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There is nothing technically wrong with this, so yes it is OK. I've seen this done before.

Some people also choose to use an index page at the directory level so that domain.com/xyz-products/ resolves with say "index.php". You would need to make sure you provide the right canonical/redirect combination if you do choose to go this route of course.

It's really up to you and your marketing team I suppose. Maybe ask which sounds better (e.g. "for the best jambalaya in town go to www.jambalaya.com!" vs. "for the best jambalaya in town go to jambalaya.com!").

I prefer www.example.com myself.

I don't think you will lose any link juice.

I also don't think it matters which URL you use for domain root. That said, it would matter if you were using http://www.domain.com versus http://domain.com. Otherwise, I don't think you need to worry.

Hi Marty, there is really no difference between root domain URLs with or without trailing slashes.

Note, however, that this is not true for absolute URLs: http://www.example.com/page is not the same as http://www.example.com/page/. For absolute URLs that are not the root domain, you need to be pretty explicit about whether or not it has a trailing slash. Many content management systems (e.g. WordPress) will let you choose to have trailing slashes or not.

At this point, I don't think you need to do anything with your homepage canonical URL since it is the same as adding a trailing slash.

Hope this helps!

Hi Brian, yes indeed it is worth it. But don't just take our word for it, take the word of many others in the industry:

Use it to increase traffic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-author-photos. I built my profile for this express purpose. Authorship is important too and you need a Google+ profile to hook things together. Danny Sullivan provides examples where Google+ is pushed over the other social networks.

How to take advantage of Google+: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tips-to-use-google-for-seo.

There are too many reasons to do it and not one reason not to (IMO).

Hey Brett,

Try this recent post on Searcher Intent:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/searcher-intent-my-main-focus-when-it-comes-to-keyword-research

I would say arrange for how it makes sense for users/searchers and not necessarily for search engines at all. Look to the audience and you'll be on target IMO.

Hope this helps!

Paul's advice is sound Dana, shouldn't take too long to do either.

Then yes, I would migrate the archives to the new site if it was me.

I suggest taking things one step at a time. Your reports from SEOmoz may include tons of errors, but you can often fix tens or hundreds of these errors with one fix. I see some technical updates you can make to your pages that will help clean up the source code and perhaps make your pages load faster which will help.

A couple quick technical tips:

Clean up the inline CSS used on your pages. Use your external CSS files to hold  this information.

Don't use relative URLs if you don't need to. You can fix a number of linking issues by just using absolute URLs.

Here's a helpful post from Paddy Moogan:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/common-technical-seo-problems-and-how-to-solve-them

More to come later. Hope this helps!

From my point of view, the idea is not so much that the social shares themselves are a signal; but rather, the more your content is shared, the more likely it is to be read by influencers. It's more about getting your content in front of the eyes of people you want to visit your site, engage with your business, and also link to you. This is a great way to build natural links.

Start here:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-create-an-excel-spreadsheet-to-remove-link-spam-post-penguin

Hope this helps!

Have you tested it with one URL to start?

It would help us diagnose your issue if you provided a link to the website you are having issues with. Thanks!

If it's a high quality link you shouldn't need to worry. If you are paying for the review, I suggest being careful. Check out their link profile and see if it is really something you are interested in. I would be wary of any type of paid reviews/links.

Don't do either of those and start here instead:

http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/143993

Paddy has some great stuff.

For example, this post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eight-link-building-tips-whiteboard-friday

Personally, I would go with example.com/blog and host it on your own site. Why? Because it increases your branding, provides a better sense of security (what will you do if Google folds Blogger?), and gives you more control.

Are they both on the same domain?

From a maintenance standpoint, I think it makes sense to move its archive to the new website. I wouldn't want to maintain old content on an old site forever. By maintenance, I mean continuing to update to the latest versions of the blog software, plugins, themes, etc...

With proper redirects in place, you shouldn't lose much in the migration.

I suggest looking through previous Q&A forum results for various answers that have been provided for this question. Here's the query to find them: https://www.google.com/search?q=seomoz+base+href.

Basically, you are right, you should use absolute links instead of relative links. You only need to use a base href if you are using relative URLs on page and the base href is needed for them to resolve correctly.

The base href you are seeing in the code shouldn't be causing any issues for Google when following internal links. The issues, if any, would be caused by the relative links themselves if they are not set up correctly (this should be easily tested).

Adam is right, downtime like this is unacceptable and this should be the card you play to convince the client to change hosts. You have the data you need (25 page one rankings dropped) to support your argument. The costs involved with moving to the new host will be worth it. Oftentimes you can even see hosting cost savings by switching to a better host.

If you can't move, yes your rankings should come back after the site is re-indexed. The only strategy I am aware of to handle this issue is to use a host that has more redundancy built-in. It doesn't sound like the local provider is able to provided this in-house and in the future they may themselves need to use an off-site location for hosting their servers.

You should use "noindex, follow", not "noindex, nofollow". In my opinion, you don't need to use "nofollow" at all here.

Also, some people say it is OK to index your category pages, but if you do there should be some unique content describing what the category is about.