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Daniel - No worries… If there hasn't been a manual action (just a big drop in rankings), disavow is a great tool to use. I think on the darker side of SEO, there has certainly been competitors in highly competitive spaces who have tried to create spammy links pointing to competitors as a means to win at this often zero-sum game.  So my hunch is that is why Google realizes that sometimes links show up beyond your control. Best practice, though, is to contact the other website and ask for links to be removed.  But sometimes this can fall on deaf ears…  Thus, Google's disavow tool… If it was my site, I'd try to get some of the bad links removed. And then really focus on a high-quality end user experience…  including site load time, engaging content, etc... Hope this helps guide the decision… Jeff

No that would be against G+ TOS. You would need to use the rel=publisher tag instead and link to the business G+ page.

Right! And there can be secondary effects.  If you are running surveys and people bounce back into the SERPs instead of answering the question, could that result in a ranking reduction because of poor engagement?  I have been running surveys and am cautiously watching my engagement and rankings.

They may for awhile - the thing is, WMT is not updated regularly (think of it as PageRank, just a little faster. lol) So you could disavow and 4 weeks later see results but see the links in WMT for 3 months.  I wouldn't worry about what's in there if you disavowed correctly.  Single links & domains, like this: http://www.links.com/innerlinks-here/ Domain: andthiswholesite.com

Thanks for the response. The badge would be a graphic with ALT text. Member's would post this badge on their own website as a way of showing they are a member (a bit like the old seomoz badge), so the websites will be varying degrees of quality. I imagine there would be similar ALT text penalties as there are anchor text penalties if there are too many focused on commercial keyword. So perhaps it's best if the images point to the member's profile page with their own brand name in the ALT text along with some target keywords. E.g. "Brand Name Carpenter in Location".

Thanks for the insighful responses. I need to clarify one point. They are not aggregating reviews from around the web. Instead they have business profiles which include reviews. Instead of the business' profile page using the mark up, the directory page that lists each of the businesses uses the mark up. So if there are 50 businesses in a category with 1 review each, the category page shows up in SERPs with 50 reviews. This would affect CTRs as you pointed out. Is this considered manipulation?

I believe that penalties on internal anchor text are BS.

If you do a 301 redirect, it should pass on most of the domain's authority (the going estimate is about 90% of the strength). A 302 is seen by Google as a temporary redirect and so will not pass on any authority, so make sure you use a 301 if you want to pass on the strength. Source to help you out: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

I guess my question would be why do you have two completely different url paths, returning the same content?  Generally, canonical is used to catch things like, www vs non www, trailing slashes, caps vs no caps in the urls, # signs in urls, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization My guess is that it's probably a bug on the part of the SEOMoz software, and that Google would probably respect your canonical tag here.  Just to be safe, you might block the second url in your Robots.txt file.

I think you should implement meta noindex to prevent duplicate content issues.

It might increase CTR, but I would expect it to also increase bounce rate. As people are becoming familiar with the snippet format, they're associating it with articles and blog posts. If they think they're clicking on a link that leads to an article, and they arrive at a product page, do you really think they'll stick around and give you their money? It's widely believed that pogosticking (users bouncing immediately back to the SERP and clicking another result) can harm your rankings. So be careful with anything that might lead to a mismatch between searcher intent and page content. I wouldn't be surprised if Google eventually starts ignoring rel=author markup on e-commerce product pages. (Which they will be able to identify very easily as more and more sites adopt schema etc.)

Hey designquotes - It's been a while since you posted this question. If you got the answers you needed, could you mark as  "Good Answer" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future. Thanks! Paul

The write would be able to link up the profile via a Rel=Author Tag. You can learn more about Rel Author tags here. Here is a good article about Rel Authorship from Search Engineland

Hello, My advice is try to keep things simple and straightforward.  You shouldn't create an individual page for similar products.  I understand you are trying to optimize a product for a specific keyword, but if the products are very similar such as 'logo design' and 'graphic design' then having one page would be better. If you have too many pages, it might make things confusing for your visitors, thus they will leave the site (higher bounce rate).  Also, the content on each page is fairly similar, so there might be a duplicate issue problem. If your looking at a PPC perspective, creating the suggested landing pages would be a good idea because you can specifically customize advertisements for each page and that should improve your quality score and minimize CPC. So in summary, keep things simile and relevant.  Don't create the page just for the SERPS, concentrate on usability (what make it easy for your visitors to navigate around the site), because if they get what they want easily, there is a high chance of them returning. Hope this helps.

Google considers links from guest posts as "natural" link building, not "unnatural" (read: buying links) and won't count it against you. In fact, by using the rel=author tag and having your profile appear on other sites, not only will your post likely see higher click-through rates, but you're establishing yourself as an trusted authority on the subject and Google's actually more likely to trust your posts.

.pdf documents are indexed and will compete in the search results along with web pages.  They accumulate pagerank and any links on them are followed and credited the same as a web page. So, if you have copies of your webpages in pdf format then you should expect them to attract at least some of the traffic that would have gone to your webpage. It is possible for them to rank higher than your webpages - especially if you optimize them by giving them document titles. I believe that they can lead to duplicate content problems.  I have lots of pdfs on my sites.  To prevent duplicate content problems I have used htaccess to rel=canonical them to the corresponding webpage.

We rank #2 and sometimes #3.

Do not repeat it.  The structure of web-design/price-cost-calculator is good and will get the keywords you want in the URL.  On the other hand, if you lengthen it out and say the keyword again you'd be more likely to lose keywords in the URL because of how much of the URL google actually shows in the SERPs.

.htaccess is always the better approach when doing redirects, its easier and gives you a bit more flexibility. Good answer Kevin.