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I use a CDN and have never seen any impact on my SEO. As long as your HTML is served off your domain you're fine.

If you're using AWS Cloudfront you can set up a CNAME so that your content comes from, say, images.mydomain.com instead of xyz.cdn.com. Helps obscure it from visitors and looks a bit neater.

Manually requesting removal of bad links is like using a chainsaw.

Using the disavow tool is like using a flamethrower.

Both can help you get rid of unwanted trees but only one can wipe out a forest (and everything in it) fairly easily.

I would be extremely careful on nuking your links. It could be that you're doing yourself more harm than good because the line between spam and legitimate is sometimes very thin. Unless you have links where it's pretty clear cut that it's spam, I wouldn't touch it.

I used GC for I think 4 years. I never saw its use exceed 1% but it was solidly #3 behind credit card and Paypal. Then again, after those 3, how many other payment systems can people name?

So why did we drop it? First, it's convoluted. People leave your site and never return. Google sends you a series of XML callbacks when someone pays. They have really good documentation, tho (second only to Paypal, IMO). Debugging is screwy because it's all callbacks as well.

Second, GC has no phone support. Support is only available via email or their forum and it's not easy to come by. We had an odd circumstance where someone filed a chargeback and Google granted it (more on that in a sec). We contacted the customer and they reversed the charges but the money got "stuck". GC considered the case closed and yet Google had our money. Took 4 months to get resolved (a lot of work for not a lot of money). By contrast, I can call Paypal 24/7 with issues.

Third, you play by Google's rules or else. GC mandates you ship all items over $250 with signature confirmation. If you don't, the customer can file a chargeback and automatically win (no I am not kidding). The GC chargeback system appears to be automated in this regard. GC won't even contact you beforehand, they'll just grant it and notify you you're out the money.

Last, they destroyed their only value when they moved to Paypal's graduated fee schedule (was 2% + $0.20, now it scales from 2.2% to 2.9% depending on volume). GC is still free (Paypal charges $30/mo for the same service) but for the hassle you go through it wasn't worth it to us. That, and they used to give Adwords credit once upon a time.

Paypal is no cake walk, but at least there are live humans to interact with when there's a problem. If you need a second payment system go with Paypal Express Checkout (I had at least 5x the use vs GC). I've not tried Amazon Payments yet, but they seem promising as well. I've gotten the distinct impression that GC is a forgotten project (Google has moved onto a mobile payments platform, which has caused drama because they hired Paypal devs to build it)

One suggestion is that, in this wild and crazy time of Panda, your keyword rankings changed. One of our sites experienced a spike in some keywords while dropping in others, which produced some oddball metrics for that site. So, let's say that "blue widgets" is a great converter (we'll say 2%) and gives you 250 hits a day, while all other keywords combined give you another 150 and drag that back to a modest 1.25% overall. Suddenly Panda eats your "blue widgets" keyword but likes you a LOT more for "fuchsia storm widgets", which only converts at 0.25%. So your traffic wobbles in your overall number but your traffic sources have drastically changed and, thus, your conversion rate has suffered. I've seen several of our sites experience this, where a short but good keyphrase dropped but several long tails came up sharply and offset the traffic drop.

Have you looked at how people are finding your site? Did keyword traffic change?

You talk a lot about your content but nothing about your link structure. A quick search at Open Site Explorer shows a lot of authoritative backlinks but, amazingly, almost no keyword allinanchors (what OSE calls Link Anchor Text). Almost all of your allinanchors are "Visit Website" or "Total Displays". Only a couple had keywords (and both were on Squidoo).

You need to go get some link diversity and focus on your keywords. I'm willing to bet that your site has a generic popularity but no real power with the main keywords. A good link campaign could help in specific keywords.

Also, have you looked at your bounce rates recently? That could also contribute to this.

JS could work in that case. Load your content into hidden divs and show each on demand. Spiders could still get the whole article while users see one part at a time. Just remember that there is an indexation cap (100k IIRC) so there are limits to how well this can work.

Is Dublox a category of products or just a single product?

If it's a single product I would use http://hoodamath.com/dublox.html

If it's a category I would use http://hoodamath.com/dublox/index.html

Depends a bit on how many apps and how niche they are. Let's say you have only 2 apps. One app gives baseball scores, the other gives cupcake recipes. I would go with a separate site in this case, because the topics are too diverse and there's not a lot of apps.

If, however, you have 5 apps, with 3 more in the works, and they're all about sports in general then I would build one site and segment.

