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I had the same problem with Chinese and received a very honest response via e-mail:

Hi Kevin

I feel like I've got to be honest with you. It's an old tool and we're not very proud of it anymore. It doesn't take advantage of our awesome web index, or all the cool analysis we've done around powerful links. We're working instead to replace it with more powerful link tools. Our newer tools are built to support Unicode, but most of our older ones don't. Sorry about that!

For example, I think you'd be much better off trying our Competitive Link Research Tool (it's in Labs and therefore sometimes gets overloaded, but it's so cool when it works!), or even running your competitors through Open Site Explorer.

www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
www.opensiteexplorer.org

The bottom line is that Juicy Link Finder is unstable and doesn't support Unicode (because we're deprecating it in favor of new technologies), and it doesn't give you very sophisticated results.

I'm going to take a stab at this one and try to stay as unbiased as possible. First thing to consider here is if those sites hosting these profile pages have noteworthy domain authority. I'm not sure how many reputable sites really allow link juice to flow in profile pages as you mentioned, but if this is the case, then it's reasonable to assume this link will count as a followed linking root domain. This has, indeed, been noted as one of the most important factors in search ranking, but there are other forces at work that limit the benefit of this kind of inbound linking technique. I wouldn't call this black hat per se, put I wouldn't focus my efforts on chasing this competitor on these sites either.

Watch some webinars here and you'll learn that links that never get clicked aren't contributing a lot to your ranking or the linking site's domain authority. And a sudden massive increase in linking root domains without an increase in traffic raises red flags that someone is trying to manipulate the system, ie. engaging in black hat SEO activities. Also note that Google loves fresh content, so I'd rest easy knowing that these links will go stale at some point in the near future, especially with no good copy to entice visitors to click the link.

So instead of worrying about your competitors who are focused on short term rankings, write some good articles about your products and services and start getting the word out; build trust and extend your brand. There is so much more you can focus on that will get people to visit your site and spend money, which is the whole point of having your Internet business. So I would try not to worry about cheaters. Even if these competitors are ranking higher for the time being, I'm willing to bet they are probably not putting much energy into selling.

Since your using Volusion, you'll need to check their documentation and contact their support to see what can be done. You can certainly add parameters and tell GWT how to handle these search and sort URLs, and you can edit your robots.txt to block search engines from indexing those overly dynamic pages.

Maybe you can turn off the sorting, pagination, and search features if you don't need them, but do it to improve the visitor experience, not for the search engines.

But I doubt those pages get indexed by Google now anyway, so don't worry too much. These aren't going to hurt your rank for the majority of your key words and target pages (unless of course your key word is "searching").

When you say you're stuck behind competition, are you referring to sales, traffic, search results or some other measurement? I hope you're talking about sales, because even though we're here on SEOmoz, the point of all this is to get more people to buy (or whatever you consider a conversion to be). Share some more details about what you've done so far, and I'm sure we'll all pitch in to get you ahead (wherever that is). Good luck!

This is a hard one, I'm sure. In regards to search, I've read that Facebook pays close attention to verbs and that Google takes into account related words close to anchor text and search terms.

Now I have the unique opportunity to work as the internet sales and marketing consultant for a company in serious need of brand reputation repair. The company has experienced a terrible fallout from a recent product recall. Unfortunately in this case, the company site has really strong reach, which means that our blog posts, product descriptions, and twitter comments can be found copied on hundreds of websites hours after they are posted.

The most recent incident has associated our brand name with words like cheaters, scam, phoney, copycat, and other words that will certainly get filtered here. All my attempts to assure unconditional refunds and offer phone support get labeled as a desperate attempt to save the brand. No doubt, the company has issues but will surely overcome them in time.

SEO Question: Should I close the Facebook page and set strong filters on a new page to delete the onslaught of negative comments or should we spend the time to clean up the current page? This is a difficult decision, as I know many companies like Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Rackspace actually look at Facebook pages to qualify business leads (no fans, go home).

Damage control suggestions also welcome, but the crux of this issue here is how our brand name and product names will be associated with cuss words or negative terms and how this will affect our ranking in SERPs.

The only issue I see here is that you said "clients." Are these clients of yours all hosted on the same server with the same IP? Google does take this into account, notably to punish server farms and the like. I'm not exactly sure what levels of cross-linking will count for or against you, but I imagine these sites are relatively small with low domain authority so it shouldn't be an issue.

I might consider posting the doctor's articles on reputable medical sites and then link your clients' sites to articles on these bigger sites with higher domain authority. Try to get your wine articles on other wine related sites as well. You can also try using Zemanta to help with getting more people to link to this content.

You can use http://Validator.nu/ to validate HTML 5 + Microdata, plus Google doesn't really care if you are W3C compliant as long as you're site doesn't have an overabundance of coding errors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3KgrbiB1pc

About Keyword stuffing, check out some articles by Matt

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/avoid-keyword-stuffing/

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-not-checking-your-site/

Thanks for the posts everybody. Confirming that I've done everything I have influence over, I guess that settles it. I just tried searching for more on this after reading Matt Cutts, Eric Ward, Joost de Valk, and others SEO pros share different info.

On to other SEO issues. Awesome to be back at SEOmoz guys!

