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For one, I find it highly unlikely that any of these big players would ever publicly release anything related to that information. So I doubt there is much along the lines of conversion rates for sites you mentioned.

However, big sites like those, especially overstock, aren't worth looking at anyway. They sell products that range from less than $10 to over $1,000. Conversion rate is heavily influenced by price. A site that only sells pool tables will be lucky to get conversion rates above 1%. A site that sells T-shirts for $3 is likely to get north of 10% conversion rate.

So even if we knew a sitewide average conversion rate, it wouldn't tell us much as some product pages could be much higher and some could be much lower.

I know in the past iframes have not been crawled. Last year at SMX when Matt Cutts talked about pageRank sculpting and using nofollow on internal links, a big discussion emerged afterward. One of the things people suggested was putting your non important internal links (seo wise) in an iframe so search engines wouldn't see them. That was about 9 months ago or so. So at that point I believe search engines could not crawl and index content in an iframe. I haven't yet heard otherwise.

I believe what you are asking is if it is ok to link to those who are linking to you to help increase the authority of that page, which in turn can help increase your own authority.

Keep in mind Google does not discount reciprocal links. Google warns against excessive reciprocal links. They cannot stop reciprocal linking from happening as that's the nature of the web. Two sites will undoubtedly link to each other at some point without setting up some kind of scheme.

I wouldn't make a habit of linking out to everyone who links to you though. If you examine your backlinks and find some new site you like, then sure, link to it, but don't just link to everyone who links to you.

Using the keyword 4 times instead of 2 in your body content will probably do nothing. If you simply add to your existing content and include the keyword 2 times in the new content you are adding, then yes, you could get some benefit there. But if all you do with your existing content is swap phrases, you won't change much with Google. They already know what your page is about. So the only way you could help would be to add more targeted, keyword rich content to what is already there.

Google strips special characters out of search. For one, no one in a million years will do a search with Google and include a trademark symbol anyway. But if they did for some reason, Google would simply strip it out. You do not need to optimize for keywords with special characters. Just optimize for the keyword itself and you will be fine.

They probably submit your information under their account so you can't control your listings on all the local listing sites. Then if you stop paying them, they simply delete your listings they created. I would hire an internet marketing agency to set these up for you for a one time fee and do them under an account you can control and access, way more cost effective and better in the long run.

I wouldn't worry about anything. What you are describing is Google's defense against a Google Bomb. If they see way more links than they have found lately with identical anchor text pointing to the same place, they get suspicious. A little hosting site with no links suddenly getting some will not trigger any red flags. I would say do as many links each day as you can, you'll never get the sandbox effect or anything like that. As long as you avoid getting several hundred thousand links all at once with identical anchor text you should be fine.

No, Page A is live and linked to internally. Page B is live both with no links, blocked by robots.txt file and has noindex tag. When I have my data on page A, I redirect it to page B and then remove the robots.txt block and noindex tag on page B. Page B begins blocked but ends up allowed and when it is allowed page A redirects to it so you never have two near identical versions of a page both live and indexable at once.

When I do this I make two pages at two different URL's. I only show one of them at a time while the other has a noindex tag and is blocked by search engines. When I have gathered data on the first version, I redirect it to the other page which has the new header and footer. This way I only have one version of the page at a time in Google's index. When one comes out of hiding, the other is redirected to it so I never have two live indexed pages that are essentially the same.

Probably other ways to do this, but that's just my method.

1. Domain Authority- this is kind of like SEOmoz's version of pagerank, only on a 100 point scale instead of 10. The more links you have to all the pages of your domain, the higher it's authority. The more links you get from other authorities, the higher your authority.

2. Mozrank is here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

3. Ext. followed links is how many of your inbound links from external sources are followed as opposed to nofollowed.

4. Linking root domains is how many domains link to you, not how many pages or how many links, just how many different domains have at least one link to you.

5. Followed linking root domains is how many of those linking domains are following their links as opposed to nofollowing them

6. A C-block is related to server lingo. Every IP address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and the c-block is one of those sets. So if I own two domains and have them registered and hosted together, you may have two domains linking to you, but only one c-block, as they would be on the same server c-block. So this is the important one as spammers can get 1,000 domains linking to them but get them all on the same c-block. Doesn't help much. Google knows when you just buy a bunch of domains and make them all link to you.

You have redirected the index.php version to the / version and it doesn't work? Sounds like you made an error in your .htaccess file then. Make sure your redirects are correct and that every index.php redirects to the / version of the URL and then use the canonical tag to specify the / version as the one you want. Wait a couple weeks and it should get fixed just fine. If it isn't, you probably didn't set up the 301 redirects properly.

PageRank is divided by 20, but here's the kicker: each page only gets 1/20, not 2/20 in spite of having 2 links to each page. That's how I understand things anyway.

I have a lot of websites and they are all fitness related. Some are affiliate sites and some are blogs.

I've made some great relationships with some big players in the fitness space and it has worked out well for both of us.

Is anyone here in the fitness industry? Are you open to building new relationships? Do you know other websites or blogs in the industry open to creating new relationships?

I don't mean a simple link exchange, I mean a real relationship where sites try to help each other out more than an arbitrary link in a list on some resource page.

