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The first, and easiest, thing to try would be to redirect from the old domain to the new one. You don't need to install the old site again to do that.

With most hosting set-ups you can "park" another domain over the main one. If you do that it will appear to work. However you also need to ensure that you have a 301 redirect in place. This is just one line added to an .htaccess file on the server.  If your web guy doesn't know this stuff find someone who does to make sure it is in place and correct as it is vital (then start looking for a new web guy)

That will at least ensure that any link equity the old domain has is being passed to the new site. However it doesn't address whether the new site is as well optimised as the old one.  The on page optimiser tools here on seomoz might be useful in checking that.  It is quite simplistic though and it is only dealing with a page at a time rather than the overall site. However it might give you an indication as to whether you are likely to face problems with the on site stuff.

Hope that is some help.

You have both in the page title there anyway, so it must literally be the product name you are considering changing.

I really, REALLY wouldn't do that. You already have a product image showing multiple items. If your product name was also the plural I think you'd risk upsetting quite a few customers - you don't exactly make it clear looking at the page.

Customers first. Always. What's the point otherwise? Higher rankings, but less sales.  In fact if I were optimising that page my first step would probably be to use that default overiew tab to ensure that everyone knew exactly what they were buying.

I think that your product pages are also a bit heavy on the keyword stuffing. I'm all for making things clear, but there are a lot of uses of the key terms going on.  Maybe run some key pages through the onpage optimisation tool as well: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

What worries me is that the easiest way to apply such a penalty is probably to devalue links that appear to be part of an author box (one of several easy to spot footprints of most guest blogging). This isn't the best way, but it would be incredibly easy to do.  If that happens then it would really be a case of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", but we've already seen this year that Google is happy to do this if it discourages manipulation.

I've always assumed that when the spammier end of guest blogging is addressed it would be through a wider algorithm. As Alice suggests, value could be removed from this as a result of a wider effort to tackle low quality sources - and this would be fair.

This year though I suspect that "fairness" in the algorithm has gone down a couple of places in Google's priorities and that the idea of "the greater good" has become a higher priority. If that is true then anything that is a link building strategy becomes a fair target - even if it causes wider damage.

As always - time will tell !

The value I get comes from OSE.  I already have access to the same data + majestic data through my raventools subscription, but the ability to quickly assess competitor profiles is still useful .  I access this through a bookmarklet, which is particularly convenient.

At the moment that justifies the price to me.  That may well change in the future - particularly as disavowing links becomes more common and public link profile data therefore becomes less accurate.

I don't rate the campaign tools particularly highly.  I like the feature that shows you universal results in the SERPs, but overall the campaign tools don't help me much.  I tend not to even look at the results - particularly as it would get so expensive to run them on all sites I want to monitor.

Interestingly, I am starting to get some value from the bundles followerwonk access.  Not using it a great deal, but it's useful when I do.

The value of seomoz to me is in time I save. At the moment that makes it a good investment for me.  Unfortunately I spend twice as much time as I save in the Q&A forum answering questions, so who knows!?!

It is quite common to shorten URLs by taken common words out of them.  Remember also that URLs appear in search results too, so having something that looks helpful and makes people want to click is an advantage in itself.  Which looks more like a quality resource to you?

websitename.com/eat-you-way-to-beauty-with-superfoods

or

websitename.com/beautywithsuperfoods

Get someone to look at the database queries in coldfusion. Unless you have tens of millions of flashes it should be able to handle it on even a reasonably modest server for your traffic levels.  It doesn't sound like it should be taxing.

However it sounds like your problem is some badly structured queries. The good news though is that this is probably quicker and easier too fix than upgrading hosting, coding new removal behaviour or any other "work-around"

What would you do to avoid Google thinking its a poorly maintained site?

Sorry to sound glib, but the answer is "maintain it better".

The important point is that not all directories are equal.  "Directory" really described the structure of a website. However for many is SEO it refers to the thousands of directories that exist only to "help" sites rank in google.