The word your looking for is content personalization. It's the new thing with CMS providers, especially e-commerce sites. Most platforms with this feature are commercial, but there options like http://wordpress.org/plugins/siteapps/. I haven't used that plugin but it looks promising.

Well, I can share an experience with a client of mine who, without my condonation, ran a Groupon campaign hoping to drive more customers to his restaurant but also to drive traffic to his site. He intentionally stuffed links in his Groupon description posted on Groupon. I monitored local search results for two months after he ran this campaign, and while he made out okay on his Groupon, his site traffic didn't move all that much.

I know this is different than a PR service, but I think it'd be safe to assume Google has quite a bit of information on who charges money for "descriptions" and "public relation" postings. If you really want an inbound link from this site, and assuming the domain authority is significantly high, see if there is any other way to get that particular site to post a link to your website. I'm not convinced the cost is worth a few mentions in an article that will become outdated and probably won't generate much traffic to your site.

Now if I've misunderstood your situation, please clarify and maybe I can add something to help you make a better choice on how to spend your hard earned money.

If they are tags then they should show up in the tag section of Posts or possibly in the comments. Not sure if you allow uploads to your site, but if you do you should check out the upload folder(s). Keep in mind, these URLs could be showing up somewhere out in cyberspace, not necessarily on your site. Take those steps I pointed out and you should see those ugly URLs go away within a few weeks, not accounting for other factors.

Use the Google Rich Snippet Testing tool http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Your snippets are showing fine, but you should mark up your reviews section. Also best not to mix schemas.

Hi Eric,

I would recommend the Yoast WordPress plugin available at http://yoast.com/wordpress/. This plugin covers pretty much all the SEO issues you'll encounter in WordPress, plus there is a handy tool that will analyze important text fields in your posts to see if your articles are optimized for the keywords you're looking to rank for. This plugin won't put heading tags in the template, but I think it's worth a look.

Another consideration for WordPress is your permalink URL structure. As of WordPress 3.1.2, there is a definite performance issue when starting the permalink structure with either the category, tag, author, or postname fields. You can read more under "Structure Tags" at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. I'm not sure how this affects SEO, so it'd be great to get some feedback on ranking results using different WordPress URL structures.

Funny I just looked this up today trying to help someone here. Basically, you're adding a backlink to your site and I can't find any information to get you a solid answer. In general, you need to consider any link's relevance, reputation, and trust. so if a backlink isn't relevant to the site, will it get flagged as an ad? Might webmaster backlinks be considered paid links?

I did find this Matt Cutts video on footer links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE and it seems Google can weigh footer links and editorial links differently, and I think that's your answer. But I also came across this article http://blog.ahrefs.com/matt-cutts-says-google-cracking-bloggers-bribed-links/ that's says Google is basically cracking down on the kind of links you're describing.

But at the end of the day, are you getting a significant CTR from these links? If that's the case, nofollow those links and perhaps Google might actually counts them more. Who really knows?

Uh, I can't think of a reason to do that really, especially for internal links. I can't imagine those are paid links, so I'd remove the nofollow. And I'd take out that link to the developer's blog, too. Bring out the axe!

Looks like you're using mcroformat, opengraph, and microdata. Google promotes Schema.org so you should use that.

Also, get a Google+ account and establish authorship, then include that, too.

Glad you asked! A great way to do this is to follow the internet citation standards in your industry (simple search will get  you nice results) and then include structured markup (microdata) http://schema.org/MedicalScholarlyArticle

As for links, search engines look at the hypertext inside the link element (the text in-between the <a>text</a>) and attributes like title, rel, etc. So try something like:

<a <span="">id="source" rel="external" href="http://link/to/your/source" title="title of your source">Your source title or key word</a>

Redirects usually don't pass all link juice to the target URL but may in time. You won't get accurate reports on the www version of your site because it's redirecting to the non-www URL, so use this primary URL when running reports with SEO tools. Regarding the number of links, you may find that people generally link to the www version just by habit, and that's why I personally still use this as my primary for most projects.

Another thing to do is check Google WMT to make sure both www and non-www properties are listed. You'll then be able to select the preferred domain in site settings.

You didn't ask but I'd strongly suggest you go over some PageSpeed and YSlow recommendation. It's very slow and JS heavy, and this is simply bad for all the reasons you already know.

Google has stated they are better now at relating subdomain content to the TLD domain, but you're probably still better off using a subfolder. If you do go with a subdomain, make sure to link them in your GA code for better reporting.

There are so many languages spoken in Malaysia that this domain issue is really not going to help visitors on your site. If you're going for consistency, you'd need subfolders or subdomains for all supported languages. If you're only using English, then I wouldn't even consider this change. Simply use www.domainname.com.au/malaysia/ to host content relevant to this market until you can get your TLD. This would send the strongest signal to both search engines and site visitors that your content is targeted for Malaysia.

Coinidentally, I just touched on that today here http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-title-tags-how-to-solve-that

I would go the way of subfolder over subdomain. There is a lot of info out there, but the crux of it comes down to all traffic improving domain rank for a single TLD. If you go the route of ccTLDs instead of subfolders, then you're spitting that rank among those domains. What circumstances would prevent you from concentrate all link juice to one domain? Then that duplicate content issue you're fearing becomes a nonissue.