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Wayfair is a similar comparison. Wayfair represents a single consolidated site compared to their 200+ domains previously (under the CSN brand). I'm familiar with them since we did similar things back in the day. I'm not sure how applicable it is because we used to do the same mega-spam footers they did. The bulk of their problem (long before Penguin) was that they were what is best termed as incestuous linking schemes. What crib bedding has to do with pool covers is anybody's guess. What likely tripped them up was, back in the day, we all linked keyword rich links to the sites without any regard to relevance. Once Google catches that you have to get rid of it. A single domain is far easier to SEO for, but they probably ultimately consolidated for the sake of advertising (their ads are everywhere). But (on point with the OP) Hayneedle did 301 their old domains to their new consolidated domain, and obviously for SEO benefit. Example

I don't think it's as big a deal now because link wheels like that are long gone. I have also seen other smaller networks arise (i.e. Soap) that link between properties (in the header no less) and do not nofollow anything. It's worth noting that these networks are poorly related (camping vs diapers vs clothing) so I don't think there's any real focus on SEO there (or they just don't care). At best these links carry some minor boost but at worst they carry no weight at all. Either way, if there was a penalty it doesn't show up.

I'm not sure there's anything else to be worried about. Matt Cutts made a video and it's pretty short on the matter.

If this isn't a brand new site I'd leave it alone. I've been the URL move route and it was PAINFUL. Even with 301s there was a temporary drop in rank while the spiders caught up. I like neat URLs as much as anyone but I can't say the URL rewrite is worth the headache. Remember, your URL is window dressing. Google will spider

myawesomesite.com/?dgauyrgfbfkf=shdgfjkwhe

as well as

myawesomesite.com/keyword

Are we talking about something focused on a different country or just a different language group? If it's a different country, I would duplicate your site and then buy the appropriate ccTLD. Matt Cutts has indicated this is the preferred method for doing international and there is not penalty for duplication. This also helps greatly with geotargeting.

If all you want to do is add a different language to the same site, I would go with a subdirectory as opposed to a query string entry. Most sites tend to gravitate towards this anyways (domain.com/en, domain.com/es, domain.com/fr, etc.). Based on what Google has said in the past, this is their preference as well.

If neither is an option, Google will still recognize the page a different based on the query string.

There's a couple of options I can think of

1. 301 the preview to the article. I'm not a fan of this (more content is always better than less) but it would do what you want instantly. It's also not easy with your setup.

2. Edit your preview post and only add the link to the article. This is a much more natural solution. That should pass some of the PR from your well ranked preview to your less stellar article and it would help people visiting your site to see that there's more content to view (less bounce rate!).

In all honesty, SEOMOZ's DA hasn't been a good indicator since Penguin and based on the hints they're dropping about upcoming changes, i wouldn't surprise me if it went away until they can tweak it back in line with what actual results are. Then again, with Penguin 2.0 due out right around the corner, it might be made correct again.

That having been said, Open Site Explorer is still a superb tool for analyzing your own backlinks. Something that might ding you is a lack of diversity of anchor text. Also, look for sites that are clearly spammy. They aren't going to count towards your ranking but they count towards DA (which is one reason why it's not accurate).

Lastly, have you looked at your on-page optimization? Content is King. Links aren't queen, they're more like the King's court: the more high quality they are, the better it reflects on the King. Don't obsess about links. Build quality content first. make sure people who find your site appreciate your hard work and the links tend to follow.

Canonical doesn't prevent a page from being indexed. Canonical allows you, the end user, to specify which of your duplicate pages to treat as the real page. Otherwise Google will pick one. The page still is in the index and is still crawled, it's just ignored for ranking purposes.

We have a registered trademark. I've not seen any problems with either. The only potential problem I could see would be in using the raw character instead of the HTML entity () and you're not using UTF8 on your site it's possible that it could appear garbled in some contexts.

1. That could be a problem. A 301 tells the bots (and everyone else) that a page has moved and it passes PR along to the new page. Without a 1:1 meticulous redirect your new pages with the old content will likely been seen as new duplicate content for a while. If you're positive this is the path you want to go, be certain that your old URLs return 404 so Google drops them ASAP. You will lose any backlinks to your old pages, however.

2. 24 hours is pretty normal, actually. Most people don't have granular control over the time-to-live of their DNS (which is the best way to handle it). Go run a report on IntoDNS and make sure they give you a clean bill of health. If it's clean, you should have no negative side effects from this.

I'm not a fan of this (commonly called page rank shaping). First, you're trying to tell Google what to index and what to ignore. Second, how do you know those pages have no value? What if I found an image in your gallery and linked to it off my blog? Now you're missing out on link juice. It might not be viewed as suspicious, but it won't help your site any.

Those are some sloppy URLs. I especially advise people to avoid the problems of relative paths in ANY URL. And, yes, <base> probably isn't helping.

Links starting with / are fine. That's the root of your site. Anything using "../" should be nixed and use a fixed path. And never, ever use "./".

