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I don't see how redirecting that domain to your site is going to help your SEO all that much, unless that site had a lot of existing links pointed to it.  People aren't going to link to your pages through redballoons.com; they're going to link to your domain now.  I would be very surprised this would get your from rank #21 to page 1 on the results pages (unless that domain had a bunch of relevant links pointing to it).

If you're building a brand name at your domain now, buying domains with the keywords you're targeting and redirecting those to your site aren't going to help much.  I wouldn't bother.

I can think of one use for buying this domain... if you're doing PPC, you could try using redballoons.com in your display URLs instead of your current domain and see if you get a higher CTR and/or more conversions.

Geotargeting!  Set up Google Webmaster Tools, and do this.  You can set the location to the US there.  For other search engines, like Bing, you can set the content-language attribute in a few different ways (read this).

If you're not going to serve the pages from mysite.com/countryname/, then you wouldn't need to put the canonical tags on.

If you are going to serve those pages, but not link to them from within your site, you might want to add the canonical tags anyway, in case people link to the URLs  under mysite.com/countryname/, so they'll pass their pagerank along.  You should also disallow that directory in your robots.txt, as Google has a way of finding pages and indexing them even if they're not linked to.

I wouldn't expect you to get penalized.  I thought from your original post that the Is the content between the sites different?  If so you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

I don't have an explicit answer to this, but this article discusses these issues and links to several different sources.  In particular, this video with Matt Cutts.  According to Matt, it sounds like it's good to have a different URL like you suggested for mobile sites.

If you have two different URLs, make sure that the regular Googlebot spiders your main site, and Googlebot-Mobile spiders your mobile site.

If you serve your regular and mobile pages under the same URL, then you need to make sure you serve the mobile version to Googlebot-Mobile to get those pages indexed properly.

Hope this helps!

You'll be serving identical content from two different URLs, even though they're on different domains.  It sounds like you'll want www.newdomain.com to do well in it's rankings in its country, and it's probably not as important that www.mysite.com/countryname/ URLs do all that well everywhere else.  If that's true:

1. You should rel=canonical (what's that?) all URLs under www.mysite.com/countryname/ to their corresponding page in www.newdomain.com, so the pagerank will flow to those URLs under newdomain, and you won't have duplicate content issues with the search engines.  Google does support cross-domain rel=canonical tags (source).
2. For newdomain, set up Google Webmaster Tools, and set it so you're geotargeting that country (source).
3. For newdomain URLs, set the Content-Language so other search engines (like Bing) can understand the geotargeting.  This can be done in a variety of ways (source).  We found it easiest to set it on our HTTP headers.

Sorry, I'm a little confused as well.  Why would you want people linking to your RSS feed instead of your original posts?  Why would you even want the RSS feed to be indexed and returned in search results rather than the original posts?  Wouldn't Google want to link people to the original post vs. the RSS feed?  Aren't RSS feeds supposed to be a feed of content already on your site... so I don't see why Google would have much of an incentive to spider it or return it in search results?

It's all about quality unique content.  The reason a lot of .edu's do well is because they have a lot of domain authority and a lot of them have been around for a long time.  The directories that pass good link juice have this going for them as well.  If you create a link farm on an .edu domain, you won't be fooling the search engines.  It'll be a brand new site with no links to it that has no unique content which links out to a bunch of sites which may also be spammy, aka a link farm.

I'm not sure what your goal is with this site.  If your goal in creating the site is to give an SEO bonus to these site you're linking to, I doubt it do any good.  If your goal is to create a site that is a directory that is useful to people, and people start using it, linking to it, sharing it, then it could work.  If your goal is to put up a site that has some links for your own enjoyment, go for it!  If Google thinks your site is a link farm, it's not like they're going to dispatch agents to your house in the middle of the night or anything.

Also, if you haven't yet, you might also want to set up the Google Webmaster Tools.  Once you get re-included, if something like this happened again, you'd see your # of impressions drop drastically from within their search queries report.  If you set up the Bing webmaster tools as well, you could compare the two to see if Google is truly penalizing you.

