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It's really not about "lazy," in my opinion. It's about time and skill. When the boss is managing the company for 80 hours a week, and isn't a talented writer, the boss has someone else write. (I say this as the writer, not the boss.)

Brian, that's a really good point. When they leave, they can disown the authorship if they want to. Which could conceivably happen if they leave to start their own company or go work for a competitor.

We're an e-commerce company that sells consumer goods. We are launching a blog that will have advice, tips, etc. on topics related to our industry. I'd like for us to implement rel=author on the content. If we rel=author the content to an employee, what are the possible repercussions if that employee leaves the company? I know the markup is pretty new and hasn't been widely implemented, but has anyone dealt with this?

As far as I know, the Class C issue is only relevant for linking. It's widely suspected that links from domains on the same Class C IP are less valued, since that's a good indicator of a "fake" link (i.e. a backlink that the site owner created, rather than a true editorial backlink).

The main concern is whether or not the spider can read the HTML. If something's broken, the spider may get confused. It's a good idea to check the site's W3C compliance and correct what you can, but I'm certain the search engines don't ding you if you're not perfectly compliant.

The real problems with bad HTML are load times and cross-browser compatibility. (Although, frankly, great HTML can have cross-browser compatibility issues, since IE still refuses to get with the program.) Make sure the site looks good in all major browsers.

Do you think it's unethical to use ghostwriting on a company's blog? Specifically, I mean hiring a writer to create content for the blog, and then publishing the content under, say, the CEO's name and using rel=author to tie it to the CEO's social identity. Does that undermine the whole idea of AuthorRank? Is it gaming the system?

I see news stories rather than sitelinks for CNN.

Are these blogs actually intended to provide useful, interesting, amusing content to web surfers? Or do they exist purely to pass pagerank?

If it's the former, I have a hard time believing that readers will trust the information if it looks spammy (and 3-5 exact match KW links per post looks spammy). So the strategy probably wouldn't work for that reason.

If it's the latter, it's trivially easy for Google to figure out that you're running an incestuous little blog network to move pagerank around. That's not the sort of thing they want to reward. Meaning they've already figured out how to devalue those links, or they will soon. So the strategy either isn't working now or will stop working soon.

In either case, your questions are about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

To expand on #2, people are more likely to share and link to content that is informative, amusing, and interesting. If your website is, say, an e-commerce website for plungers, it may be difficult to have informative, amusing, interesting content on the main part of your website. A blog is a great place for "linkbait," content that is created to attract attention and be shared. So a plunger shop's blog might have a post about the 8 most hilarious toilet explosions in history. As people link to this post, this builds the domain authority. Also, if you have links to your homepage, category pages, and even product pages in the post, pagerank will trickle there, too.

Yeah, I didn't figure that out for a while, either.

Search results are personalized even when you're logged out, based on your search history in that browser. You can turn that off, though.

http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048

The two results you're referring to, the ones with people's names and photos next to them, are blog posts where people have used the rel=author markup to link their blog to their Google+ profile. That can influence rankings. I don't think anyone is sure how much influence we're talking about; part of the problem is that the people adopting this new markup are probably already doing good basic SEO stuff, so correlation and causation can get mixed up. In any case, it's likely that this author markup will become more influential in the future, so adopting it now is a no-brainer.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're asking, the answer is Open Site Explorer. It's down at the moment, unfortunately.

If they have videos, they could add transcripts in a collapsible div. That also address accessibility and general user experience. After all, if someone is sneaking a peek at the site at work, they probably don't want to have the sound on for videos.

First off, keep in mind that the "too many links" warning is a flexible guideline. If this is only showing up on your paginated blog pages, you probably have nothing to worry about.

Second, meta-description tags aren't important for paginated blog pages. Ideally, you're using rel=prev and rel=next, which lets Google figure out which page is the first in the series and probably the most relevant (and therefore the one that will appear on the SERP). Also, meta-description tags in general aren't super high priority. Google doesn't always use them as the SERP snippet. They appear most often on Facebook shares, but how often are people going to share Page 10 of your blog? Never.

Set realistic expectations for your client. It's fine if that's how they want the site to work, but explain to them that search engines primarily read text; without much text, the search engines will have a harder time figuring out what the page is about. Also explain their options: They can have more text on each page without compromising the design, by using tabs, collapsible divs, etc. Figure out whether or not visitors want more text on each page. If you can make that case, they might be persuaded.

Meanwhile, focus on the things you can control, like title tags and img alts. Then focus on linkbuilding. That should be relatively easy -- fashion is popular and has great potential for compelling content. At least you're not working for a plunger manufacturer.

Do you mean they have a flash website because they think it's prettier?

You "ask it what it knows" when you type in a URL and hit Search. Think of it like walking up to a really smart person and asking them to list off every book every written that includes the word "rhinoceros." They can only list the books they've read. A person only has so much time for reading, and OSE only has so many resources for crawling the web. It will never get everything.

If OSE doesn't show any backlinks for a URL, it means it didn't see any backlinks in the portion of the web that it crawled. That might mean there are no backlinks at all, or it might mean the backlinks are yet undiscovered (probably because they're in an obscure corner of the web). The best suggestion is to use multiple tools, as Derek says below.

As far as I know, crawling your website wouldn't accomplish anything. OSE would need to crawl the pages that link to your website. And if you knew what those were, you wouldn't need OSE, right?

I mean that no more than 50% of your links should have KW anchor text.