I gave a concrete answer, I said disavow them. The simple reason being is that YOU need to manipulate the link direction of your website, not someone else.

Always use the disavow tool for anything that you did not create or would not want created. The higher the sites PR, the more links it will take to drop the PR and get a penalty. Think how hard it would be to spam facebook or twitter for google to level a penalty on them. The lower the page rank, the easier it is to get a penalty leveled. Its a matter of numbers really. If you have 150 good links, they can be washed away with 5000 bad links. But Facebook who might have 10,000,000 good links, it would take 5bn or more links to do it.

If it were me I would disavow them. You don't want them, you don't want to have to lose sleep over them. 6 months later if the site dips in rankings, you will always wonder if it was the bad backlinks.

Don't get me wrong, I think social media is a great marketing tool, but it is totally dependent on the product(s). In my mind there are 3 types of products / services; the buy routinely products, the buy every several months products, and the buy every several year products.

Social media works awesomely for the routinely products, it is almost a remind in the sense of "Hey I am getting low on that I need to buy more". Some examples are makeup, food, household cleaner, ect

The every several months products, I think it helps to keep you in mind for the next purchase. Which on its on is never a bad thing, but it is also harder to track. Examples of those products are season clothing, home services, consumer electronics(excluding cell phones) things of that nature.

For the every few years products, I think the ROI is very low. Think things like cell phones, cars, computers (for average people not designer / developers). See the reason is, I might like Samsung on Facebook and like their newest phone. But if I bought my phone 2 months ago, I will never buy that latest greatest phone they have out now. In 10-22 months, I will buy the latest and greatest that is out then. People tend to research the not so often buys more than they do the other buys, usually because they cost more. I am not going to buy a new Corvette because of a Facebook post, but I would want to buy one after reading a third party (it could actually be paid / advertising) of how it is sooo much better than a Mustang.

I think if you have a routinely bought product, it is easy to capitalize on. On my person facebook, I have a big brand food that I liked once. They post on Mondays a lot to the tune of "Had a hard day and don't feel like cooking dinner? Let us cook for you" I think there is a lot of merit in those posts. They do it often enough, I would have to think that it works.

Without giving away too much detail, I have a client that has currently about 40k unique visitors a month. I try to shoot for putting 10% on every month, but fall short sometimes. We reached out to some video bloggers a couple months back about doing reviews of the products they sell. One blogger had 50k followers and quoted us $5k for the review, a few more with the same level of followers quote between $1-2k for doing them. We happened upon on blogger that had almost 90k followers that did it for free product. Mind you the product retails for under $50, so we send several samples to the youtuber. From that one video, the next day, we tracked almost 10k visitors to the site and in that week we attributed about $8k in total sales (gross) to that one video. For under $75 in total costs. I almost felt like making an advertisement saying "Let me teach you the one secret trick SEO companies don't want you to know.." It was awesome, so we have been banging that out for the last several months and sales are sky rocketing. The thing I have figured out about it, is the people that are not aware of the product are being reached.

One tip I would give to finding those bloggers is search your competition and see who they are using.

Another interesting thought is this. Say you send an "newsletter" once a week, and post to facebook daily. Have you ever pulled a metric for a week against those two methods? I generally get a better result from the emails over a weeks time. I mean honestly, they pop when the email is sent and that usually beats the weekly facebook number.

In my mind, since I do not deal with leads and affiliate advertising sites, it breaks down to sales numbers. If I doubled a clients sales in a month by going out to a farm and whispering in a goats ear, they would be just as happy if I had doubled them through facebook.

Thanks for the tweet, I just starting using the moz forums a few days ago, I am still trying to get the hang of it. I am a moderator in an e-commerce forum that has a SEO board, but this is very different for me.

From my understanding, that is not what that tag is for. You can read more about it here, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

As a suggestion, I would recommend having different content. Just because they both speak english, it does not mean that they speak the same flavor of english. If you can change the content enough to suit the people in the UK I think you will have better overall results.

The reason I like Rafflecopter is the points system. As far as analytics, they are so-so in the scope of a contest I feel. It is mostly about exposure to people that will enter a contest. There is a market segment of people that will buy your product and be life long devotees, but will never enter a contest. Then there are people that will never buy your product, but they will enter a contest for everything. There are two keys to contests like this, exposure and not preaching to the choir.

Honestly, my market segment is e-commerce, with social media I think a lot of people cannot see the forest for the trees. Social engagement is nice, but honestly it means nothing. I have clients that have huge numbers of facebook, twitter, pinterest, and other followers but convert little to any. I hear so many people say social media is where it is at. For some companies it truly is, but others it is a waste of money. With my clients the goal is to increase sales, if that happens by increasing social engagement, great. The best way I have found to increase social engagement is by increasing the social reach. That is where not preaching to the choir comes in. You minimally want to advertise the contest to current followers on facebook, because you have already captivated them. Why preach to the people you already have? You want to reach different people, that is where the bloggers come in. You are reaching out to people are not in your network and might not be aware of your product. Those are the new followers you want. They interact with the blog, they follow it, they can do the same for you.

i know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I think the whole affiliate marketing companies are skeezy and have low interest people. People do not frequent affiliate sites, so why are they going to frequent yours?

