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I believe it depends on the user visibility of the H1 tag. It's fine to make H1 tags smaller and in odd positions - it would be difficult for Google to be overly punitive on creative design of this sort.

I've created H1's smaller than H3s on many occassions. The question for me would be - is the new H1 the same or very similar colour to the background? Is it in an incredibly small font? Google is wise to attempts to "almost hide" content.

I would ask why the SEO can't be more creative and make the content more visible. If h1 tag and keyword in it isn't appropriate there is something wrong with the overall content or keyword choice for the page.

This September, Matt Cutts announced a new crackdown on widget links. But they clearly still work so it's a matter of scale and usage in IMO.

Years ago I started recommending changing links within widgets to use branded anchor text instead of keyword rich anchor text so as not to create an unusual amount of keyword focused anchor text. It's also clearly more natural. So far this has been working very well.

The new warning is concerning and I recognize the "best practice" according to Google would be to no-follow these links, but I'm not quite ready to do this unless a risk of unrecoverable penalty is apparent.

My thoughts are it's a matter of scale. If there are tens of thousands of widget links and they dominate the link profile that would be a serious matter. If there are only thousands of widget links and they are a small part of the total link profile it is much less of a concern.

Does anyone have any direct experience with getting warnings on this matter?

We tried Marin and the results were good, but we needed integrated closed loop reporting for paid and organic search. We ultimately integrated our back end data with Adobe Site Catalyst and then used Adobe Search Center for paid search management. This allowed bid adjustment based on our back end closed loop data, and allows consolidated reporting for both paid and organic search.

Adobe Search Center isn't the best tool, but it's not bad and the full integration with Site Catalyst makes it worth it. Adobe bought Efficient Frontier last year and will be replacing Search Center with this new tool.

I have used Brandpoint about 10 times. Yes, they used to be called ARA content. Their writers are professional journalists and they write very high quality articles on your behalf after you fill out a questionnaire and do a phone interview with them. Their background is in creating "mat" articles for community newspaper editors to pick stories to run for the purpose of having more content to run ads around. They're still in that business but they also now offer this online service.

The articles do appear on about 600 sites, and yes it is advertorial. The sites are almost entirely local TV station websites, but also some online newspapers, such as the newly added LA times.

I ran a test last year, linking to a very specific term to see if it helped rank a page for a specific term and it did have a noticeable impact. You won't get any traffic from the links, but the links do show up in opensiteexplorer as good quality backlinks to your site.

I've wondered if Google will devalue or penalize this now with the Panda and Penguin, but I haven't seen a problem with it yet.

Hi,

The data center locations is interesting, but it isn't what I was looking for. I need to know whether Google crawls the web from any IP other than US IPs.

To clear up the second question, let me be more specific:

Let's say Google is crawling a .co.uk site from a US IP address. The site is using GEO IP redirection to redirect all US traffic to the .com site. Therefore, when Google attempts to crawl the .co.uk from the US IP address site it will be redirected to the .com site, never seeing the .co.uk site. Can anyone confirm that this is what happens?

Where does Google crawl the web from? Is it in the US only, or do they do it from a European base too? The reason for asking is for GeoIP redirection. For example, if a website is using GeoIP redirection to redirect all US traffic to a .com site and all EU traffic to a .co.uk site, will Google ever see the .co.uk site?