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I would think it would be more worthwhile to write these articles, and then post them on your site, rather than running around submitting them to different sites.  If you write interesting and unique content, people will start to follow you and come to you to see what you have to say.  Start getting links and tweets about your articles, and voila, your sites rankings will increase.

Doing things like submitting articles at a bunch of different sites is becoming more and more transparent to Google.  They're onto this kind of thing, especially if you're submitting the same articles to different sites. This was somewhat mentioned in the SEOMoz post yesterday (see here).  If I'm reading this correctly, you're going to be building a large truncated pagerank, which is a spam signal to the search engines...

I'd focus on writing interesting, unique articles, and work on linkbuilding to them at your site, as opposed to posting them elsewhere.

Good developers should do a lot of these things by default, like optimize page load time, use sprites, avoid duplicate content, load page content prior to ads, etc.  A good SEO should be aware of all of these things, and when things need to change, should be able to communicate those changes to a developer.  Identifying these issues are more on the SEOs themselves, not the developers.  In my experience, most tasks are more front-end tasks, and a few are back-end, so depending on what your developer does, they should be able to handle the tasks within their niche if you point them out.

I don't think they need to put "SEO" in their skill-set.

Google won't penalize you for their links to your site.  You have no control over who links to you, and there's little you could do to get them removed.  I see new links for my sites come up all the time, and some are from these spammy sites.  I've never seen a penalty accessed.

If they did penalize sites for this, people would set up even more link farm sites just to link to their competitors.

When I search in Google, it's showing me 800 pages!

Having a sitemap will help search engines index your pages better.

In the SEOMoz 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors report, long domain names show a -0.07 correlation with rankings. Having exact match domain names has a 0.22 positive correlation, so there is a lot to be said for that.

18 letters is pretty long.  That's a lot of typing for someone to come to your site.  Does a subset of this phrase make sense, like 2 of the words?  That would be easier to type, and you'd still get a benefit from matching some of the search terms in the phrase. You'll also match less-specific phrases people will search for, so you'll do better in more searches.

In the SEOMoz 2011 rankings report, it shows that exact match .com domains are 0.22 correlated with higher rankings, whereas exact match domain names (with other domain suffixes, like .us) are only 0.17 correlated with higher rankings.  So, it still appears that .com is still the boss.

Doing PPC won't affect your SEO.  You might see some drop in some organic traffic, since people will be clicking your ads instead of your organic search results.

In one Google thread I found, the Google employee summed it up quite well:

Being an AdWords advertiser will not cause one's site to be listed or unlisted in the unpaid search results on the left hand side of the page. There is no relationship between one and the other at all. Put another way, being an AdWords advertiser will neither help nor hurt one's chances of being listed in the unpaid results, nor will it impact one's position in any way if they already appear in the unpaid search results.

This doesn't sound ideal.  So only the home page is under URL B, and the rest of the pages are hosted under URL A?  That would seem really strange to me as a user if I entered through URL B, went to another page, and the domain changed completely.

Ideally, you should 301 redirect everything under URL A to URL B rather than using rel=canonical for them.  There's no reason to host two identical sites like this.  It's fine for multiple sites to be hosted under the same IP.  Here's a really good SEOMoz blog post about using 301 redirects vs.canonical tags.

If it returns a 200 OK code, it can be indexed as a page and may appear in search results, which isn't great since you don't really want to be bringing people in to your 404 page.  According to Wikipedia, this is a "Soft 404".  Since there is a section under Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools for Soft 404's, I take it that it's better to return a 404 code.

I've seen promotions where if you like a company, you can get a discount on your next purchase.  Or let people know you'll be running promotions through your page, so they have an incentive to like you.

You can also run Facebook ads to get people to like you. They offer a lot of demographic and interest targeting, so you could target the right audience.  Once you get a few likes, you can target these ads to people who have friends who like you, which makes it more likely for that person to add you, since they can see their friend already likes you.

Yeah, it's a bad idea to chain multiple redirects.  From the whiteboard Friday a little over a year ago where Rand talked with Matt Cutts:

Is It a Bad Idea to Chain Redirects (e.g. 301-->301-->301)?

"It is, yeah."

