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When I signed up for an SEOmoz account I received several notices during the first month that explained the charges.  Here is an excerpt from one such email:

"Also, we wanted to let you know that you have one week left in your free trial, and when it expires, you will be charged $99/month. We hope you've enjoyed your membership, but if you wish to cancel, you can do so on your account settings page."

I'm guessing your notices are in a spam filter.

Best,
Christopher

There is a limit on the size of a sitemap and to allow for large sitemaps to be split into smaller sitemaps, the sitemap protocol includes a sitemapindex.  See "Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)" here http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html.  Of course, it's also possible to include the multiple sitemaps in the robot.txt file, but automated sitemap generators will likely use the sitemapindex feature so that the robots.txt file does not have to be modified as the size of the site changes.

Best,
Christopher

I have a niche site that attracts between 50 to 100 visitors a day.  For the past several weeks we've been working on a new article and the with aid of social media have attracted 2,000 visitors in the first 24 hours of posting, a dramatic spike in daily visits.  Visitors are spending about 10 to 12 minutes reading the article and then leave our site.  So, the GA bounce rate is quite high at about 95%.  Does Google know this is a compelling article for our niche based on the number of visits and time spent reading the page?  Will the high bounce rate affect the article's PR, or do they also consider the time on the page?

Best,
Christopher

Thanks, Sha.  It does not happen with other automated email from Moz such as ranking reports.  It's only the email from the Q&A responses.

Best,
Christopher

I'm not familiar with the A1 Sitemap generator, but regarding the sitemap protocol, there is a limit on the size of a single sitemap.xml file, so for large sites, the sitemap must be split into multiple sitemap.xml files.  And, the protocol has a method for indexing these multiple sitemap.xml files.  It's sort of like an index to an index.  None of my sites exceed the sitemap file limit, so I don't know which sitemap generators use this approach, but I would guess many of them do.

Sitemap generators I have used include DMXZone which is a Dreamweaver plugin, and xml-sitemaps.com which includes a video sitemap generator.

Best,
Christopher

EDIT: PS: Your current sitemap looks fine to me.

If you can't get 100 FB likes for a new online product or service using white hat techniques then fold up the tent and go home.

EDIT: Posted in response to a suggestion that has since been deleted.

It is my understanding the search volume and keyword competition are independent.  For example, many people purchase socks, but the potential for profit is relatively low which limits the pricing competition.  In contrast, awards for medical malpractice could be quite high, but the search volume for a rare medical procedure could be very low.

Best,
Christopher

Hi Dana,

" ... you are right, one of the fundamental questions I still have is how does a bot behave when it finds an orphaned page like one of these? Does it just revert back to the sitemap and move one? Does it automatically go back to the last non-dead end page and move on from there? What does it do?"

Bots are not really like a single spider that has to crawl around the web that can get trapped when entering an orphaned page with no back-button.  When a bot enters a site, it creates a list of all the internal pages that are linked from the home page.  Then it visits each page on that list and keeps adding more linked pages to that list.  Each time it adds more pages to the list, it only adds new unique pages and does not add duplicates.  It also keeps track of which pages it has already visited.  When all the pages have been visited once, and no new pages are discovered that are not already on the list, all of the pages have been crawled.

Best,
Christopher

Add a redirect to the .htaccess file, as in:

Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.manandhisvan.com.au

Best,
Christopher

It's quite all right to link the pages you author to your bio page using rel=author, but then your bio page needs to link to your G+ account using a rel=me.  This is the way I do it and it works fine.

The other way to do it is to link your pages directly to your G+ account using rel=author, but since you have a bio page, I think you should use the scheme above.

Best,
Christopher

In addition to EGOL's excellent comments, you will also have to compete with all the Amazon affiliates that sell your product, and even worse, they will create crappy ads on the web and Youtube showing your product.  There are countless Youtube videos of Amazon products that are nothing more than a pan and zoom of an affiliate product set to elevator music.

Another great tool is the SEOmoz toolbar plugin.  When the highlight tool is set to Nofollowed (pink), all the nofollow links are highlighted in pink.

Best,
Christopher

I think the way these social plugins work is they pull the +1 and Like counts from the social media sites.  That's why these plugins can be slow as they get the information from the other sites.  So, if you change plugins, the counts should remain the same.  At least, that is my understanding.

As an aside, I post the buttons on my pages but not the counts.  My limited testing suggests that my pages load faster without the counts.  I'd be interested in any other comments on this aspect as well.

Best,
Christopher

I'm sure you already did this but just to make sure, you did inform GWT of the move, right?

Best,
Christopher

Vadim, have you tested the performance of these buttons with and without counts?  My testing suggests there is a performance hit.

Best,
Christopher

The markup is used to identify what the content is.  When a human sees

2003 Boxster, Red with Black convertible top, 26,000 miles, $14,000

we know someone is trying to sell something and we know what the item is, the description, and price, but search engines may or may not know this is a product for sale or is a review of a product or something else.  The schema.org allows you to tell search engines this is indeed a product for sale and here are the attributes of that product including item name, price, etc.

So, in answer to your question, the markup goes in the body of the page and marks up the content.

Best,
Christopher

manual action ... that was spurred on by a PRWeb press release where publishers took it upon themselves to remove the embedded "nofollow" tags on links.

Seriously?  I've been thinking about trying PRWeb for product announcements but this makes me rethink that strategy.

Yes, your question makes sense.

You can put the schema.org properties in any order, but spitting the description like that is going to be problematic.  I would also suggest that your example is tedious to read and lacks a product description heading.  A more realistic example would be:

h1 Widget /h1
The widget comes in blue, green, ...

Hiding the price in the middle of the description is also difficult for humans to read.  Putting aside the schema syntax, the example IMO is a poor user experience.

The other domains are ours, yes.

Oh, that's a horse of a different color.  If you have multiple domains on one account, one domain will be the primary domain and the other domains will be virtual domains.  If you look at the file structure on your server, all the virtual domains will be sub-folders under the primary domain.  You need to create a robots.txt file in the primary domain that blocks the spiders from discovering the other domains through the sub-directory structure.  Otherwise, all the virtual domains will be duplicated, once via the primary domain and again via the virtual domain.

Best,
Christopher

You should be able to resolve this with robots.txt and .htaccess files, but one more thing I've learned to do is to use a domain name for the primary domain that I do not plan to submit to Google for indexing.  For example, I'll use arbitrary color names like silverblue.net as the primary domain and then the domains I intend to index will be virtual domains.  This isn't really necessary but it helps me keep all my domain names straight in my head and avoid the issue you described above.

Best,
Christopher