trying to do.  In that case they would have to lean on pure strength.  That said, as they're getting better and better at personalization of results, one could conclude (and I personally do) that if they see you searching phone models and generally clicking on online stores, that they would then infer that even on the next model-specific generic search, that you'd prefer a shopping experience delivered over the Samsung site and it's product based information.

As an irrelevant aside - love that avatar David.

I agree with Mike here.

While technically the canonical might do what you want (kind of) this isn't what it's intended for.  Another side to that coin is, if you funnel the strength to the product page from the PDF but the product page doesn't have the content that the PDF was ranking for then you still won't get the rankings on the product page and on top of that, you'll lose them on the PDFs.

In a case like this (with major brand sites as those listed) you won't be dealing with a penalty insomuch as you'll be dealing with a case of content being ignored.  For example, if a local shop has the same content as Amazon, Amazon will generally win.

I can't possibly answer the question better than Matt Cutts himself so he is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgbOibxkEQw#t=77 You'll notice that the focus of what he's saying is on unique content and giving Google a reason to rank you.  This is a case like that noted in my comments about strong outranking weak; if a site is up against a strong site - Google is going to rank the one they believe is the most trustable and that will be the biggest brand (generally).

Now, I cannot for the life of me find it but I know that recently Google has comment elsewhere that they may look to user intent.  If a user or their query indicates a preference to online buying then they would rank Amazon and if they tend to imply a local purchase then a local site would rank with exactly the same content.  I know that's from recent comments from Google but I cannot remember where I saw that.  Sorry - not a great source.

Either way however, the stronger site will win if the content is all up at the same time and the stronger site may even beat original source if Google decides it's more reliable or fits a searchers intent better.

I used to do a lot of affiliate marketing but it's been a while so take this with a grain of salt though I do work with sites in a similar situation ...

The key here in original source.  If you get picked up as the initial source of the content then you're OK, if you don't then your resellers will outrank you and you'll be paying them for traffic they  earned with your content.  The same can be said if they are significantly stronger than you.

In your shoes I'd write 2 versions of the descriptions, one for you and one or resellers.  Don't let them take yours, let them take the content that meant for resellers.  Then you'll always have original content.  It'll be double the work of course but that's better than writing copy for every site.

To be fair - you may want to mention that they should consider writing their own copy but if they don't want to they can take the copy you're offering to give away.

Hello Lydia.

First - I don't recommend it in general but it does work to a degree.  It used to work better.

The idea is that if you link to a page dedicated to a subject and cram enough instances of that phrase onto the page (such as in a product list as in your example) that the page will rank for at least longtail versions of those queries.

In the example you sent it likely does work to some degree but that's because they're a fairly strong site.  Nonetheless they probably saw their search volume decline as of late as it's pretty thin content.  Focus on this type of strategy and you're basically asking for trouble.

If you stick to creating good content people want to link to and work hard to get people to find it and link to it in the first place (pretty necessary) you'll do far better overall.  If you want to rank for longtail phrases - build real pages on the subject.  Sure you can mention and link to products but provide some value for readers - not just a product list.

And of course ... GOOD LUCK !