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Hi Irving, As Yusuf suggested, .htaccess files are not publicly viewable - they're inaccessible by public users by default. For your own site's .htaccess file, simply downloading the file via FTP and opening with Notepad/similar will work. But I take it you were looking for a tool to check the .htaccess file for public sites. If there is such a tool, it's news to me. Best, Mike

I'd second Erwan's questions - did other signals confirm the Toolbar PR update? Have you lost ranking, search traffic, etc. Not only is TBPR notoriously unreliable, but this could reflect something that happened 3-6+ months ago, and maybe it's reversed by now. It's very, very hard to pin down a timeline from TBPR, and if you were penalized, a timeline is critical.

Hi Irving! Thanks for the heads up! I will let our engineers know so we can fix this asap. Will update when I have new status. Cheers!

Interesting question. I don't think Google has every penalized anyone for passing Pagerank to themselves. Technically all paid links should be nofollowed according to Google's policy. Practically speaking, in your case, it's more of a grey area although I seriously can't anticipate too many negative consequences.

Hi Irving, the G+ L listing for Eyeglasses does not have a website listed, so that's why the link in G search only goes to G+. Here is the G+ L page search links to: https://plus.google.com/112052218407614442300/about?hl=en However there may be an issue with that listing. If you view their maps page, the link shows but it does not show up on the Google+ Local page. Looks like someone just made an update in Map Maker on May 23rd and added the website there. If you manage the listing I'd be sure the website is also listed in the dashboard and I would not typically recommend editing in MM.

I'd tend to agree - it's really tough to say without knowing more about the site, but a bit of bad behavior across hundreds of thousands of profiles shouldn't impact you that much. Of course, just having hundreds of thousands of indexed profile pages can have its own hazards, so it depends a lot on the site, authority, etc. The other option would be to just NOINDEX any questionable profile pages - that should sever the offending links. Of course, it also means those pages won't be able to rank, which could irritate the people building the links to them, so I'm not sure how lightly you want to tread. If you 404 and change the URL, you're sort of doing the same thing - they'll still have to rebuild and won't be happy about it.

thanks, i'm going with a combination of two. one seems to be decent and also intuition tells me it's good, and other one has no other sites currently well optimized for it, so it actually MIGHT bring more traffic than the better one because it's an easy win with less competition.

Neat tool. I granted access with a site that was affected by these updates. Seem to correlate well, but not perfectly. Great find!

SeoMoz should give free memberships to those that reach guru status

A display ad targeting that landing page might be useful if you are targeting people to learn about the brand outside direct searches.

ahhh no index in .htaccess file. brilliant - thanks!

HTML 5 doesn't care which way you do it, but the 2nd way is invalid in XHTML or HTML 4.  I prefer the first way, since it looks cleaner (to me) in the code, and there is less chance of a broken tag (if someone misses a < or >) trashing the link completely.

Thanks for the post Irving. Happen to me as well!

it's not a strategy, it's due to technical limitations on the dev side. i agree though thanks. So, I asked this question to a very advanced SEO guru and he said they could be seen as doorways and present some risk and advised against it. That combined with the probability that they will most likely get dropped from Google's index anyway and we know that Google says they want pages to be part of the sites architecture has me leaning towards nofollowing all of them and maybe experiment with allowing 1000 to get indexed and see what happens with them. Thanks for your input folks

Totally agree Dan. As of last week all the previous author microformats that worked suddenly disappeared from the SERP pages after working from their implementation

Hi Irving, Today i have Compiled a comprehensive backlink report for one of my hotel client (http://www.fairfieldinnhotelcedarrapids.com/).I have identified all bad links and create one .txt file and upload via google disallow tool. now my question is, How do i know that all dead links has been removed? Is there any way to know status? Thanks

Congratulations! We'll be in contact for your address and shirt size shortly.

Hey Irving! Good catch! Turns out that my Web Team knows about it too and are working on it! Only cause you said you'd wear it proudly, send me your info to Help@seomoz.org with ATTN: JOEL in the subject and I'll see if I can't scrounge up a shirt for you.:) Cheers, Joel.

I downloaded mine and found some opportunities to engage in a forum that was referencing a brand we represent