I posted to YOUMoz last week about this exact topic. Hopefully it gets moderated soon for you to study as it answers this perfect. It is called A New Perspective On Link Building. Look for it soon. Basic summary:

Relationships are the new links. Stop trying to get links. Just stop. Try to build relationships. Start a blogger battle over a contentious topic. Create a way to share ideas and content with others. Find ways to make someone else's site better. Do all in your power to build quality relationships and not only will the links come, you will have more influence in the blogosphere yourself. Never ask anyone for a link again. Ask them if you can provide value to them in some way. This is the only sustainable method to gaining links, influence and relevance online.

Ask yourself why you are using a domain and if you can accomplish the exact same thing by simply making a subdirectory. If you can, drop the subdomain. Always use subdirectories.

Google treats sub domains as separate websites, so having a different IP address doesn't matter, just makes it more separate I guess. That's why I wouldn't bother. Why separate your content?

SEO rule #1: Never use subdomains. Ever. For any reason.

Ask yourself this, what's the difference between putting these 100 pages on a subdomain as opposed to a subdirectory? None? Then why bother? Make it a subdirectory!

99 times out of 100 you will say no difference to the question above. In the random instance that you do have some kind of reasoning for using a subdomain that will get you something different, then sure, why not, but I doubt you can find a reason. Subdomains are treated as separate domains by Google. Why would you hinder your SEO efforts for no reason? Just put your 100 pages in a subdirectory of the domain and link to it from your website internally. That's all I would do.

First of all, I don't know of a way to noindex a link. Noindex is a robots meta tag that goes in the head section of an html document to inform search engines not to index the content of that page.

In your situation, I would first block every one of those url's with a robots.txt file and make absolutely sure that none of them appear in your sitemap.

Then I would add the rel="nofollow" tag to every one of those links.

I would not take away user reviews and ratings as Google loves to see that, especially if you advertise in adwords. I have seen sites get banned for the lack of such functionality.

Try those two fixes and see how it goes. I would say 301 instead of 302 those pages, but I think the functionality of x-cart needs them to be 302, but I could be wrong.

I hate to always say it but it depends. Google may crawl your site all of once a month. If that's the case, it will take a month or so until you get updated in the index. If you are frequently crawled, then you should get updated in the index much sooner.

You will also only increase in ranking if your site is not penalized. All the optimization in the world won't help a penalized site.

Check your listing in Google and see if it reflects the changes you made. If so, Google likely knows of the changes and within a week you will move around in the SERPs. If Google hasn't indexed your changes, well, it will be as long as it takes until they do.

I can definitely see where you are coming from there. I would just say this- once you reach out to build that bridge, if that webmaster isn't buying it, then that bridge is likely burned forever. There are only so many blogs and other websites worth connecting to. I would be very deliberate in my approach to connecting with them, because you probably won't get a second chance.

If you want to connect with a blogger, start by commenting on their most recent posts. Follow the blog. Read each new update and comment. Find them on twitter. Retweet what they say occasionally. See if they have other websites. Check for a linkedin profile. Really understand not just the blog, but the blogger and what they are about. Then reach out to them with an actual proposal. Offering a link exchange is probably not enough. Have an actual plan formulated and an actual proposal for how you can work together for mutual benefit.

In my opinion, you can't do this 10 times a day. If I find a site I think I can work with, then it can take weeks before a connection is ever made. But if each day I find a new site, I'm working on creating a lot of those relationships simultaneously. But when I reach out, I tend to be very successful because I feel like I already know the person and they know who I am.

So everyone has their own approach, but I wouldn't try to be in such a rush to build up links that you give the blog a superficial review and then go for it. That's just not my style, but everyone is different.

You've actually inspired my next youmoz post with this though, so thanks for that. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as they hopefully publish it and I will offer some more tips on this.

If your entire link creation process is asking 10 sites a day for a link, you can expect 0 and consider yourself lucky any time you get a link. I wouldn't even try 10 sites a week. Don't think of it as link building, think of it as relationship building. You cannot create 10 new relationships a day with new websites. You just can't. People recognize the non-spammy, relevant people reaching out to them. They also recognize the people reaching out to 10 sites a day just trying to get links.

If you're in it for the links, what incentive does that give the site you're reaching out to? You're just using them to further your own agenda. Do you offer a link in exchange? Then you are violating Google's guidelines and having too many of those reciprocals will definitely hurt you.

The key is to create synergistic, valuable relationships online. That's more than linking. For example, with my college football blog, I had lots of people approaching me to do link exchanges. I didn't really pay attention. So when I wanted to promote my blog, I approached a blog I knew was pro-BCS ( I am not) and challenged them. We posted our arguments and rebuttals. Naturally, we linked to the previous posts of the other. So they got links from me, I got links from them. More than that, we both increased readership by receiving visitors from each other.

Now if I want to promote something, I simply email them and let them know what I published and I know they will talk about it. I didn't just build a link here, I built a relationship. That relationship has results in more visitors, more exposure and of course, more links. That's better than just blanketing every college football blog and asking which will link to me.

So I would make a goal of trying to create a new relationship every day. Do a lot of research, come up with a good plan, and then execute that strategy. Webmasters are very open to new opportunities. You just have to present one to them in a way that shows value.

Do this and you can expect to come away with at least one solid relationship each week moving forward. Give that a try and see how it goes, I bet you'll be pretty glad you did.