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Don, there is a very safe bet that the bots that are spamming forms across the web do not adhere to the "nofollow" or "noindex" meta tags that search engines use. Recently there was a post on MOZ that covered some great alternatives to CAPTCHAs though:
http://moz.com/blog/having-a-captcha-is-killing-your-conversion-rate
Good luck!
You shouldn't receive any penalties if you are redirecting relevant domains that are associated to your brand. If you are worried that they are not relevant or could be tied to spam you may be better to 302 redirect those specific ones but it all depends on the domains and how you acquired them.
The link tracking is using a 301 redirect so 99% of the juice will be passed along to your page. As Jason said OSE has a slight lag with updating their index. Try out http://www.majesticseo.com/ for additional link information. In my experience they tend to update their fresh index more offten.
Good luck 
- Kyle
Hey Justin, it is a pretty long and specific process. However there is close to 50 different blogs and articles published on MOZ alone for it. I'd start here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amoz.com%2Fblog%2F+%2B+unnatural+link+removal
Hope this helps!
Part One:
If the only reason you would spend $1000 on a domain is because of its age then i think it is a bad idea. Focus on a domain name that makes sense for the company and its mission, don't make ALL your decisions in the name of SEO. If it happens to have a targeted keyword in the domain or some old backlinks, then bonus.
Part Two:
Do you have to have a .com to rank well, of course not. However a few things to think about if you go with what you are thinking in part two...
Personally, without knowing any other details on the project, i would keep looking. Find a .com domain if that is what you truly want. Keep wordsmithing different variations and utilize Google's keyword tool to give suggestions. You'll find a winner eventually.
Good luck - Kyle
I would highly suggest using CPM (cost per thousand impression) pricing structure for your content network campaigns. You can get a lot more bang for your buck than paying per click.
For example lets assume you get 1000 impressions with only a 3% CTR. This means you have around 30 clicks for $0.45 a piece, which means your total cost is $13.50.
If you would have instead setup your campaign to bid $1.50 per/thousand impressions you could have saved $12 dollars. Then taking it another step further, what if you have a CTR of 5%? you still only pay the $1.50 even though you are receiving more clicks.
As you can tell these are just made up figures and I understand each case is different, but i would definitely suggest looking into it. From my experience i have never paid more than $1.50 per thousand impressions (and that was for the keyword "stimulus reimbursement" during the health care reform bill craziness).
Try and do you best to stick to quality websites for links but most importantly make sure the link is tied to relevant content. Beyond that i always look at 3 factors when choosing places to reach out to:
Also if you ever want a sanity check on your link profile, http://www.linkdetox.com/, does an awesome job of automating the process of telling you good, suspicious and toxic links in your profile. Plus it is only $40 for the tool which is totally worth it!
Good luck!
Thanks for the input Cyrus!
If your interested, here is what ended up happening:
It turned out that my colleague, the person who was pressuring me to find the research, had read some hubspot powerpoints that talked about the size of your website and how much inbound traffic you can receive, rather than the size of your website being a ranking factor. So this was my response back:
It sounds like we are both trying to answer a slightly different question. I was looking for “Does a site’s size determine its ability to rank in search engines". You were looking for “Does a site’s size effect the amount of traffic it receives”
While they both seem very similar they are quite different. In regards to a site’s size being a ranking factor I would disagree. A site’s ability to rank for a given term is based on its external linking factors, social mentions and on-page targeting. This is why even smaller websites and companies can be competitive for individual keyword terms. However I would completely agree that a site’s size does give you a better opportunity to gain more overall traffic because there is more content to be indexed in search engines and shared across social networks, blogs, directories, etc..
In the end they decided to take the suggestion and combine the product and demo pages to help increase their page's authority and in turn its ranking position.
I agree social media is a most... depending on the niche. My normal suggestion for people trying to ease into social media is to use social bookmarking (add this, share this, etc). With social bookmarking you can see what channels your users prefer and based on your analytics you can make educated steps with your social media plan.
Hey Mozzers - i was hoping to have a discussion with you guys on conversion rates and would love any feedback on comparative metrics. I plan on keeping my client anonymous and feel free to do the same if you would like.
Lets start with some background. This client is an online retailer selling golf training ads, the products range from $20-40, he is based out of the US and this site is targeting consumers (B2C).
So far i have assisted him with some site analysis and setting up some pay-per-click campaigns. I feel like his site is doing pretty well conversion-wise but i have little experience with conversion metrics with ecommerce (mostly just lead generation, etc).
Here is a quick break down on channel conversion rates:
PPC: 0.8% - 1.7%
Organic: 6.8% - 15%
Direct: 6.2% - 13%
His overall site conversion rate is between 2-3%
So my question is to you guys. Is this average, above, or below in your past experiences? Based on my research a site conversion rate of 2-3 is pretty good for ecommerce, however i felt like my PPC conversion rate is kind of low.
Thanks for the insight - Kyle
A 302 status code is a temporary redirect which, depending on the circumstances, can cause issues with search engine ranks. Here is a great infographic from Dr Pete on status codes and how it effects each user in relation to SEO:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes
If you would want end users to redirect to that page and NOT search engines, then the current setup is fine. However, if you would want to send search engines, end users AND link equity then you would want to recreate that as a 301. This process normally requires access to your hosting environment as well as some technical knowledge.
Hope this helps - Kyle
I've always had a great experience with 99designs but you want to make sure you give a lot of requirements and inspiration if you want to get exactly what your looking for. I've only used them for logo work though so i can't give much feedback for other types of projects. What are your price points?
There is no benefit or negative aspect to either - pick one and stick with for your own internal linking structure, external linking structure, Google Webmaster Tools setup and outreach. I also suggest doing a redirect from the one that you do not choose to the one that you choose. For instance if you want to go with www.domain.com, make sure you 301 redirect any traffic from domain.com.
In my experiences there is no direct correlation with ppc and organic. However, i have noticed one indirect benefits of pay-per-click overall. When running a ppc campaign through Google they re-scan your site very often to create your keyword's quality score. Due to this increase in crawling i have found that new content gets indexed faster.
Once again, this is an indirect benefit. In no way does a quick indexation mean a higher rank. it just simply means you turn around on releasing content can be faster.
If i do not have a relevant page to redirect them to i always send them back to the homepage. This way the end user, search engines and link equity are still brought back to the highest level page. It isn't the best case scenario but it is better than losing your equity and end users getting an error.
Hope this helps!
Brent - thank you for finding my post, i thought it was forever lost!
They had created a custom template, however i will still suggest them try the TAC plugin just incase. I will post the results once i get them.
Thanks again - Kyle
My two all time favorite tools (free to a certain degree) are Ubersuggest and SpyFu.
Ubersuggest gives you a lot of keyword variations and suggestions while SpyFU can be used to look at how your site compares to your competitors. I also would suggest letting Google SERPs give you an idea, try using long tail keywords related to your site and see what others are targeting.
Hope this helps!
Tom is spot on with tools for a link profile analysis.
If you know that you are being penalized by Google (via a warning message) i would also suggest checking out www.linkdetox.com to give you a quick run down on what are good, bad, and suspicious links for removal.
Good luck!
Kerri - this is awesome! My wife and her students are going to be so excited! I will send something via email shortly. Thank you again!
This happened to me in the past. My client's site had a custom 404 that redirect all missing pages to the homepage. When roger bot (seomoz crawler) searched for the robots.txt page (that was non-existent) it continually got redirect to the homepage.
So on that note, check if you have a robots.txt file. If not, add one and see if it solves the problem.