Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sorry to say it, but If you really want a blog on your site, you may want to look into some other hosting options.

Copyright notices are really just a signal for the users, and to say "don't steal our stuff" in somewhat of a non-forceful way. People can generate the year automatically, but sometimes they just forget to include it.

Is it a big deal to have an older date? Probably not. Google has a number of other ways they could check a page's freshness aside from a completely arbitrary copyright date.

An interesting note about copyright, you don't really have to display a copyright notice in the first place. As soon as you create something, it's already considered "copyrighted."

Tagging posts provides a good user experience, allowing them to scan through a number of related posts. It does create a number of duplicate content issues though.

To solve this on my own wordpress websites, I've added a noindex tag to each of the "archive pages", which includes tags, categories, authors, and dates. This effectively cuts out the duplicate content areas and I haven't seen any unusual fluctuations in search traffic.

What is the size of a retargeting pixel and who places it on the site ? Is it the retargeting company ? Can we place it ourselves ?  Does a code have to be added to the site ?

The retargeting pixel is simply a way to record a cookie to the users computer. When you setup the retargeting campaign either through google or some other method, you should be given a code to add to your site.

What do you mean by burn pixel ?

When a user converts and you no longer wish to target them, you can send another pixel (cookie) to identify which users have already converted, somewhat disabling the previous cookie.

How do we come to know that a burn pixel has fired ?

The burn pixel is placed on the users computer in the same way that the original pixel was placed, they load the screen with the page with the "burn pixel" and it's stored on their computer.

As long as you aren't targeting the search engine spiders and giving them special content, you shouldn't have to worry about "Cloaking". To my knowledge, all incidents are reviewed before they penalize a site so they would probably see no harm in simple split testing.

Links like that don't hurt you, but they probably aren't doing you any good either. I wouldn't worry too much about them.

The types of links I would be worried about are ones that come from foreign sites, pharmacies, free poker sites, etc. that are obviously spam sites.

When it comes to video production, you generally get what you pay for. You could have someone you know throw together a powerpoint and narrate over the top of it, but it won't be nearly as professional as someone who might charge more.

I think your best bet is to check your local craigslist or try doing a google search for video production in your area. I'll leave the quality vs price issue in your court though.

Asking for a review won't get you in any trouble, but offering some reward for a positive review may cause problems.

A lot of people, myself included, will check a places ratings on services such as google places or yelp in order to decide whether or not it's worth trying out. More reviews also lead to more trust.

Are you talking about a service that automates bookmarks through fake accounts?

I don't think it would add much value, as these accounts would show little activity. Think of it like a Klout score (klout.com), if a user has no history, only a handful of bookmarks, and rarely active, it's more likely they're spam.

You'll probably get more value by finding new followers on facebook or twitter instead. I definitely wouldn't pay money for it.

We don't assign any session ID's, but I did find this post that I think I could use as a starting point.

http://robertmaldon.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-search-terms-did-they-google-to.html

Of course, I would be performing a different set of actions, and would like it to work for Yahoo/Bing as well.

We receive lead forms from interested visitors that include their name, email, grade level, and academic goals, and we would like to also know which specific phrase they used when searching for us.

I need to find a way to grab the referring keywords and pass them as a hidden form field.

Can this be done, and are there scripts available that can do this?

It depends on whether you want your homepage or those subpages to be ranked on the given keyword.

"Link Juice," or the value of an inbound link, decays with each step. The more pages it has to pass through, the less value it will provide. If you want the homepage to rank for all 5 phrases, then link to the homepage using those phrases, otherwise link to the subpages and allow them to creep up in the SERPs.

I don't think that google would penalize one site because it shares a common owner with another site of poor value. However, it's likely that the common owner utilized the same tactics across all sites and something THEY have done could have caused the penalty.

As far as the ban on AdWords, again, I don't think it would negatively affect a site right out of the gate.

If you've been banned from AdWords and you have multiple sites suffering a penalty, It sounds like there's an issue with the overall approach to SEO.

"Link Juice" passes from one page to another based on the number of links on that page. Here's what the SEOmoz basic guide to SEO says about it;

Number of Links on a Page

According to the original PageRank formula, the value that a link passes is diluted by the presence of other links on a page. Thus, getting linked-to by a page with few links is better than being linked-to by the same page with many links on it (all other things being equal). The degree to which this is relevant is unknowable (and in our testing, it appears to be important, but not overwhelmingly so), but it's certainly something to be aware of as you conduct link acquisition.

So the more links you have on a page, the less value each link passes.

The SEOmoz optimization report says to avoid "Excessive" internal and external links, and I think that number is somewhere between 100 and 150.

I don't think that you should get to a "maximum" number of links. Instead you should aggressively reduce the number of links to find the minimum. See also: Link Sculpting

I think that the number of links you're gaining might cause a problem, not to mention the quality of those links. Google assumes a natural pattern in link acquisition, so when you suddenly jump from 5 links per week to 500, that triggers a red flag because it doesn't appear natural.

How many hours are you spending on this link directory? Perhaps you could take the same amount of time to write a well-researched guest post, or some other type of op-ed piece.

That type of content is much more likely to earn the type of high quality targeted links you're looking for, without junking up your link profile.

PDF's are crawl-able, see this article from Webmaster Central

With that in mind, it's also a good idea to have the content available online as HTML. It's accessible from a wider variety of devices, and doesn't require you to update your adobe reader.

I agree with  Barry, you won't see your links show up immediately, the standard web crawls each take a couple of weeks to go from start to finish, and those new links willl show up when the linking page gets crawled again.

I think the description and alt tags may count towards the keyword count/distribution, but google ignores the keywords tag for most search purposes.

I think in the case of a page for Sedan > BMW it would be categorically related to SUV > BMW, so cross linking should be encouraged.

If you were to restructure your site, you might end up with "Vehicle Make" as a top category, and then body style as a subcategory, with categories like "BMW > Sedan" and "BMW > SUV". Another valid way of organizing your site, where the pages would have identical content.

There's more than one way to slice a pie, so if they are justifiably related, you should cross link.

In that case I wouldn't worry about it. Most webmasters won't really check the outgoing links, and if they do, they certainly wouldn't do it every day.

Google is probably pretty lenient on this too, as they understand that occasional service outages occur. As long as your site was back up and running in a reasonable amount of time, you should be fine.