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This is one of the easiest things you can check. The other posts gave some great examples of how - it's just a matter of if you want to check one page at a time or a collection all at once.

Ranking well for brand terms and less so for more generic/non-branded keywords is common for most all companies. Like Brian said, there could be a lot of reasons, and that guide has some great tips to address. There's an entire art and science to making things work.

Apparently yes and it's supposedly not widely available (they probably want to find a way to make money off of it).

This deck is a bit out of date (pre-timeline) but there's some info on it. http://www.slideshare.net/steph_king/facebook-parent-child-model

Given how Google likes to be cagey with things an the fact that G+ is still evolving, right now we may not know the business impact, however, like anything, why wouldn't you want to claim your online brand if you have the opportunity? Or if the opportunity presents itself?

I link back to my site, to help tie together content matches that I think can help the user/reader. I keep in in check depending on the length of the blog piece, the intricacy of the topic (is it jargon heavy or really technical?) and work from there.

Good content, to me, does match up to SEO because you're targeting what your user cares about and looking for. Using the same best practices makes sense. (You can have great content but if you didn't SEO it well, then how easy is it for people to find to know it's good?) Don't go overboard because it can seem spammy and be a reader turn off.

It's a limited solution. It can get visibility fast and possibly drive traffic. It can also (unintentionally) interfere with your site - for example, a product news release could do well and the product page on your site could rank lower. So it also depends what the CTA is and what you want to rank best.

Even with good content, you need a way to get it out there to get visibility which is what a service like this can do. Then again, it can also do it for not really great content.

We can't host WP on our server (long story) so we use a third party and domain map it so the URL appears to be a subdomain of our main domain.

Personally, the best benefits for SEO for blogs are when you're tying to the domain you want the "SEO juice" and links to go to, so for me this isn't my ideal solution, but it's what our system allows for. And, for our audience, it gives some authenticity to the content since it's branded the same as our main domain.

But it's also not necessarily stable. If Magento can handle the blog, that would be my first pick for how to do it. WP has some great functionality and such, but you make things a lot more complicated and lose SEO and link benefit.

I agree; don't put the brand name first. You'll do way better ranking for non-branded keywords that way and your site will naturally do well for your brand name anyway.

Depending on how similar your page titles end up being, they could be seen as duplicated. I mean, if you have 10 pages, all titled the same thing, like "Men's Watches - Acme Watches"  then you duplicated, compared to "Men's and Women's Watches - Acme Watches" for one page, then "Men's Watches" for one page.

Trying to hide things from Google is not the way to handle any issue. They don't like it and it can come back to bite you in a big way.

While some of your content may be similar to other websites, that's the same issue any website has - we have that problem with competitors having similar content about our products.

Unless you are trying to rank for those pages, for which you'd need to take on a different type of project to rank well and drive traffic, as long as you have other unique content on your site that appeals to users (and Google) it shouldn't be much of an issue.

I personally won't pay to play. These types of scenarios are often when Google algo changes can come back to bite you as it can be considered gaming the system. Yes, people do it. Yes, there are agencies that make money off of selling the service to companies. Yes, it's common, etc.

I prefer to put my attention towards trade pubs and other legit sites and put content there and get backlinks. There could be cost if the pub wants an advertorial vs them doing an article, but it's still a more legit site than many others you could end up partnering with. And prices can vary too much per pub to be able to make a generalization on cost.

I don't think the two have anything to do with each other. If there's not much - or any - competition for keywords, than ranking without trying is't unusual. And sometimes you think you don't optimize but do optimize, just not as best as you could. If you have a page, and there's content on it, and Google indexes it, it's going to associate it with keywords of some sort. I have pages that rank for things we never intentionally optimized for, either.

Oh, I think it goes back to the root of all evil: cash. We are a corporation and have several sister companies under our umbrella that, collectively, have good sized budgets. And, in fairness, we may have gotten lucky with our assigned rep

I'm not proud of it; I think it's a huge, huge miss on Google's behalf and a ding to their reputation if they play preference for advertisers (ahem, keyword unavailable). I don't envy your position because this can be so frustrating - thank goodness for groups like this where you can either find answers or commiserate?!

In my experience, in order to get  a timely reply - or a reply from a non-automated source - you have to be an advertiser. It's disappointing, but once I had an account rep, my experience changed for the better.

Thanks for confirming!

I'd appreciate feedback on a situation. We're going through a major overhaul in how we globally manage our websites.

Regional servers were part of our original plan (one in Chicago, UK, and APAC)  but we've identified a number of issues with this approach. Although it's considered a best practice among many, the challenges we'd face doing it are considerable (added complexity, added steps and delays to updating sites, among others).

So, we shifted our plan and how are looking at hosting here in the US but to use Akami to deliver images and other heavier data pieces from their local servers (in the UK, etc.).  This is how many of the larger companies like Amazon, etc. delivery their global websites.

We hope that using Akami will allow us to have good performance while simplifying our process. Any warning signs we should be aware of? Anyone doing it this way and has a good experience/bad experience?

And given that Flash is on the way out, either they change now or they are going to be hosed later

I think some of the same still applies - it depends on how competitive your keywords and industry are, how frequently you update your content, blogs, etc. Also, the main page has a lot of links which isn't unusual for many website. If you click through, the pages have deeper content.

For my industry I wouldn't do this set up as my terms are more competitive and subject matter is very different. But my site is very product/sales specific, not news-like or gossip like the one you mentioned. Google has very different expectations for those types of sites. If you have a newsy site then I could see the appeal but if you don't then I wouldn't recommend it.

Nice to meet you, too! Yes, amazing timing for Rand to share this resource

You know, it's hard to say because it could be apples to oranges of what your site is about and what that site you shared the link to is about. You have to design for your audience and fashion/manufacturing/educational/travel, etc. all have totally different sets of user expectations.

Rather than compare yourself to one site to mimic it, it may be worth looking at UX data and CRO tips and other factors to help determine what to do: http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/544-conversion-rate-optimization-tips/

While not exhaustive to your questions, Wednesday SEOMoz hosted a Mozcation in Milwaukee and one of the presenters spoke to mobile. Here's a link to his presentation, in case you find it interesting:http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/14562864?hostedIn=slideshare&page=upload