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Change your settings to just display teasers or excerpts on the home page.

You're probably right about the estimate. I haven't done any testing on it or the impact of redirects in general personally, but have seen some folks suggest as high as 99% but others much lower.

Slightly. Like any redirect, you lose some of the link value. However, Google has said that PageRank does flow through shortened URL's. It just might only be 99% of the rank instead of the full value.

Your meta description isn't really a factor in ranking and more of a call to action for a user to click the search result. That said, putting too much there is probably a spam signal.

My suggestion would be to either leave it blank or put the first words of the content. Google will replace the snippet based on user query no matter what your decision.

Force7,

You may be able to get free help from folks in the Q&A section. The community is awesome like that.

If you find that you need something a little more detailed, you might try the SEOmoz group on LinkedIn. SEOmoz used to run a marketplace where contracts were posted, but they migrated that aspect over to LinkedIn. Great benefit for someone like you is that you can view profiles of people who are offering their help. Knowledge is power, and LinkedIn will help make sure you find someone who will be of real benefit.

I think a few factors will be at play. First, how prominent is the customer quote compared to the rest of the content on the page? If it's the dominant piece then it might get flagged. Second, where on the page is the quote? Most sites have some text that's repeated across all pages in sidebars, footers, headers, etc. Third, as raised above, how much other content is on the page? If none or very little, it might be an issue.

A good rule of thumb is, if the different pages on your site say different things, you're fine. If all your pages say the same thing, none of them can be saying it any better than the others.

It sounds like your link portfolio needs to be built up again.

If this were a penalty, I would expect you to have been pushed further down than you were. One other indicator you might check is the PageRank of the page. If the page suddenly has a 0 rank or a gray bar when it had a rank previously, but the mozRank is still intact, you might be suffering a penalty.

A forum isn't the best way to improve rankings and there are a number of issues to watch:

First, old content gets pushed to the bottom and there isn't a lot of interlinking that happens, so the older content would eventually lose some of its power. 1,000 hits a day isn't very high, so I wouldn't expect that the surge of new content would be enough to immediately make up for the PageRank depletion on the buried topics. Using a system that has interlinking, creating a dynamic sidebar that pulls random topics and displays them on the page, or creating a static list of highlighted topics might help.

Second, you run duplicate content risks. I've managed two forums in the past, and posters never use the search button. Instead, they'll just ask the same questions over and over again. Communities are tricky; moderating may upset people, so you'll want to be very up-front about your stance on not using the search function to see if a topic was previously raised and you may want to create a sticky topic of frequently asked questions that you update from time to time.

But all in all, a forum isn't a bad idea and would add some dynamics to your site that probably don't exist now. There are work-arounds for some of the ranking issues you might run into; just make sure to put user experience before any potential SERP lift.

To add, is the link in the first couple of paragraphs, the middle, or the end of a document? Or is it in the sidebar, footer, or top menu bar of a site? Common sense can tell you which of these have more impact.

Hmm... Wordpress has a built in fix. Just add or remove the trailing slash from your permalink structure. For the home page, you can just specify what the home page should be. Joomla, from what I can tell, requires some modification to the htaccess file... I'm not much of a Joomla fan and my Wordpress information could be incomplete, so if anyone has any corrections feel free to chime in.

The slash is minor, but it can create some issues... Search engines can figure out pretty easily which URL you mean but users can't. If users come to the site and decide to link back to you, the link can point to either mysite.com or mysite.com/. The PageRank is essentially split to what really amounts to two separate pages.

You should redirect one to the other. It isn't a huge deal and won't cause too many problems, but why leave something to chance with the algorithm?

If your site runs Drupal, I suggest downloading the Global Redirect plugin for easy across the board decisions about trailing slashes and other duplicate content URL issues.

Just curious, would no-following the image link work?

What do you mean? There are a few possible responses...

1. If you mean how long until a search engine sees, that depends on when the spider returns. Could be an hour, a few days, or a few weeks depending on how often your site is updated and what it's authority is.

2. If you mean how long until SEOmoz does the on-page ranking again, it will be about a week.

3, If you mean how long until you can run the report card manually, it can be right away if you're a PRO member or at the latest tomorrow if you've used your three daily credits as a free member.

Hope that helps.

Agree with Robert. Also, if you're concerned about Google getting access to your GA data you can always disable sharing it with them from your GA account.

I'm not used to seeing the canonical tag in the main content section? I usually have seen (and placed it) in the header near the scripts.

Am I wrong on this guys? Maybe that's why there's an error on the report card.

It depends. If you're getting traffic and links to your tag pages, then it wouldn't be worth it to de-index them. The general rule of thumb that I've followed is if I'm attracting traffic to tags or categories, I leave them in the index while adding canonical tags to individual post pages. But other people have other views and a lot of it is personal preference to how important those other pages are for you.

Is the directory related to the theme of the site? So for instance, if you have a site that covers Facebook business marketing and you add a directory of consultants who offer Facebook marketing help, then you're sticking to the overall theme.

Likewise if the theme of the site is community journalism, separate subdomains that cover (or are directories) a variety of topics stick to the overall theme.

So assuming your idea is a benefit to your site users, a directory will help your SEO because inbound links will contribute to the overall root domain authority and outbound links will establish yourself as a trusted hub of information.

It doesn't matter one way or the other. You should pick one though.

Could be a few things.

1. The scoring is different between the two tools. I looked and couldn't find any specifics on their API's, but they could place weight on different factors. In the second tool, it looks like the first tab is from Google's page speed tool since the second is Yahoo's. The scores between the two were different.

2. The location where the test is done can impact speed. The closer the testing server is to the server that the website is hosted on, the faster the load time will be.

3. Could be a difference in caching? If your site has flushed its cache, the load time can be slower while the server re-caches things, then it will be faster later. This usually isn't the case, but I've seen it happen.

As for your second question, I'm not sure of a definite way. If your caching is working properly, it should just happen... Hope that helps.

I've found three approaches to be effective:

1. Link to them first, then send an email with a non-spammy subject line that says that you linked to X content for Y reason because you found it valuable to your audience. Include a link to your website in your email signature and people will sometimes reciprocate on their own.

2. Use this tool (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) to find any broken links on a page. Make a short list, send an email with the subject line as "broken links on X page". Give them your list and suggest at the bottom that they might find your topical resource helpful. People will be grateful that you're improving their site and they'll have to edit the page to fix the broken links, so it's a low opportunity cost for them to add your page on there.

3. Flattery, as mentioned by others. Email them and point out that you liked X content for Y reason. Include a link to your website in your email signature, or politely point out that you share their interests or views on things.