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I have a feedly account with most of the sites mentioned here piping into it. I also look at a few platform specific ones, or ecommerce specific ones like elastic commerce. But those are mainly because I deal in ecommerce.

I cross posted this thread to reddit to get the hive mind opinion on the situation. A couple of people did mention a great point, you violated Yelp's TOS by posting multiple reviews on the same company / situation.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/297rf4/it_looks_like_yelp_is_hiding_bad_reviews_again/

The reason is because of the way that your server is set up. You can read more about how asp handles errors here http://www.colincochrane.com/post/2008/01/ASP-NET-Custom-Errors-Preventing-302-Redirects-To-Custom-Error-Pages.aspx

You can check the status codes that your server is sending here, http://web-sniffer.net/

You need to link the by line to google plus, not internally to the site. See check out my site below and how I have it set up.

http://blog.dh42.com/fastest-prestashop/

See how I have a by My Name with my name being a link to my google plus profile. That is how you have to do authorship. Then in the person's google plus account you have to add the site that they are an author to. Like here is what it looks like in mine.

http://screencast.com/t/dOsZslUOI

This might help.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/08/configuring-url-parameters-in-webmaster.html

All great points. I guess where I was going with the automatic content writing is that it seems to me more people are headline readers these days, or at least short article readers. From the different content I have on my site and using things like GA and Crazy Egg, I can see that only a dwindling percentage reach the bottom of the page.

Oh, about the software that you posted, I think that could work, but at the same time I can see it being easily blocked by Google as well. I don't personally think that would increase a site in the SERP's, but it would help with auto-complete for discovering new sites. At the same time using all of the VPN's and distributed computers that the service would use I imagine it would wreck your baseline stats too.You would be essentially being flying blind for however long you used it.

More than likely the reason it was removed is that it was considered spam. One way that Yelp detects spam is from new accounts that open and leave one review to never be logged into again. I went round and round with this, because /i actually ran a promotion where /i gave people a discount to leave a review. It was basically wasted money.

How many campaigns do you have?

If you have under 30, and are wanting to upgrade to an account with more campaigns, click the little person icon in upper right of the screen. Under it click billing and subscriptions. From there you can upgrade your account. If you need more than 30, click billing information while on the billing screen and there is a box on the right to contact Moz.

I would shoot geographically close, most cities are not going to find top level data centers in their city and that is really what it comes down to. One thing to keep in mind too, is that just because a company is local it does not mean their data center is local. One that I would recommend is Web Hosting Buzz, they use a tier 3.5 data center in Atlanta. Which is more than likely geographically closer than what you are using. I am guess since you are using Bluehost you are in the Provo data center, which has had a ton of problems in the last couple of years.

One thing I would mention too is I would stay away from hosts that use data centers located in Florida for the reason of hurricanes. I know one big consideration in data center placement is natural disasters, and it would seem more likely down there.

SEO benefits, not really, but you should see a speed increase, assuming you are hosted in Provo.

I personally would use both. They way that I look at it with the OG tags is that you are controlling the consistency of the brand across platforms that you do not officially support. This is very much in my mind the same thing as making a page display correctly in older version of IE.

I wanted to ask something, which do you put more value in organic SEO or social sharing?

One thing you might be able to do is go to a local college and hire someone for work for their portfolio. I have heard stories about clients doing that and it working out well.

I have a pet peeve about these situations. I saw one posted earlier today that was really similar. I do not see why people would want to start wholesaling their products, then turn around and cut the wholesaler's out of the loop. I understand that your client more than likely makes more money selling directly to the consumer, but at the same time they do not have the reach that however many brick and mortar stores have. Plus if the companies are selling online too, they have even greater reach. What you are wanting to do is the proverbial "cutting your nose off despite your face". If the company is ok with that, just don't renew wholesaler agreements. Then you can have all of the market share.

Barring doing that, and going against good advice, give product away for free. Have an insert in the box with a code that people can enter online to get a free one of what ever they buy. Do it smartly though, issue a code range to each store, so you can track where people are coming to buy the product. Then you can create a map and see how far people are actually traveling to get the product. The people that are the furthest away from the store will be the low hanging fruit, I would push more marketing effort in to them.

Also, when you give the the free product, you might try to goad them into an automatically re-ordering system. Hype it up, so they know that they will get the product delivered when they need it. You might even have a survey of 3-4 questions to get the free product and ask them how often they purchase it. Then with that information, give them re-occurring options based on that. Also do a discount system with that, say you sell 1 bottle for $20 maybe do a 6 month subscription for $100.