Think about it in perspective, lots of us follow Matt Cutts and Rand, people read every word they say and love it. Those are the kind of followers that you want. Not the kind that come from affiliates. Honestly what value do affiliate sites hold? their followers hold about the same value.

Notice my first sentence "Depending on how they are using the brand name..."  my whole post hangs on that.

Depending on how they are using the brand name, it might be a legal matter. It could be something easy enough as filing a DMCA notice with their hosting company or sending them a cease and desist notice. They aren't immediate solutions, but they will solve the problem.

One method that I have had really good results with is Rafflecopter. Like everything else it is not a miracle program, it all depends on how you use it. If I had your budget per giveaway this is what I would do.

Use $500 instead of $1000, Once it gets to a point, the monetary value means little for the entries.

I would use the remaining $500 to contact 3-4 good high traffic bloggers and see if they would write a short article on their site about the giveaway. The best way to do it is find bloggers in the same market arena as your client company. I would also submit the contest to all of the contest sites on the internet. There are actually people that sit around and fill out contests all day long. If you company falls in line with what reddit likes, I would consider posting their also, they can achieve some great results.

For the actual contest, in Rafflecopter, the way I would set it up is this.

5 points for liking on facebook

5 points for following on twitter

5 points for tweeting a message (have the message be about the contest, and have people be able to tweet about it daily)

10 points for writing a blog post OR a forum post about the contest (use the custom method and have them submit the url)

10 points for signing up to your mailing list (if you have one, if not disregard)

And also set up viral sharing, so people can use the send to a friend for more entries.

Depending on how much you want to push things, the policy of your company, and the local laws, I would also email the entrants a couple times during the contest to remind them that they can enter again by tweeting. Using Rafflecopter, everyone that enters, you will get their email address.

Some of the things are open to be tweaked and changed. Like with the bloggers, if you are at a major company that people like, you can get away with not paying bloggers. You can also get away with rewarding them by adding a entry option to like their facebook page. But again that all depends on the company you are at and the image they portray.

Hope this helps some.

It is going to be a little bit more difficult than that. Unless you have a wildcard certificate your ssl certificate is not good for sub domains. www.site.com is considered a sub domain of site.com. That being said, I would use url rewriting to handle the problem. Here is a small example of what you could use.

Rewrite Rules for site.com

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

Redirect from example.com to www.site.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Turn SSL on for payments

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} /payments.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Turn SSL off everything but payments

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !/payments.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

You will have to enter the other pages that you want to be ssl too, this should get you started though.

It looks like it is a cache problem to me, everything works on this end.

One thing I would recommend is adding a redirect, redirecting your general pages to the non secure http. All of your pages seem to be able to be accessed with both protocols. I would leave the checkout process, login, user account, and contact pages behind the https, and make them only redirect to https.

No problem. What platform do you use, because you can include what CleverPhD said as well, it really just depends on how the headers of the template are generated. I am not familiar with a platform that uses directories for the cart pages, but I am sure that some exist. One thing to watch out for if you try to no follow a whole directory is, some carts put all of their secured (ssl) pages in the same place. This could include the contact page, which you want to leave index able. If you are not familiar with coding in the platform, I would avoid it, because if you got the conditional code wrong, you could de-index a portion of your site accidentally.

Generally you always disallow the cart page in e-commerce sites. The reason being is that some spiders like baidu, will make fake shopping carts when spidering your site. If you keep track of your abandoned cart rate, this will wreak havoc on your stats.

When you disallow the cart.php, it will keep the whole page from being indexed, which ideally is not a bad thing. More than likely the way your cart works is it uses ajax to post the product to that page silently to add it to the cart. But at the same time if you go to site.com/cart.php it will more than likely take you to the cart screen. There really is no inherit value in having that page indexed by search engines. If people are coming to that page, it will also skew your numbers when you are trying to figure why people are dropping out of the checkout process.

I would leave them be. Use accurate meta tags initially, then just let them stay. One thing I would add if it is possible, is to use authorship rich snippets. If the news articles are reviewed, add that one too. Another suggestion I might give is to internally link them to newer articles. Like say you have one from 2007 that talks about Googles stock price, I would link it to the most current one that talks about Googles stock price and put a little message in about an updated article. Other than that, I think you will be fine.

This might give you some information about the site as a whole, http://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fmoz.com%2fcommunity%2fq   RoR is what it looks like the site is built in.

Generally yes it will. The cases that I have seen it not work is when people use a plugin that turns their site into a responsive theme. But people using those these days are rare.

I am shooting off of the hip, were you the one that down voted my answer that pretty much said that?

1. Correct, it is best not to use manufacturers descriptions alone, you need to water it down with more on page content or you need to have your own written (best case).

2. Ehh, I know it will be contrary to what other people do here, but I always put the 3 products on one page and use combinations to access them. Depending on the platform you use, you can use a query string to set the product displayed by default too. I know a lot of people go for more pages, but I go for more / better content on one page. I don't think the searches between colors of the product will vary enough to warrant 2 more pages. Plus, in e-commerce it can hurt you in the form of lost orders. If someone lands on the wrong color product they might just hit back in google and try the next site.

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/

Sorry, with Moz all you can do are root domains like site.com or sub domains like blog.site.com. You cannot do folders like site.com/product

You cannot track single pages like that with Moz.