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Jason, Thanks for the update. Yeah it seems pretty clear that it's a bug at this point.  Not fun while it lasts though

I actually agree with what Mark Ginsberg said that it might be an SEO firm we hired way in the past (we don't have anyone for over 6 months) and might have pipe lined articles on our behalf. But yes, main keywords to the exact landing pages

No way ..   however, Google Webmaster Tools never have any link to this tool probably they feel that it is not safe for everyone and people may try this powerful feature for fun. You can find the option here still intact  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Hi, To reduce the bounce rate of your landing pages, you can have some teasers on them that lead to other pages. For one of my clients, I did the same. I added product related textual and graphical teasers to the landing pages with high bounce rate. When the visitors clicked on those teasers they are taken to another page on the same website that will have some how to videos and / or slides. This strategy worked pretty well for my client. One thing that you have to remember is that when including teasers on these high bounce pages, these should be tightly related or belong to the same subject matter of these host pages they reside in. Coming to the question related to if high bounce rate is good or bad, it all depends on the purpose behind the existence of these pages. Take for example, a visitor lands on a Wikipedia page in search of a topic. He reads the article and leaves Wikipedia. In this case, the page on Wikipedia served the purpose behind its existence and the visitor got what he wanted. Bounce rate on Wikipedia is good in this regard. Hope that helps. Best regards, Devanur Rafi.

Thanks. Question though, I'm not using canonical, only next and prev. I don't think canonical should be placed since it is not the same content (different products). Any thoughts?

"in my article section I have a HUGE article about Samsung Laptops" Nice work! "The category page shows lots of laptops and a small section of text." OK... this is good... more text might be helpful So, what's the problem? Here is my opinion and you know that they say about opinions.   I think that Google is going to rank the page that Google thinks is best for the searcher.  Some types of queries are made mostly by buyers.  Some types are made by people looking for information. I have pairs of pages on my site just as you do.  I link between them just like you do.  My article pages are usually much stronger than my product pages but I usually see the product pages higher in the SERPs for product queries and the article pages for information queries. Even if someone lands on an article page I still have an opportunity to route them to the product page with house ads and other types of obvious links.  Maybe my article will impress them and they will decide to buy from me because they read part or all of the article and decided to buy from me because I know enough to write helpful information.  I know for a fact that this happens because customers tell me. So, if you see your article page ranking high be sure to make it very clear to people who land on that page that you are in the business of selling Samsung Laptops.   Most people would by happy to get any page to visible rankings in those SERPs. Something else that I noticed is that if I place a link to one of my pages in the persistent navigation that is on every page of the site - that page often moves up nicely in the rankings.   You might consider doing that with your Samsung product page if you want to increase its strength in the SERPs.

I have ranked 100's of keywords on sites that I wasn't allowed to touch the front page of.  The keywords were not mentioned on their pages at all either.  In some instances your keyword doesn't even need to be on the page to rank like i this instance. Have a great day.

In my opinion, this is not a good project.  I would find something else.

My suggestion would be to review the quality of the content on the site. If the site does host good quality content, then i would recommend submitting your articles on them. If they look spammy and dont really have meaningful content posted that the visitors can benefit from, i'd stay away from it.

Not necessarily, one for example is an aggregation site that brings articles (or headers) from other sites and it shows as if he has 2000 links pointing to me. Some are directories (not that good ones) that also show 100-200 links pointing to me. These  are not links that I mind removing... but I wondered if they currently do extra damage showing that many links. Does google think these are types of site wide links?

Yes they are: www.domain.com www.domain.com/blog However, it was just an example. Also, in my main category page when people go to the category wiki (info page) I open a new tab in order not to completely take them out of the buying page. Thanks

Yes you are correct. By adding the "+1" right next or underneath your ad, people who like it will able to visit your Google+ page.

Thanks for the fast reply. My fear is that Smith Computers will not get an audience from within Google + and that the audience from within will look for plain computers and not what we do (and unfortunately we cannot change our brand now ). I think agree with you and will go with 3 or 4.

Well, there are a few HTML elements that you can use with being the standard for a quote and being for a quote from another site or source. With regards to duplication, I am not really sure I have ever come across a hard and fast rule here so tend to think the standard rules apply and if you have a good percentage of unique content on the page then having a few quotes won't matter. That is likely as true if you use italics, q or blockquote. From my perspective, I would use blockquote to indicate it was from an external source and not worry about so long as 90% of my page was not quoted from an external source. What you can't do is pinch content from another source and just wrap it up in blockquotes and call it good. Seriously though, I quote things in my blog posts all the time so keep the unique ratio high and this is not something to worry about. The HTML quote details can be found in more detail over at w3c schools: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_q.asp If you google around this topic, you won't find much, a good indicator that people are not having duplication problems due to quotes and citations else the internet would be moaning about it. Hope that helps. Marcus

Thanks for the fast reply. I agree with you that in some cases where you buy a service from a person and not a company (i.e dentist, lawyer, CPA etc.) it makes lots of sense and will probably help CTR. However, if I can't use a logo, then it is just for the articles and not for the categories (even though there are informational texts there). Thanks

canonical them to their page without the parameters and handle the parameter IDs in Google WMT under "URL parameter Handling"

Maybe this link will help. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/help-google-index-your-videos.html

BBB Mcafee Some sort of ratings like reseller ratings or trust pilot

So basically you got the answer as it dosen't harm or help as far as rankings BUT there is a way to use it either in your advantage or disadvantage. It can also give away your main keywords to competitors - and that's not good. For high competitive websites (where competitors are following movements and trying to figure things out )  I am using the keywords metatags to channel competitors in a different directions by putting there other keywords (still somehow related) and not the keywords that particular page is targeting. Case study: I have an account and soon after placing some "stupid" keywords in the keyword tag we've notice on page changes in a major competitor for those keywords that are not really good (conversion, volume etc) but probably on the idea that if the #1 is doing it it must be important