What is the purpose of the company wanting to do this?

Ruben,

It does, but it is to a degree. There are multiple factors to take into consideration with improving speed to help with rankings. The first one is that Google uses some 200 ranking factors, speed from what I have researched is graduated. Like say all sites that load under 2 seconds get a full score, then sites that load 2-5 seconds get a half score, ect. The numbers are just made up, but that is what I have imagined is how things happen.

Also, you have to take into consideration that you might be moving the site geographically further from the location of googles crawling bot, which might make it seem slower for google.

Then there is the point also, that you might convert more because your site seems quicker to local users.

Is the site itself already optimized for speed? What are the normal page load times from something like pingdom?

I would not think so. If you are using a logical division of products using categories and sub categories, I cannot see that holding you back. It is really the defacto standard on how e-commerce sites work. As long as your site is not doing something weird with the re-writes on the the products I think you would be fine. A weird rewrite would be like this, say you are selling a baseball pin. If your rewrites do this site.com/baseball-things/pin.html and the page is also at site.com/baseball-things/pins/pin.html then I would highly suggest using canonical urls. Because one of the pages is going to get a duplicate content penalty.

Another thing I would suggest is if you are not already, use category descriptions for the category pages and also mix the products. You don't want your main category to have 75% of the products that a sub category has. Like in the example above, if 3/4 of the products in the baseball root category are pins, I would change that to be a more even number between the categories.

Also one other suggestion, I wouldn't use empty categories either. Like for basketball, if all you offer is trophies, I would not have a basketball category then a basketball trophies category. That would be seen as duplicate content.

I personally would think no. I think Google has a metric they use for social media sites which is out of the realm of their normal linking metric. Because a good post can gain a lot of retweets on what are essentially worthless user profiles, but be completely natural. I honestly would not be surprised if it came out that google was ranking social media accounts in a method like author rank or page rank. I am almost betting they are actually, because companies like Moz invest in products like follower wonk which also give a quasi social media rank.

Read this, http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/170059/A comparison of SPDY and HTTP performance.pdf

The only time that http is faster is when mod_pagespeed is run and you are pipelining. Most US isp's do not support pipelining, so the only real option is using a spdy layer, hence why it was created.

I set up a lot of high traffic servers, everyone of them relies on mod_spdy to serve requests because it kills over http1.1. Most sites don't use mod_spdy, most servers do not have it set up, so that is my basis for the myth. If you look at the test results running spdy with ssl is faster than apache running http1.1, which accounts for I would guess at least 70% of all *nix machines on the net.

As for security I agree that setting up SSL certificates wrong is an issue, but that does not mean that there is an issue with using SSL. It is like if someone does not lock their door and someone breaks in the house, it was not the lock's fault. I set up ecommerce site's and boxes for a living and do quite a bit of pen testing, there are not many attacks out their where someone is on a closed non public network that will actually work in the wild. I mean some of the things you list could possibly work, but in most cases it would be easier to drive over to someone's house and torture them to get the information than to try to hack a router at a CA.

I would start by sharing them yourself. Sounds spammy doesn't it? You can do it in a way that is not spammy though, let me tell ya how.

I am familiar with inmotion, I don't really care for them either, but at the same time I am a moderator for an e-commerce package called Prestashop. All the time people are asking for hosting recommendations, so this would be helpful to those people. The great part is, Prestashop has two hosting partners that they recommend, A2 and Inmotion. They have deals worked out with both of those companies, check here http://www.prestashop.com/en/industry-partners  (because of ajax, I cannot directly link you, but click webhosting partners)

This leads me to what I would do if I were you, I would troll the boards and look for people wanting recommendations, post a short message about inmotion and a link to the reviews. In the case of Prestashop I know with almost 100% certainty that it would not get flagged as spam since you are promoting a partner.

Most hosting companies have partnerships with other companies, use that and exploit it. Once you start posting the reviews, it will be more viable for other people to start posting them as well.

If you want to shoot me an email at lesley@dh42.com I took a look at your site, there are other suggestions I would think would be more beneficial than getting a closer host and would pay off greater.

In my opinion the safest way to do it would be to have a discrete iframe that loaded the contents. The reason being is that google would ignore it. It would make it on par with twitter widgets and facebook like boxes.