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I wish I could help you with that one, I'm not too proficient in PHP. Maybe someone else with more development experience can answer?

I would imagine that the use of canonicalization or a 301 redirect would be the way to go. Can you set it up so that it tracks the referral ID, logs it, then 301s to your main index?

Look at other ebay/amazon stores that link to their own website. Check out the source code and see if there is a rel="nofollow" attribute appended to the a tag of the link. If it's not there, you are in good shape search engine wise.

User wise, you are definitely in good shape. Link to your company website so that you can show your potential customers that you are the best choice, especially compared to your competition. Offer them reasons why they should go with you and use testimonials to back it up. I don't think there is a downside to this

Just to open a discussion, I would imagine that Google will not put a lot of weight into the domain name listed on the places page. They are already looking into exact match domain names and their ranking ahead of others, so I would assume that the same would be places. I know for sure that distance from centroid, number and quality of reviews, and categories of the listing have the most weight in ranking in places or maps. Sorry i don't have a straight answer but thought I would give a point of view? Hope it helped

To clarify- if you have two pages, one optimized for furnace filters and the other optimized for furnace filter, i would imagine you would have a lot of the same content on those pages, not to mention that you would also probably be wasting your time since Google will treat those two keywords the same since they are variants.

To answer your other question: You should probably optimize for those filter sizes also. Thats a great idea for long tail keywords.

Also, when determines whether or not you should optimize for the singular or plural version of the word, optimize it on that page based on what product you are selling. For example, if you are selling a budle of 3 filters, focus on the plural version of the pages, that way users searching for multiple filter packs won't come across a page with just 1 filter. Does that make sense?

I think Google will count both filter and filters as the same search terms as they are just variations of each other. But just to be safe you might consider furnace filter because it has the most volume. Use variations of filter both singular and plural on the visible page. Google does not hold a lot of weight in the variations of these words and will display results accordingly based on relevancy and authority. Focus on getting text links with both variations of the word, you can't go wrong with that. I don't think you will need to choose two separate optimized pages since they are so closely related. I could image there would be a lot of duplicate content issues with that?

Since it is the same content then I guess it wouldn't hurt you to no follow and no index at all. And even if you didn't I'm sure it wouldn't matter since Google knows you are just testing using their scripts.

Check out this thread on Google: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/websiteoptimizer/thread?tid=2462d6ad54512b96&hl=en

It basically says that if you are using GWO for testing purposes, SEO will not be affected. Google can see that you are using their site optimizer and won't discount any of your rankings or penalize your site for duplicate content.

If you are just switching hosts and keep your site and permalink structure the same, you need not worry about backlinks. For some reason if they do change, you should 301 redirect all old articles to their new versions. If you are switching domain names then you definitely need to make sure that you do the 301 redirects as well. I just want to make sure that you have the terms correct?

If you have links incoming to your home page with "job scheduling" in the anchor text, Google will see that page as more authoritative and relevant than a page on your site without any links to it. If you can build links with "job scheduling" in the anchor text to the optimized page not ranking, you'll have a better shot at it ranking ahead of your home page in the future.

Seoug-

1. You are correct. Since those 2 IPs have the same first 3 blocks, it is likely that they are close to each other. I misread the second IP the first time, I thought it said 45.44.43.41 which would make it right next to 45.44.43.42. However, they are still very close to eachother. This means that Google will see these two IPs on the same C block and that any sites linking to eachother are likely related.

2. To clarify, the higher the ratio of C blocks to total links is beneficial for you because it is likely that you are being given links naturally, and are not using your relationships or other websites to game the system. Does that help?

Seoug-

Yes you are correct, basically the IP format is AA.BB.CC.DD

It is not necessarily the case that the two are owned by the same company, but are related. Google uses these C blocks to determine likelihood of relationships if any.  Google would tend to assume that these two sites are related, since they are on IPs right next to each other. It would be even more so if they were on the same IP.

Links from the same C block aren't necessarily bad. Just make sure ALL of your links arent from the same C block. If you own several sites it's natural to link to your others. Google just lowers the value of these links so that people who own several domains don't have an automatic advantage over others due to excessive linking. Basically, the more C blocks the better. 100 links from 10 C blocks probably won't rank as well as a site with 100 links from 35 C blocks. I hope this helps!

You should probably make sure that the canonical URLs box is checked in that particular plugin. The reason why you are getting those duplicate content errors is because Google is seeing those tag pages as different URLs with the same content which will possibly penalize you.

This will help with most of the issues. Also, you can edit your tag and category archive pages to display links to the different articles without displaying a lot of the content. Although there might be user consideration for this.

Also, maybe try SEO Ultimate, a plugin which has additional options for you regarding your author, date, category, and tags archive pages.

Have you created and submitted to Google an XML sitemap including the TOC and all other pages?

I have had good experience with the yahoo directory and it's link quality. Same goes for business.com and Best of the Web. The submission requirements fall right along the lines of the google webmaster agreement and google's guidlines for what qualifies as a good site. If included your site will be seen as more authoritative. Make sure that the site meets the requirements of the Yahoo directory because they will not refund your $299 review fee if you do not get in.

Yes- I did not mention this in my other response. Adam is correct also, it could be that Google has an outdated index.

Sometimes Google will display the title and meta element of a DMOZ listing. If you are listed in the DMOZ open directory project, simply put the following to your head section and it will default back to what you actually have on the page.

Sometimes, Google will also change the Title and description elements in the SERPs for user experience. It's difficult to see how or why, but it does happen. Does this help?

Hey-

I have not used this site before but heard good things about it. It's affordable, but the directories are not super high quality. PR 4 or so. I think they have different tiers for better directories. This isn't auto submission, it's simply a service that submits manually for you. Also, they vary the anchor text I think up to 10 times I think?

http://www.submit2please.com/directory-submission.html

For awesome directories - I always submit my client's site to Best of The Web, Business.com, and the Yahoo Directory. They have similar guidelines to Google so they are very well trusted.

Hope this helps!

I think you should keep optimizing for keywords that you already rank for, if you are not #1, your pages can still be better optimized. Keep them in back of you mind, but don't forget about them. With SEO, you don't have to sacrifice a lot of keywords as long as they are all somewhat related. Also, a good measurement to see if you should keep any keywords or variations or not is to check their search volume in Google Keyword Tool. That is what would tell you if you are wasting time on not.

I like Vinnie's response! I would 301 all of the expired pages maybe to their lowest level category? I'm not sure how the taxonomy of your site works but once the post is deleted I'd have it 301 all of the way down to the lowest level of categorization. This will keep the URL as specific and relevant to the user and also keep your category pages indexed