I just got the new UI today, and you're right, it appears the wonder wheel is gone. Even manually entering the URL to use the wonder wheel doesn't work, so it looks like Google has retired this feature (source).

If you were using it for keyword ideas, I asked my Google reps about using the wonder wheel, and they said that it would be ok, but they recommended that I use the Contextual targeting tool in Adwords instead.  The Adwords engineers over at Google are still working on improving the results that the Contextual targeting tool gives, whereas the wonder wheel is more of a novelty that is not actively being developed.

Like enzogg2 says, work on improving your site.  Certainly there are features you want to add?  And bugs to be fixed?  For example, when I view your site in a window that is less than 768 px wide, the banner links start getting lost on the right (like the contact link).  Also, your home page is trying to grab http://www.findahealthcarejob.com/wp-content/themes/JobBoard/style.php twice and it's returning a 403 status code (forbidden).  Also, your sharing icons in the upper right hand corner aren't positioned quite right in my IE9.

Even though the recipes are the same, I doubt they'd be penalized for having duplicate content.  If the search engine decides that it's duplicate content, it may filter out one or the other, and may knock one page down in the search results.  If your first page of results was all the same page from different domains, the search engine would have failed you.  The duplicate content penalties you're thinking about are more for spammers and spam content, where they're duplicating a lot of content, and doing it intentionally.

In your example, there is a lot else on the page other than the ingredients and the recipes, so that also should mitigate some of the duplication, and they're also laid out a bit differently in the HTML between the two pages, one with divs and one with tables.

Sources:

• [Google Webmaster Central Blog '08](Google Webmaster Central Blog '08 )
• High Rankings Advisor (Jill Whalen) '10

The tag is to prevent Microsoft Smart Tags from rendering.  It was only included in beta versions of IE6, and no other browsers since.  It's not worth including; you can safely delete these tags.

An explanation of smart tags on wikipedia.

The same question on stackoverflow.

A lot of items on your home page are getting served securely... which isn't necessary, and will prevent the browser from caching them properly.  For example:

• https://www.stbands.com/javascript/jquery/jquery.min.js
• https://www.stbands.com/css/dynamic-css.php?currentlyActivePageId=1
• https://www.stbands.com/uploads/image/Custom Wristbands(1).jpg
• https://www.stbands.com/images/categories/783.jpg
• https://www.stbands.com/images/categories/785.jpg
• https://www.stbands.com/images/categories/786.jpg
• https://www.stbands.com/images/categories/787.jpg
• https://www.stbands.com/images/categories/788.jpg

Since it's not a secure page, I wouldn't be serving all of these securely.  I'd use http:// instead of https://

A good place to start would be to go to the Google Webmaster Tools.  If you haven't set it up, I'd highly recommend it.  Expand the "Your site on the web" section, and click on the "Search queries" report.  The default tab is by "Top queries".  Click the tab next to it for "Top pages".  This will show all the pages with some information as well for each page, such as impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position on Google SERPs.

I'm not sure if this is a complete list, but it's what I go off of.

I'm not sure why Google's results would depend on how many results you're showing, but if either setting shows a URL, then it must be indexed, right?

Also of note, if you're interested in getting indexed in Bing too, I'd recommend setting up their webmaster tools as you can submit 10 URLs a day, and up to 50 URLs a month, to be indexed if Bing hasn't indexed your site yet.

One post I came across that could be of interest here regarding Bing.  It's a little old, but probably still accurate.  It sounds like you could get flagged by them, but only if the number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time.  Here is the relevant part of the article:

Going unnatural

So what does it mean to go unnatural? It means you're trying to fake out the search engines, to try to earn a higher ranking that the quality of your site's content dictates as natural through manipulation of search engine ranking algorithms. This chicanery can range from relatively benign but useless efforts to overly aggressive promotion to outright fraud. And as the major search engine bots are continually crawling the entire Web, we see what is being done, the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more, we account for these cunning behaviors in our indexing values applied to those pages.

Examples of potentially conspiratorial hocus-pocus that might be perceived as unnatural and warrant a closer review by search engine staff include but are not limited to:

• The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
• Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
• Using hidden links in your pages
• Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web
• Linking out to known web spam sites