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Hi, Kevin-

Without knowing a little more about the niche and the services, it's difficult to give a definitive answer. But I think that in most instances, I would be inclined to simply concentrate on fleshing out the pages that deal with each individual service, all contained within one site. In that fashion, I think you'll gain more authority to the site, while still focusing on each service as needed.

Generally speaking, I would agree that validation is often too strict.

Google seems to handle this well, however. In fact, I seem to recall Matt C. once saying that the VAST majority of websites don't validate. I think he may have been talking strictly about HTML, though.

Validation isn't a ranking factor, of course, and most prevalent browsers will compensate for minor errors and render a page, regardless. So I really wouldn't be too concerned about validation just for validation's sake. As long as your pages render in most common browsers and neither page functionality nor user experience is adversely affected, I'd consider it a non-issue. As to whether a bot could be fooled into thinking the head had ended and the body had begun, I suppose it's possible, but I've never seen it happen, even with some absolutely horrible coding.

Hi, Stephanie-

Googlebots read as raw code. But in the example you give, it would see those links, as well. What remains as a question is whether it recognizes the nature of those links and therefore pays them limited attention. Personally, I doubt Google ignores them, as it's a valuable source of data for them for both the link graph and the Knowledge Graph.

If you want to keep trackbacks enabled, but don't want to deal with the spammers, another option is Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-trackback-validation-with-topsy-blocker/ ).  That plugin will stop 95-99% of spam trackbacks by comparing the IP addresses. As Alan says, it's nice to know right away when you get a new link.

I'm going to give two responses to each, one being what I suspect might be Google's take on it, the other which is my take.

Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying?  Assume all links are do-follow.

• You're a local business.  You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year.  In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. Google: paid; Me: paid

• You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• One of your clients is a college bar.  You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings.  Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. Google: paid; Me: paid

• You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab.  Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon." Google: paid; Me: paid

Scary! Turns out I agree with Google on those... purely coincidence

I'd certainly agree with that, Dunamis. I don't ask for links, and I don't respond well when asked for one, unless I have a relationship with the person.

I have even been asked for one by someone I knew, and tried to explain nicely that an OBL from an SEO site to a real estate site didn't really make much sense for either of us.

My advice, Rhys, would be to focus first on establishing a relationship. If the resulting relationship is solid, and both sites are relevant, a simple mention of your need to acquire more natural links may well spawn an offer.

Josh- I'm of the opinion that there is no tool in the wild that is consistently accurate, in any regard, including detection of 404 errors. There are a number of things that can cause one tool to detect an error, while another won't. Personally, I compare the results of all the different tools I use, and hopefully find a consensus. Failing that, I double check with them all, and look for consistent results. If nothing changes, you may just have to "consider the source" and decide in which tool you have greater confidence.

Not much help, I realize, but sometimes that's just the way it is.

Great, Gina! There's nothing like that feeling of satisfaction when you recover a site's positions. I wasn't around when you had your issue, but I do know what you mean about the value of the community. There's a lot of talent here, and many of them dedicate a lot of time to helping people learn how to do things the right way. You can't put a price on that. Congratulations on your success... now pay it forward.

I have to agree with Francisco... mentioning Android in your copy or even a title, is generally accepted practice (although technically, it must be followed by the symbol the first time it appears on the page). You can see more on this here: http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/brand.html

Michael- You're definitely facing an odd situation here... makes no sense. Have you tried posting an inquiry on the Google Webmaster Help Forum? I'd say there's a good chance you can get a Googler's attention there and maybe get a hint as to where the problem lies.

It's difficult to say whether you may have been smacked, from a superficial glance. But I will say this: your homepage copy is keyword stuffed and full of grammatical errors of the type that even algorithms can spot. I would certainly say that your site is a possible candidate for a Panda slap, judging just by the homepage.

Takeshi is right, James- you gain nothing by adding nofollow to internal links. In addition, if you attract attention with a lot of it, you could even incur a penalty. Matt Cutts has stated more than once that nofollowing internal links isn't advisable, except perhaps in limited special circumstances, such as to a contact form or privacy policy. If you get carried away with internal nofollow, it could look like you're trying to sculpt pagerank, and that could cause you problems you don't want to have.

David, I've done a couple of proactive pruning jobs and it beats waiting 'til you've been slapped. The comments on that video are mostly uninformed, in my opinion. Disavow has worked for my clients.

You might want to watch this short hangout sponsored by Arnie Kuenn, on the topic. We discussed proactive link pruning as well. http://intrinsicvalueseo.com/googles-disavow-process-and-penguin-recovery/ Feel free to give me a shout if you like.

As Mat said, you could be risking more scrutiny, so if you submit a recon request, be sure you can endure the attention your site will get.
However, I can see no possible gain to doing so. So why bother? All you'll get out of it is a message saying they found no manual action against your site, and advising you to check for other possible causes of a loss of traffic, yada, yada, yada...

I'd agree that it's a bad idea, particularly at that scale. If relevance of the redirected domains is high, and it's just a couple of domains, I imagine it wouldn't be a problem. The fact that they're using a 302 will afford them some protection, but how long are they planning to leave that "temporary" redirect in place?

Your terminology of "one-way" and link "exchange" would seem to be in conflict. Since it seems that you're not really talking about one-way, but actual link exchanges, I'd echo what searchpl says: be really careful. In my opinion, the risk is far greater than the potential reward, and you'd be better off acquiring true one-way links.

I agree with Oznappies' recommendation... tell them "this vehicle has been sold, but we have other similar models". Personally, I would offer them a link to similar models and a Back link, as some people will take exception to being led to a different car than the one they wanted to see. I would definitely not get rid of the old content, however. I would simply do a noindex follow.

Hi, Egol-

From what they say here, I don't read it to indicate that schema markup is required.

As for ranking articles losing their spot by submission as In-Depth Articles, I see that as unlikely. If you want to play it safe, you could submit one and watch its rankings in SERPs after it pops up in the In-Depth index.

I'd say you covered all the bases, Brad. I don't know what you could have done to protect yourself any more. Sean, I think your client is playing a dangerous game. My advice would be to first cull any of those additional sites that aren't highly relevant to their own. Write them off as a bad investment. One thought that occurs to me is that rather than setting a 302 from all the remaining sites to the client's site, maybe you could redirect them to a selected site from their recent acquisitions. Then redirect THAT site to the client's site. Using 302s is still safer, IMO, while you go through the process of requesting changes on link destinations. Relevance is obviously the key... stretching that is treading on thin ice. My approach to that is, if it needs any statement of justification.... it's not justifiable.

I would think that unless the various sites are very closely related, that you'd be better off with individual accounts, but I can see how there would be benefit in consolidating, say with various geo-separated sites on the same theme (Denver real estate, Colorado Springs real estate, Aspen real estate...)