Depends how the products are displayed. Are your products all under one single URL or is it something like site.com/product/?color=red color=blue, etc? If so, Google sees these as separate pages.

If one have one URL (even if it's AJAX driven), you should be fine. If you have multiple URLs, you need to canonical down to one, or else you will get hit with a duplicate content penalty. You could also remove them as you suggest. Just be sure to 301 redirect your products so you don't lose much SEO benefit.

Are people linking to the original URL? If not, it's likely not a big deal. Still, it would be better if you had it do a 301.

The good news here is that there's a simple fix if you want your script to return a 301. You need an extra header sent. Here's a PHP snippet of how this works

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location:http://www.newurl.com");

Understand that moving your URLs is difficult. Even with 301s, you lose any SEO momentum and only preserve most of the rank the page has. You need to be prepared to take a short term hit if you move URLs.

Let's say the top page for seomoz toasters is a site on seomoz.org that happens to talk about toasters (say a youmoz). It's got the right keywords and it's on a popular site. But Rand Fishkin has started a Cafepress store that sells seomoz toasters. Being a busy guy, he mentions this on his blog but forgets to link to it. So people turn to Google. People get served seomoz.org as #1. Google doesn't read Rand's blog (like you or I do) so it links to seomoz.org. But you and I, we want that toaster, not some guy talking about link building for toasters on seomoz. So either you will click into seomoz and bounce out, or just click #2, the Cafepress store. And 80% of the people who click into Cafepress never come back. That tells Google that people are finding what they're looking for at #2 and, by the power of Matt Cutts, Cafepress becomes #1 for "seomoz toasters", based on the traffic patterns Google observed.

In a shorter term, this is called "bounce rate".

So to get back to your question, volume tends to make Google notice term traffic trends (like bounce rate) faster. I don't know that this applies to other terms. "seomoz toasters" is a fairly specific term (it's not terribly common), while "toasters" are highly general. You could have people who want the seomoz toaster so badly that they search "toaster" and click to the seomoz site in that result, but that's really unnatural. Most would just search the long tail.

There's no difference, really. Multi-domain certificates have been around for years (UCC, which is what this basically is, isn't new at all) and I've never heard of any problems with them. If anything, a multi-domain EV like this better in the long run because EV is much harder to obtain (you have to be a corporation to get one). I wasn't aware that anyone was allowed to issue what is basically a EV UCC certificate but I guess it was inevitable (I am surprised they don't have EV wildcard yet)

For Google's purposes they want a valid, signed certificate. They don't care if it's a single domain or a multi-domain EV like this. All certificates are issued and validated the same way.

I would nofollow your links.They're probably dragging you down because they're not natural.
This video is on topic from Matt Cutts himself http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuhSmwsL7s

You're 100% right. You should have one 301 redirect to the other. While there are some SEO reasons for this (mainly with duplicate content), the best reason is that it's just less confusing to end users to only have one URL to use. If your non-www has trouble loading I would say you need a 301 to the www version.

Moz restricts Top Level Domain (i.e. domain.com) and crawls accordingly. I have some set up with www.domain.com and some with just domain.com. The 301 to the www forces the issue but Moz is smart enough to crawl the proper pages.

There's no difference, SEO-wise, between domain.com and domain.___ (insert your flavor here, .xxx, .info, .ws, .travel, etc). No search engine considers any TLD to be better than another (not even coveted .edu and .gov).

Some things I do expect to see, tho

• Phising explosion - Hey, you have a complaint listed against you on ebay.web. Hurry and get it fixed!
• A massive spike in exact match domains and generic terms
• Branding is about to be a LOT harder. Previously, it wasn't too hard to police things. If you owned a .com you could kinda fend off the pretenders. There weren't too many TLDs to choose from and people aren't as likely to be fooled by a .ws as they are a .net. But now? You can be moz.web and host your own Whiteboard Fridays! Sure, Moz has an army of lawyers and will probably legally pile drive you into the ground but if 100 people did that... Yikes to the legal bills. How close can you get to someone using the same domain in a different TLD before it infringes on your identity? Something tells me it going to be left up to the courts to sort that one out.

I'm leery of anything that bills itself as a "one size fits all" approach for responsive. Real responsive takes work because you have to design for the 3-ish viewports out there (mobile, tablet and desktop). To say "Just add this and you're responsive!" means you either have a VERY simple site, or you don't care how bad it looks on mobile.

I guarantee if you try to do it the easy way that some future Google update will ding you. Google is now HIGHLY focused on mobile and how well you do it. Take the time to do it right and you won't regret it.

I think we'll need some more information to help you

• How do you know those links are spam?
• How do you know your competitors are buying spam links? Is it possible that some of these links are natural?
• How do you know they filed spam reports? Did you get a manual action (as in Webmaster Tools notice)?
• If you didn't get a manual notice, how do you know those links that are questionable are the reason for your ranking drop?