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EGOL makes good points here. I've seen the opposite happen, too. An SEO firm links to the Wikipedia definition of website, and I can only assume it's meant to show the search engines that they link to authoritative sites. However, it really doesn't fit in the context of the site, and makes things appear very odd.

They are extreme examples, but Adobe Reader ranks for "click here" because of all of the links pointing to it with "click here" to download adobe acrobat since the beginning of (web) time. Same with Disney and Yahoo ranking for "click here to exit", as adult/liquor sites often have a click to enter if you're over 18, and click to exit if you don't want to visit that site, and they'll link to Disney or Yahoo.

It is less than two months old, and we have a blog post about it at http://moz.com/blog/new-seo-expert-quiz with more information.

Just in case some people aren't familiar with Google's recent post about high quality sites, I'll throw that into the mix. I've edited the list, and selected things that focus more on an individual article than the site itself.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

Have you read Dr. Pete's post at http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many yet?

I'd make sure the site is verified in Google Webmaster Tools, and see if there are suggestions there about the site, or notices of anything wrong. Run it through the crawl diagnostics in Moz and see what we might pick up. Take a couple of phrases from your site, put them in Google, and make sure that it's original content and not on several other sites, or a dev site that was accidentally left up. Do a site:yoursite.com in Google to see what is indexed already.

Those are just my first few thoughts of things to look at.

Often times, Google views the meta description as more of a suggestion than a command. They'll show a different snippet depending on your search query, and there's really nothing you can do about it. Same for the title tag, they'll even change what shows in the SERPs for huge companies like Apple.

A correction to that Ryan. After two weeks, non-members can see the answers, but cannot reply. Only pro members and those with a certain threshold of mozpoints can answer after the two weeks. (I believe it is still two weeks, that's what it was initially at least).

The Google on/off tag is only good for their search appliance, which you use to run internal searches on your own site, and doesn't affect Google's main index.

The Beginner's Guide to Link Building at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building should help, too.

It will show up as N/A in the toolbar until the next time Google updates what it displays to the user in the toolbar. This can be several months behind what the true PageRank is, and can be inaccurate. Google has admitted that the PR displayed on the toolbar is not always accurate, and has been that way for years.

Rand also made a post about what to do if the "wrong" page is ranking last year at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

This has been a feature for several years, though I believe it's one that Google chooses whether to enable for you. There's a post about when it first came out at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/search-within-site-tale-of.html.

So, on the off chance this isn't just a shill question/response, and for the benefit of others reading the answers, I'll explain what I meant a little more.

Using an automated tool to create a bunch of links is not natural, and goes against search engine guidelines. In addition, you're likely to leave some footprints to the engines that will identify your blog network, and could result in getting the whole network slapped.

If you were at a conference and met with a search engine rep, would you be comfortable explaining these links when asking about your site?

Is this your own site, or a client site? If it's a client site, are they aware of any potential risks this type of linking brings to the site?

There are other forum sites that are better for a discussion of GSA versus ScrapeBox. The Moz Q&A area isn't a site where you're likely to get a lot of positive responses on this type of question.

Roger is very reluctant to delete questions, and feels that it most cases, it's not TAGFEE to do so. Usually by the time the original poster wants to delete a question, there are multiple responses, and deleting the questions would also remove the effort the other community members have put in to answer the question, and remove the opportunity for other people to learn from the experience.

Do the users have a chance for an expanded question beyond the 64 characters, or is that the proposed entire question limit? If that's the entire question limit, I would certainly say to not limit it so much.

The question at http://recessionitis.com/what-is-the-lowest-fare-roundtrip-to-atlanta-from-oakland-california/ is "What is the lowest round trip fare to Atlanta from Oakland, CA?", which is 63 characters. There's a response asking what dates, yet the OP never responded.

My gut says that by limiting the question so much you're going to limit the amount of information the person is able to give, and thus limit the amount of answer a person can give without knowing more detail, and you may never be able to get that detail out of the OP in time. Or, you'll have someone answer, only to have the OP come back and say "oh, but I don't want any layovers" or "I refuse to travel on airline xyz". You're still likely to get people who don't make complete questions, but I would say don't hamstring those who did want to give more information just because you don't want to trigger the "..." in the SERP.

You don't want a copy of your website out there. Ask your developers to block that demo server in robots.txt, and consider putting a password on it as well just for extra security.

Do you have any conversion events or conversion tracking in place? Any way to look in your analytics or paid advertising and show the boss that "hey, people coming in that searched for 'liquidation' have fewer page views, lower conversion, and higher bounce rate than those who come in for '[specific term] liquidation"? Because you'll get people who are searching for information for physics class, people who are searching for sales happening at a local mall, etc.

Hi Limens,

It is certainly fine to use a subdirectory, and can really make sense to help organize your content. It's also helpful in your analytics if you want to see who went to the blog area of your site versus the product area of your site.

It would help to know a little more about your site, but I would choose neither of the above. I'd actually go with something like domain.com/cooking/lasagna/. Note that I'm not including the .php. If you later switch to a different language, you won't have to redirect from php to asp or html, etc.

I wouldn't stuff your subfolder in your URL with keywords like the tasty-food in your example below. It just makes your URL longer and look a little more spammy to the human eye.

Egol echoes what I was going to write. Would you trust someone else with a major portion of your website?

What immediately came to mind was this MySpace incident with John McCain in 2007. http://techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/