So, if you were promoting a car tyre shop and found "Bobs Auto Resource site" where Bob picked great firms, wrote up what he liked about them and was itself linked from other quality looking sites then that would likely be a good resource.

However "Bobs cheap SEO friendly directory" that listed virtually any site that submitted itself, added no value to those listings, was full of rubbish and linked from equal rubbish would not be as good.

Damn that Bob and his wildly varied site quality.

ha ha - wondering whether you are just trolling now.

Followerwonk is actually more useful on b2b stuff! I would agree though that there is way too much snakeoil in SEO.  However that is down to the individuals not the principals.

if you offer relevant, high-quality content, and people can already find you, then that's most of the battle.

It's one small battle, yes. It's not the war though.

If you honestly believe you have every customer that the internet can offer you then congratulations. I hope that you don't mind me saying that it is starting to sound like the reason you are not getting value is that you're understanding of SEO isn't that great.

That isn't a dig. One of my gripes with seomoz is that it doesn't give enough obvious help to non-industry folks in how to get value from the tools.  That results in people really focusing on weird areas here sometimes.

I can understand the argument that SEOmoz might not bring your value, but to seo that SEO can't is a really weird point of view that I suspect the numbers don't support.

I don't think that it helps in the slightest myself.

I do think that the way it is used on some sites would be a good indication of manipulative practice though.

If your users are looking for that information in the footer those links should be there.  To remove them in case it provides some ephemeral SEO benefit is looking at your website the wrong way around.

Billions of pages have those same links in those same spots. This includes some of the best, and best-ranking pages on the internet.  I wouldn't worry.

If you are really concerned for some reason - here's an idea.  Have a single link to covering all those topics going to a page called 'legal' or something.  Link that page to the pages you used to have in the footer, but also to key pages in the site.

Mathematically that greatly reduces the problem of leaking pagerank. However I suspect that there are far far better uses of resources.

The domain suffix is unlikely to have a big impact on this sort of tactic.  If this is the way you want to go then just get whichever name is available.

In truth though I'd really weigh up the tactic.  The return from this approach is likely to be low unless you are set up to pretty much automate this at scale (which I am guessing from the question you are not - and is the sort of tactic very much frowned on at SEomoz).

There are two extremes in building such satellites. One is just to throw up some cheap thin content and rely on the exact domain match to do the work. This is not without cost, but not too expensive. However you have a risk attached as this is very likely to come under google definition of spam do could result in your main site getting penalised if you do a lot of it.  The other approach would be to build a quality site that can stand on it's own merit - which obviously costs more. Also don't forget to factor in that you will still need to be link building and doing SEo on the satellite sites too.

Considering that an extra site means an extra large step in the conversion process (you have to get users from site A to site B before purchasing and you will lose a lot of them at that stage), you need to be really sure of the returns.

Many people here will tell you that what you are talking about is spam and you should therefore instead concentrate on building a better core site.

I'd say that what you are suggesting is unlikely to be the best return on your time and you should therefore concentrate that time and effort in to the core site unless you are really sure about what you are doing and understand the risks involved.

Your product is interesting enough that you can probably get much better links much more affordably through a content marketing approach  and get more traffic and sales as a result.  Start a thread here asking for content marketing ideas for a fake snow company and see the responses you get.  I reckon it's a dream product to promote!

I wouldn't worry overly about chasing A grades on the on-page tool here. The goal isn't to please seomoz! I use some VERY short titles very effectively.  The too short warning is really about possible missed opportunity. Go with what makes sense, but use the "too short" warning as a flag to look at whether it is the best title to use.

Ideally I would use the /market/ directory over a sub directory.  That would allow the store to benefit from the authority of the existing site, rather than starting afresh on a new sub-domain.

Some software combinations could make that tricky, but in most cases it should be fine.  If it does get tricky there is also a work around where you can have content on a subdomain served from a directly url using a reverse proxy.  Messy though.

The final option seems unnecessarily complicated to me.  I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve there.

