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If you take a look at the Adwords Keyword Tool, you can see some phrases get more traffic than others:

• Football Manager 2012 - 27,100 exact searches per month
• fm 2012 - 8,100 exact searches
• fm2012 - 1,900 exact searches

My advice would be to continue with alternating anchor and title tags, but give more preference to phrases that get the most searches. Be sure to include all phrases in the copy of the page as well, but pay mind that the page doesn't look spammy.

Adwords Keyword Tool: <cite>https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal</cite>

Using the <abbr>tag will help. Again, don't overdo it. You will need to take time to think how you can fit all the acronyms in the content body without making it appear like you intentionally did so.</abbr>

Proper usage: <abbr title="Football Manager 2012">fm2012</abbr>

It's a waiting game at this point. If they don't find problems then ask for reinclusion again. Wait 24 hours between asking for reinclusion & seeing if Google reports new problems.

In FireFox you are getting personalized results. Make sure you are logged out of your Google account and try again.

I'm getting the same result (page 4) in both browsers.

Alternatively you may turn off these settings as detailed here:

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

Atul,

You definitely don't need to contact webmasters to change any links.

There is a 301 redirect flag you can apply to your rewrite rule:

RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [R=301,L]

Do a 301 redirect test to confirm. Best of luck!

I ran into an issue with malware once and Google was very responsive during the process. Each time I asked for reinclusion the request was responded to within 24 hours.

I say "each time" because this particular piece of malware infected random files across an entire dedicated server hosting a great deal of websites. After I became aware that the problem was impossible to solve manually, I wrote a script to detect and remove all traces of the malware. At this point it was my 5th request I believe, and there was no problem with Google approving my request.

There are scanners you can use but during my look at them, I didn't find any reliable free ones. Hopefully you got it all and won't need to pay for anything.

Wonderful people, these malware creators. Best of luck.

Yes. Also consider filling out an excerpt for each post, and showing the excerpts instead of the preview of the article for category pages. That way all the content is completely unique.

It's more work but it's worth it.

Hi Ryan.

Hitting the 100-link warning is usually best ignored if you are an eCommerce store. Stores often can't help hitting the limit with large navigations, sub-menus, and then product images/titles. This is fine.

For a blog this is less common. I would be interested in knowing why you are in excess of 100 links. Personally I would work towards lowering the link count because it divides the strength the page gives to each link.

Matt Cutts does not recommend using tag clouds. There are several studies on the matter that prove Matt isn't lying: do a quick Google search to get a few of them. When you think about it, they don't really offer the visitor anything. I would suggest removing the tag cloud.

Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg

Disregard page strength, acquire links.

...as long as the page is relevant. The fact that cheaper forms of SEO like article marketing are still effective proves that poor page strength shouldn't sap your efforts so quickly. I use page strength more of an indicator of where on my priority list I should put acquiring a link, if possible, and also assuming the page is relevant.

I understand not wanting to be associated with bad neighborhoods. Page strength is not a strong indicator of a bad neighborhood. One common SEO tactic is to create contests, correct? One recent contest I developed required participants make a review of a product, and naturally that meant linking to the client website. Most of these reviews came from personal blogs and general websites that did not have a lot of domain authority. Yet it was still a boost to rankings and domain authority.

Use your own judgement by looking at a website and determining if you want to be associated with it. Don't pick and choose based on the website popularity alone.

Take a look at the Lynx web browser to see how Google would see the website:

http://www.lynxbrowser.com/

Alternatively, check out the Google cache of your website or use a googlebot simulator. You will see that everything in your HTML, including your navigation, is read by Google.

If you are running an eCommerce operation you can safely ignore some of the warnings that SEOmoz shows. For example, many eCommerce stores will have an excess of 100 links due to a large navigation, shopping categories in the sidebar, and product images/titles. The same is true for keyword count.

As long as you aren't overdoing it you are fine. If you have a tennis website, a proper navigation might have "rackets" as the parent category, and then list child categories by color. You should not have the children listed by "Blue tennis rackets," "Yellow tennis rackets," and so on. Duplicating a keyword like this is not necessary.

I've seen it done before for the first time about two weeks ago. I checked up on the rankings of the website, which was in a local (read: no competition) web development niche. The website was not ranking for anything. Take that as you will, it's certainly not a case study.

Personally I wouldn't do it. What value does it bring your visitors? Any at all? If not, it's probably not a good idea, as per the advice Matt Cutts and the Google quality guidelines state:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Take a step back and think about it. Doesn't that seem excessively spammy?

Should brands be concerned with registering or blocking the .XXX TLDs?

Reputation management is one of your strong suits, or so your profile says. You of all people should know that registering all relevant top level domains is necessary in a situation where a business is serious about their reputation.

Should individuals care about .XXX registration?

Some will be interested, some won't. Not everyone wants to develop a .xxx domain. Maybe I don't understand this question?

Will links from .XXX be helpful?

Matt Cutts has stated on more than one occasion that the domain extension does not matter. Yes.

Will a 301 redirect from a .XXX be harmful?

It would be too easy to register .XXX domains and redirect them to your competitors. No.

The only pages you should be using nofollow on would be any pages you don't want to be found in Google. PageRank sculpting is long dead (or so Google says) so you won't be able to horde your page strength.

Matt Cutts does use nofollow on his website, but only on his RSS feed. I go a step further and also nofollow any cart pages for ecommerce stores and any login/auth pages. Just anything that shouldn't be in search results.

I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I’d recommend that you do the same. I don’t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it’s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results. Even that’s not strictly necessary, because Google and other search engines do a good job of distinguishing feeds from regular web pages.

--Matt Cutts

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

More importantly, why are you getting a 404 when viewing Site.com/widget? That doesn't make sense. If Site.com/widget/ resolves, so too should Site.com/widget.

The page has authority because it's getting linked to. If someone is linking to your page they aren't going to add a slash unless they know they have to. You will need to properly setup your rewrite rules so that the URLs resolve correctly.

Once you make that update the page authority will transfer correctly, and yes, it will help.

Easy: noindex the search results so they don't appear in Google.

I realize you want the traffic and are attempting to skirt around the issue, but it's something Google warns against:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Every time I install this plugin for WordPress, I uncheck this option. However, that's the default because most category pages are duplicate content. You can really pull in a lot of traffic to category pages (After all, most theme sidebars and each individual posts link to them, so they have a large quantity of links) but you have to make sure you solve the duplicate content issue.

Category page styles can be overwritten. You create a new file in your theme root according to the naming convention found on WordPress.org:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates

You can now add images, fresh text, and anything you want to that specific category page. Now it has unique content and can serves as good link bait. Honestly, I don't know why more people don't do this.

Don't just take my word for it, here's another guy who condones this: http://richardcummings.info/customize-wordpress-category-pages/