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So, its official that Panda 2.3 is out.. Has anyone found the fine print on what this "version" focused on?

quick point of clarification - i wasnt suggesting hiding the text, just utilizing alt tags..

would it be possible to provide the example or an example? without more information it would be vague guesses at best.

I came here to tell him to do the exact opposite! I was going to suggest doing one change at a time to measure and or A/B test results to make sure maximum benefit of each was given.  After reading your response and his issues, i've changed my opinion and agree with you that its probably best to do all of these at once in one MAJOR revision and then tweak after that.

I've done it on some websites and I havent on others.. It really depends on the design elements we've been incorporating.  I think if you can have the text there without a complete design overhaul that would be considered best practices, but I havent been penalized by google when I have done it with img tag.  I do believe that google doesnt pass as much juice through the alt tag though, so you'll have to be clever with your CSS.

Im shocked you've been having issues with dreamhost... I absolutely love them.  I havent heard of the other hosting companies you've mentioned, but anything with "Seo" and "hosting" sounds like a gimmick to me.. If you are unsatisfied, I've also used hosting.com for some cf stuff we've had to do and they are pretty good.

are you talking about SEOmoz campaigns? adwords campaigns? analytics?  Also it'll help if you give a little background information so we can guide you into the right direction for drilling down what you need to do.

I highly recommend http://splashmedia.com/  they're a local company that has a track record of success including i think 11+ emmys?  they are also affordable. I actually almost went to work for them, but the deal fell apart - that being said they're an amazing company for video

Google and the other search engines have pretty good systems in place to detect and protect against clickfraud.  They have billions of dollars invested into the reliability of their ad programs.  I wouldn't be overly concerned but you should definitely use analytics tools to monitor your data.  If you suspect clickfraud, definitely let the correct representatives know and they will investigate.. Google in particular has been very good at making reps more available to endusers even with lower adspend.

Click Fraud is much less of an issue today than it was a decade ago.  These companies have too much too lose if the reliability of the ad system were compromised.  They need to serve relevant ads to relevant searchers otherwise advertisers wont pay and the system would break.

Agree with EGOL.  if you can create some amazing linkbait content - think viral, creative, or awesome infographic you could in theory leverage this to a short burts of traffic, inbound links etc.  depending on the site and content you could leverage on digg, reddit, stumpleupon, etc. the problem with these social sites is that you typically have to be an active member to start leveraging links and information for real value.

are you talking about versions of sites to see how old that particular website is or the domain?

obviously whois information is great for domains

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

there is also a way to see old versions of websites here:

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

AUguides.com would probably be the best one of of the available you've listed.  i'd avoid anything with two letters together a la venueexplorer.com  that being said the trends right now are for short unique bit.ly bizzy.com etc.  you might go back to the drawing board but I dont see anything wrong with AUguides.com  if you brand it correctly you could have something special .

I agree with chris.. could provide specific examples.. It would help to find the cause of the problem.  Also, are you keeping the old pages and new pages accessible or have you removed the old pages?

Seeing as youtube is a google property they can do what they want  additionally, google has been known to change title tags in their SERPs from time to time and lately they've been doing it more.  here is some more information directly from google -

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=679eb9f272a5a3bf&hl=en

I would say any traffic is good traffic as long as it is the correct traffic.  If someone is searching for something irrelevant and finding your website, then you should probably add a nofollow tag to tell the search engines not to look at the landing pages.  If it is relevant I dont see why you would want to remove it.  You might have a link to the specific landing pages under a "specials" section or whatever your value prop is that you're using on the landing pages.

I wouldn't say that seomoz has a literal direct effect on helping your pagerank.  It does however provide valuable tools to analyze what you're doing right and wrong in terms of SEO strategies, link building etc.   SEOmoz also has this forum and public and private questions to help point you in the right direction for your optimization.  Additionally, you get a followed linkback after you have 200 MozPoints, but that shouldnt be the only reason to use the website.  Your best bet would be to start with the research tools and find out what you're doing and then ask questions from there.  You'll see increased results in no time.

The company I work for did a complete text and layout overhaul in October of last year and it was a brutal undertaking.  We were transitioning from ASP.net to PHP and implementing a new CMS.  This meant we had to do the entire site at once.  There were a few hiccups, but we found the complete overhaul to be fairly seamless.. some things to keep in mind are making sure the 301 URLs are working correctly, launch the website during low traffic times (weekend)  to work out any unforeseen kinks, and request feedback from your visitors to see what they like / dislike for future changes.

First,

I want to say thank you to the support i've been getting from everyone in this community over the last few months.  Im glad to be a part of something that isnt full of flammers and haters... and happy late 4th of july...

I implemented canonical tags on a clients website (job board with tons of job postings) and the pagerank has almost immediately rebounded from 2.3 - 4.6.  it was a little higher pre-panda, but im happy with the rebound.

has anyone had experience on how long it usually takes for the keyword rankings to rebound after changes are made?

google recached the site this morning, but im still waiting to see traffic bumps.

Thanks!

I don't know if there are any real effective "free newswires"  You may be able to find a database of press contacts for your particular industry, but most companies  vocas / prweb / and busineseswire attempt to make $$ for putting press through the wire.

As for the 3 mentioned newswires above, i have used all three and can safely say that businesswire is leaps and bounds better than vocus / prweb... the rub is that it is also exponentially more expensive.  bwire does offer real organic SEO with their news outlets as opposed to the other two.

however, for decent inexpensive reach, i can recommend prweb.  You can get a good press release out on the wire for about 80.00.

I hope this helps.. if you have any more detailed questions about these, ill be more than happy to clarify in greater detail.

well i was hoping to avoid getting political with this post.  Id like to avoid the DOJ investigation if possible and leave that for another topic that would directly discuss monopolistic intent.  I am unsure if providing the best product is considered a monopoly....