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Thanks to everyone for responding. I don't see anything amiss with my code, so it sounds like I just need to be patient.

I added the rel="author" tags to the blog posts last week and updated the authors page with a link to the Google+ account, but I have yet to see the authors photo surface in the Google Results.

Example URL: http://spotlight.vitals.com/2011/10/dr-richelle-cooper-testifies-against-dr-conrad-murray-in-trial/

Can anyone identify what else needs to be done?

Gianluca is absolutely correct. Example one (main site) is much better. Subdomains were used by spammers many years ago and are no longer a good strategy.

For every subdomain you make for each product you're basically creating a separate site too which needs to be put into GWMT seperately, so that gets a little crazy. It's just not a good strategy, even when someone wants to create a blog only for their site I tell them to put it under the main domain for PR and Google webmster compliance reasons, and you're talking about creating dozens of subdomains. There is only downside to doing it that way.

Good luck

Without looking at the actual site it's hard to make a determination, but simply matching up H1 tags, breadcrumbs, title tags etc is not enough to trigger a penalty, so don't un-optimize your site or you'll have an unoptimized and penalized site. Try to look at places where you have over done it, like too many instances in the content and tone it down a bit.

That is assuming this is why you got a penalty though, there are so many different factors that could trigger a penalty, how are you coming to the conclusion that it is over optimization?

Google's take is you're not supposed to do it.Also,

a) make sure the domains are private registration so no one knows who owns the sites

b) put about 2000 words per page on the site, you can get away with a two page site just make sure both pages have tons of unique content

c) link to your site from the web and let Google find the site on it's own, don't submit it to Google's ADD URL tool - some claim that doing so tells Google that this is a new site, if Google finds it on it's own it doesn't make that determination (again can't be proven 100%)

d) this strategy only sometimes works for some reason, don't count on them all ranking.

Are you doing this for SEO reasons? If so I would just host in the US. Hosting location for rankings in that region is not much of a factor anymore due to the fact that companies in 3rd world countries were hosting in 1st world countries because of the need for reliability and it wouldn't be fair to rank them lower based on that decision.

Also, you can geo-target specific folders in GWMT so there is also less of a reason to get a country specific TLD.

You can redirect them all with no issues if the companies websites are compliant. That is they are not penalized domains, and also not overly interlinked to each other.Too many websites for one company is against Googles rules, you're only supposed to have one horse in the race.

My suggestion would be to look at each site one at a time and vet it for compliance, once you have determined that it's a healthy site with no bad link building done on it, it would be safe to 301 redirect it to your new site.

This is just being super cautious though, because theoretically you have no control over who 301's a site to your domain. If Google penalized a site based on that then competition would take penalized spam domains and 301 them to the competitions sites in an effort to get them penalized. That being said, I wouldn't want any penalized sites to be 301ing to my site just to be on the safe side.

Run don't walk from that offer. They're going to spam on your behalf and probably get you penalized. Also, they could be talking sitewide numbers. One link in a blogroll on a blog with 50,000 pages is technically 50,000 links but Google discounts sitewide links.

If curious ask them to build 10 links for you on a trial and see what they come back with.

Hey Robert, I respectfully disagree with this theory:

"The reasoning (this is my opinion) is that they do not want the advertiser to grow and leave them so they try to prevent any juice from going to them. To, in essence, endeavor to keep them captive. "

Giving an advertiser a dofollow link is like gold, so not only will you get more advertisers, but if they do see better rankings as a result they would be less hesitant to leave because losing their links on your site could cause a drop in rankings so just the opposite is actually true regarding keeping them captive.

Also, image links do not pass PR which a lot of people don't know and also there is not anchor text so SEO benefit is minimal. If someone wants to advertise on your site and says they want their image link dofollowed I see no problem, that is of course assuming it's a clean site (which should go without saying because you only want to associate yourself with clean sites anyway)

This is a great tool, it will show you not only the sites they are linking to, but the sites that the sites they are linking to are linking to, if that makes sense.lol

This has false negatives, like "sussex" gets flagged for "sex" so you need to read between the lines, but it's extremely valuable to tell at a glance if the site you are interested in getting a link from is linking to bad places such as adult, meds or casino sites.

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

Also take a look at incoming links in Google Webmaster Tools, you can export that as well. usually when someone tries to attack your site they use adult links, so these are pretty easy to identify due to the site names.

correct, you 301 redirect the dead 404 pages to the most relevant related page, if there is no similar type page then redirect it to the home page. You can do that in your .htaccess file. You must explicitly code 301 in your redirect or it is 302 by default and 302 redirects won't pass link juice like 301's will.

Here's how to do it:

http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm

It doesn't matter, because in Google Webmaster Tools you can geo-target directories for specific countries, so there is no need for different TLD's for different regions. It seems to work well.

Also, Google is smart enough to know that if a section is in German it should be shown in Google.de, if a section is in French it will be shown in Google.fr - it is the English sections that you definitely need to point Google in the right directions with.

Load time is absolutely a consideration in rankings, go into you google webmaster tools account and you can see your site performance and how your load time compares to other sites on the web. Images are just one aspect of why your page load times could be considered slow but it is a factor. Get the yslow extension for firefox and that will give you some suggestions about what other changes you can make on the site to reduce load times.

I would play around with optimizing your images in photoshop and see what percentage decrease you can get away with without noticing a difference. If all of your images are roughly the same quality you can do a batch in photoshop, which is basically making an action first, for example saying shrink all images by 15% and then batch all of the images in the image folder and photoshop will shrink them all in one shot.

tutorial: http://www.pagecurve.com/tutorial.php?id=5_0_1_0

I wouldn't do that because Google is not going to update your title tag every day like clockwork so if you're thinking the title tag will line up with the pricing on the page that won't happen - the daily price on your page will be one thing and the title tag will be a price from a few days ago. It could be construed as misleading because the user will see one price in the title tag, click on it and see a different price on the page.

Just to add a bit, if your pages are being frequently updated you can add a published date and frequency of updates in the XML You can also prioritize the pages (like giving your category pages a higher priority). However, only use these optional parameters in the XML if they will be used correctly and this will definitely help the bots in crawling your site. If your pages hardly ever get updated, then it makes little sense to let Google know in the sitemap that your pages never change.

Shalom - Your blocking the images folder in your robots.txt file.

Please point us to the site and the exact example of some of the images in question.

I would also recommend to go to the site configuration - crawler access page in Google Webmaster and test many of your sites URL's to ensure that robots can access them. Test every unique URL format on your site like the search results page, product pages, category pages, etc...  I always use this tool whenever I make any change in the robots.txt

I would advise you to remove all no follow tags unless the links are for paid for.

Some ideas on links to remove: In the drop down for designer radiators - product manufacturer does not need to expand into many more links - cascading drop downs are generally frowned on anyways. The links in the footer are duplicate to the header - consider condensing the footer links.