Hope that helps.

Don't get hung up by the keyword-in-domain concept. It plays a role mostly when you're looking at starting a new site. Switching URLs (especially TLDs) is painful, since you lose some steam your current site has. Work on your on-page optimization and build a social media campaign. Build what you have into a winning SEO strategy. There's no reason why unrelatedsoftware.com can't rank well for "blah"

Some people have issued the warning of "Make sure you're not on a banned IP" but, so far, I've never seen an example where a person jumps onto an IP and finds out that Google banned that IP. Google bans sites, not IPs, and in every example I've seen, the sites banned on an IP all had some common problem (i.e. the server got hacked and malware was installed).

There has never been any advantage shown to having a dedicated IP vs being on a virtual host. What Nijzing means in his post is that some people like to build their sites to link to each other and use dedicated IPs to achieve that. As someone who virtual hosts, I can say that it really doesn't matter that much. I link my sites together (where it makes sense) and have had no real problems. Then again, I don't rely on those links wholly for my backlinks either. I think the whole "links your sites together by using different IPs" mess is a ton of work for no real gain.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You need to understand that the disavow links tool is like fighting dandelions with a flamethrower. If you're going to do it, you need to be aware that you could get rid of your weed problem... as well as the rest of your yard.

I've had people definitively tell me that unless you have a Webmaster Tools message (manual penalty) you shouldn't touch it. And I've had others say, anecdotally, that the disavow tool fixed all their problems.

Here's my rules for anyone considering even touching this tool

1. Do a full backlink analysis. Use ahrefs and open site explorer in concert. Look for spam patterns.
2. Once you've found patterns of links that look suspicious, do your best to see if they are passing you any rank for your phrase. In one case, the phrase was so niche I could search it and still verify we held rank for it
3. If you still want to go forward, start only with the links that are obvious spam and MOVE SLOWLY. Nuke a few bad links and wait. If nothing, move on.and nuke a few more. If you have any doubts about a link, leave it.

If you take it slow you should be able to determine if your efforts are the reason for any recovery you see. I would NOT drop all 400 links at once.

I dunno about that. I have a static IP and you could figure out who we are from a reverse DNS lookup. But we host our email on in-house servers and have to have a proper entry on our servers or we get bounced as spam. Many companies don't have that on their IPs and, as such, all you'll get it an entry pointing to their hosting provider.

As far as gleaning that list for lead generation... good luck to you on that. If you have private registration on your domain you might not get anything and it's not exactly kosher to use WHOIS info like that.

Start with Open Site Explorer (doesn't require any time for spidering, etc). Compare your sites to your competitors. Start building links as best as you can.

Once your campaign is done with the initial crawl, analyze your competitors. What are they doing right and where are they weak?

Using my Matt Cutts decoder ring (mailed in 20 box tops off Google O's cereal to get it) it says the codename stands for "Test Webmasters: Resistance Engagement Fun".

This is version 2.0.

See? We've just solved Penguin!

We use caching and have seen no ill effects. I seriously doubt spidering robots will be hitting your site's pages every 15 minutes.

One thing you might want to look into is the "If Modified Since" header, which could help notify Google that your content has changed

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more

I have two general rules of thumb on disavow

1. Disavow is for unnatural link patterns, not unnatural links
2. Don't disavow first and ask questions later. Disavow is a flame thrower and while they can help you set things on fire, they are a terrible way to weed a garden.

It sounds like your problem is not the link but the fear that the link is going to be seen as unnatural and might draw a penalty. If it's seen as unnatural it will likely be devalued. That's it. One link won't kill you. If anything, it might hurt the blog its on. Unless it's clear cut, leave it alone.

The key question here is do you want help in managing it or do you want someone to manage it for you entirely?

The latter is very expensive. Most companies charge a percentage of your advertising budget and full management charges a larger percent. I have tried Marin and looked at Acquisio and Wordstream. They're not the only ones out there, but it's a good starting list. I think they all offer both management tools and full time management.

I don't think that bad anchor tags can hurt you unless you're pointing to bad pages on your own site. Linking to a 404 page, for instance, will cause bots to try and spider the bad page instead of a good page. The concept here is called crawl budget and it's not devastating, it just slows down indexation.

I don't think a plain text reference can hurt you at all.

For SEO? Not really. The biggest benefit (aside from security) would be that you would regain referrers from Google users using Google over SSL. You know those pesky (not set) and (not provided) in GA? Those are caused by users going from HTTPS to HTTP.