Matt was very clear that Google can and usually will deal with one or two redirects in a series, but three is pushing it and anything beyond that probably won't be followed.  He also reiterated that 302s should only be used for temporary redirects...but you already knew that, right?

Also, here's a similar Q&A question with some good answers.

Looks like you asked this question twice... some answers are over at http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-put-a-promo-code-directly-into-adwords-copy.

1. It seems like canonicalizing the URLs is still a good idea.  For one, there are other search engines that respect the tag, so you want them to do the right things.  However, it does sound like for Google that this could replace the need for canonicalization tags due to URL parameters.  If you have duplicate content that's not caused by URL parameters, you'd still need the canonical tag. Just to be safe, I'm still doing both.

2. When I logged into my webmaster tools, all of the parameters Google had found were there already.  I went through and edited them and added the new information.

I don't think it's necessarily bad.  I'm just not sure it's as compelling as stating the savings and an expiration date in your ad.  You could try running an ad with the code, and a similar one without it, and see which does better.

If the user doesn't write down the code and later forgets it, they may might not be able to find it again!  If you do use a promo code in your ad copy, make sure it's easy to find on the landing page, or automatically added the customers cart when coming from your ad.

One article I found reinforcing this: http://certifiedknowledge.org/blog/be-careful-of-using-discount-codes-in-your-ad-copy/

Yeah, Google generally will come across just about all of the parameters while indexing your site, but you can add parameters as well.  When you log into Google Webmaster Tools, you should see a list of parameters when you go to the Site configuration > URL parameters page.  They've given more options now that you can change for each parameters, beyond whether or not Google should ignore them.  If you click Edit for a parameter, now you can set:

• Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? (Yes, No)
• How does this parameter affect page content? (Sorts, Narrows, Specifies, Translates, Paginates, Other)
• Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? (Let Googlebot decide, Every URL, Only URLs with value ___, No URLs)

It will also show you sample URLs with the parameter to make it easier to figure out when these parameters appear, which is very useful, as sometimes you don't which pages have which parameters.

Google's help file for this can be found here.

Yeah, it's your personalized results.  If you go to http://www.google.com/search?q=mixtapes&pws=0 (the &pws=0 removes personalization), you won't find it on the first page, or in the first several pages of results.

A little background:

The site I'm working on, www.ixl.com, is a math practice site for pre-K through 8th grade.  Our content consists of math skills where we randomly generate math problems, grouped by grades and topics.  We have around 300 skills per grade.

The question:

We don't currently have a twitter feed, Facebook page, or a blog.  I'm working on setting these up, or at least a twitter feed and the Facebook page first.  I'm wondering, what kinds of things will we tweet about once I get a twitter feed set up?  What kinds of things should we be tweeting about?  Things like online education articles?  And articles about teaching math?  Do you guys think that would be compelling enough to get followers and make this productive for us?

Another question, how important do you think a blog is, compared to a twitter feed and Facebook page?  I was thinking it would be fun to set up a blog, and post math questions from the site 2x or 3x a week, as well as other content that could overlap with the twitter feed.

You should be able to get around this with geotargeting.  You can set indicators for Google and other search engines that your site is for that country.  I don't think where you host the site is as important as having good machines and indicating to the search engines what country and language your site is for.

Geotargeting:

• Google
• Bing (& other search engines)

Most of the time in GWT you can see the page where the referring link is coming from.  The crawl errors in GWT are links to your site, so if people use an invalid URL to link to your site, it'll show up as a 404 error in GWT.

In my experience when this happens en masse, some spammy site goes a little nuts and tries to link to a bunch of pages, but goofs something up to make the URLs 404s, like putting a extra space which renders as a %20, in the href at the end of the URL.

If it's a common mistake, you might considering putting a rewrite rule in to 301 redirect those 404 URLs to valid pages on your site.  You could also contact the webmaster of that site to fix the URL or URLs that are invalid (especially if it would be a valuable link).  Lastly, you can do nothing and ignore the errors.

I think you have to participate in their new Google Offers program (their version of Groupon), as that "View offer" button goes to an Google offer page.  Read more about it here:

• http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2079346/New-Google-Ads-Expand-Offers-Arsenal
• http://www.searchmarketinggroup.com/blog/sem/ppc/google-adwords-testing-view-offer-button/