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Hi Joe, There haven't been any major image algorithm updates since the beginning of August that I'm aware of. Have you looked at the queries that you rank on image search for to see where specifically you're dropping? There could be another site that popped up in early August that's outranking you. Best, Kristina

Try giving Google a call, as now u have that option

The page is gone, but the service will be back. I'm quoting from fellow employee Ruth Burr below: We've given the "keys" to our directories list/database to Ian Lurie, who is collaborating with Mackenzie Fogelson and Distilled to put together a more robust and scalable solution for directories. With everything else we've got going on, we decided that curating the directories list was beyond the time/resources we have to devote to it. I know this gang of trusted providers will do a great job with it! Other than redirecting the page and handing over the existing list, Moz won't be actively involved with the project."

If you have tons of thin content pages, then it is a good idea to consolidate them into a parent page, and canonical to that parent page from all the subpages. Then focus on creating unique content for the the parent page. If you have a lot of users, reviews and ratings can be a great way to add unique, user-generated content to your pages. You can incentivise people to leave reviews for you by offering a discount coupon for people who leave a review after making a purchase.

Its all about relevancy IMO. The closer you can get to the niche with that particular page the better. Remember the entire site does not necessarily need to be related to your niche (of course it does help if it is) as much as the individual pages do. The reason I say that is I have a hard time finding full site related niches who are not my competitors. Of course I am not going to be able to get a link on their sites, so I have to find those 1 pagers (usually news, blog and such) that happen to be perfect for my niche. So if you are going to place that link on a particular page, try and make sure the relevancy is a perfect match (The higher the relevancy, the higher the impact). I have learned that when links are placed at the end of content they tend to not have as much of an impact (especially in forums, blog comments, etc...) the only reason I say this about the end of content is because I no longer will place links at the end of anything, only in the middle of text. Of course make sure that its relevant and helpful to the readers and make sense. You don't want to place links just to place them. Also remember that Google still loves anchor text (yes even post penguin :)), but you really have to evaluate how you are placing that text in the link. Try and take yourself out of the SEO mode (I know I have too) and really think how you would link to that page and with what anchor text. Be as natural as possible when writing and make sure it makes sense. I tend to write my content first then I pick the most relevant text to highlight and place my links there. Many times people make the mistake of thinking about the link before the content. Write your content whether its a blog comment, forum post or whatever and make sure the comments relates to the question. Then after you have answered the question ask yourself if a link is really necessary. If not, then don't place a link. Which I know is hard to do sometimes, but honestly that's what spam is all about. If anything most profiles have the ability to place a link to your homepage to them. Just make sure that's in place and leave well enough as it is. I personally don't place percentages to my anchor text to my brand name. I just write the content and look at the best place to place my link and do that. Naturally it tends to be my brand term, but sometimes it's text like this article about this site check this link out freakin awesome tool Yes even misspelled words, because naturally I will write them like that and I know that Google understands that too. If I learned anything its that because of the amount of SEO I know I tend to gravitate to keywords and subconsciously tend to use them too much OR it causes me to write content that can be somewhat un-natural. I don't mean to do, but it just seems to happen. What I started doing was asking friends of mine to write my content for me. I tell them the subject of the page, verbally tell them the keyword without letting them know that's the keyword and let them write something for me. 99.9% of the time, it will be extremely natural flowing content

IMO don't do it. I know that Matt cuts once said that linking to high authoritive sites can be beneficial, but he did not elaborate how. I really don't  think it helps you rank better. I would have at least one link out as reading the original google algorithm a page with no external links is a hanging page and not included in page rank calculations, there is a line of thought that this is also true on a website level. so at leas one external link on your site. The idea is to have news linking to you, and you not linking to it. Screenshots seems ok.

Quick reality check here, Brad. Your home page has over 180 links. So each of these social media links you're wondering about is passing 1/180 of the PR juice of the home page. I certainly wouldn't be fussing about this either way. Far bigger challenges to be focusing on. That said, I certainly wouldn't be risking compromising user experience and user expectations in order to conserve 1/180 of a page's value. I'm not saying you're doing that - I think in some circumstances a dedicated social media page can be great. But as always - make the best decision for your users, not the search engines, especially in this case. And to reinforce what Adam said - no-following links in NO WAY conserves page rank - that hasn't been the case for well over a year. No-follow has very specific purposes - to denote a link that you don't trust (e.g. from user-generated content like comments) or when the link is a result of a commercial relationship with the target site. The third use , which might apply to a few of your home page links, is to tell  the crawlers not to follow links to pages that are of no value to users other than being purely transactional - like your View Cart, Checkout, Create Account, Track Package etc. The reason to no-follow these isn't to "save Pagerank" but to help conserve crawl budget so the crawlers can spend their time indexing more important pages. Hope that helps? Paul P.S. If I were looking to conserve and transfer front page influence more effectively, I'd be seriously looking at reducing the sheer number of links on the page so the links that remain can transfer more value to the most important pages/sections of the site. Not going to be easy while maintaining usability, but that's where i"d be focusing my attention.

How do you feel about guest bloggin?  Our site has a blog but all blog entries are written by me.  It can be difficult to find something new to write about ont he same topic everyday.  Also it takes an hour or two to write worthy content.  Just spewing something out to get new content is not worth it.  I want to allow guest blogging.  This will create more time for me to focus onother SEO tasks and broader blog topics.  The carrot for guest blogging would be a link to the guest bloggers site. However, it is believed by the powers that be at the company that we never want any outbound links.  Once we have them on our site we want them to stay here.