There are two parts to that really: 1. Can they read it, and 2. Might they see it as manipulative

Google can certainly (and is) reading and indexing the content in that div, so technically no problem there with point 1.

Point 2 is harder to give a clear answer to. Hidden divs containing a lot of text are certainly a tactic that has in the past been used to manipulate results.  By itself I can't see it being a problem though (or even in conjunction with those slightly suspect keyword links that the jquery hides).  It depends how much you want to keep pushing that line.

I'd question how useful it is though.  You say that you are not trying to hide anything, but I can't see much other reason to take this approach.  Personally I'd focus more on making you homepage sell the product and engage users as best as possible and worry less about designing for search engines and people separately.   You could quite easily replace that hidden block with a shorter visible one that still ensured you were covering the points you want on the page, but also worked to suppose your sales message.

Not sure that I follow the question.  Where are these blogs posts being made?  On your own blog?

If they are then you are over analysing.  People do that loads in SEO : They are so worried about looking natural that they stop being natural. Do what makes sense.  Push towards "SEO Stuff" but don't do stuff that feel like you are gaming the system.  Do that and you are heading for long term wins. Worry about the tiny ins and outs of every thing you do and you'll end up going nuts.

Hmm... not sure that was a very "mozzy" answer.

The slightly glib answer is that google uses over 200 ranking signals, and none of them are DA or PA!

However, think about what you are saying.  If the strongest authority result always ranked first then the results would always be the identical for whatever search you perform.  Ranking is more about relevance than authority (although both play a massive part).

Relevance could be determined by a number of things, and they are not all on-site. Consider the topics of pages that link to the result, the anchor text used, the behaviour of other users who made that search and found particular results useful (or not). These all give a strong indication as to the purpose of a page without taking on-page factors in to account at all... in fact they would even work on a page that was blocking google from crawling it.

Don't underestimate on page / on site factors either.  If it is Google's job to find the "best" result for a given search then the starting point has to be the content at the end of that link.  The more they can do to determine how useful and relevant that content is to the search the easier it is for them to do that job.

What you are  seeing is a search engine working well!

If you haven't seen it before, Google have a great page about how search works.  It is essential reading for anyone with a website:  http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html

but they still maintain highest authority, etc.

Be very very careful with that assumption.  Just because OSE (or whatever your backlink analysis tool of choice is) reports a high metric for a link, it does not mean that link actually has any value.  Google doesn't use OSE! (or majestic / ahrefs etc).  Only they know for certain which links are passing authority/weight and how much and we know that they have cautioned us about directories.

Use of directories for backlinks is one of the strongest correlation factors I have witnessed with site that have dropped during Penguin updates.  Be very very careful indeed.

Now - all that said... here is where I seem to contradict myself!

Some directories are great! Google doesn't actually have an issue with directories. It has an issue with links that have no value - which includes the vast majority of directories. Those that do count though are few and far between and it is now probably best to steer clear if you are not certain.

This is totally down to a matter of personal preference.  I'd be looking for something in the way of original text.  A good way is to ask more question then total up the number of words in their answers.  You can also flesh that out by introducing snippets from recent activity, connections etc.  Do though try to include something in the way of original content in order to turn off the no-index.

I think your example isn't bad.  Add a personal slogan, or line of introduction and it is probably enough.

Definitely 301 the old to the new.  Keeping the authority from links is just part of that: The 301 will also ensure that users following those links end up in the right place and also that the old URLs get removed from the index (in time).

If you just wait for the next crawl then you are going to end up with users hitting 404 pages and 2 copies of each URL.

If you don't already have it, this might be a good time to get rel=canonical in place.  It might help ensure that it all gets indexed correctly as it gets recrawled.

If you ensure that those pages return a 404 (Not found) response then Google will remove them from it's index in time.

If you want to speed the process up then you can also do this from webmaster tools. There is a guide to removing URLs here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419

It has been said that using the URL removal tools on a lot (read hundreds) of individual URLs might be seen as negative. However if you just have a handful then that would be the way to do it.