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Google does measure social activity so your question is a good one. I personally prefer shares versus likes.  I'm going to quote Mari Smith, as she best explains the difference between the two.  "Note the Facebook Like Button now functions (almost) the same as the Facebook Share Button. The big difference is there isn’t an obvious place to write your own narrative before posting to Facebook, plus you cannot select the thumbnail. Clicking the Facebook Like Button automatically pushes the full story into your personal Profile stream. So, you may wish to add the Facebook Share Button with Counter to your registration page instead." So from a SEO perspective they're equivalent. From a useability and conversion perspective, I would think share would be better.

No problem Luke - it is hard to judge whether your pages are keyword stuffed without some examples such as what are you page titles, headings and even an example of content (paragraph or two)? Do you think they look natural or do you think that you have included your keyword too many times - more than is really necessary? Even with an in your face approach you can reduce keyword stuffing I think..

Thanks Anthony - that's very helpful feedback - I'll have a go with those formats and see how it goes. I have quite a few pages to play with so I'm gonna test, test, and test again...

Gosh some really great input here. Would the server ever write a redirect - I suppose if the htaccess told it to do so ...? I have a few pages on my site that were first changed to include the / then changed back to without the / then changed back again. This actually caused some loss of page authority. What can I do to at least stop this madness and unnecessary redirect writes on my server.

Well when I did it I put one removal request in for the whole domain and also put a disallow in the robots.txt for the whole site. Matt appears to be referring to putting in to many removal requests, but if you want your whole site removing you only need one so this wouldn't be an issue - you put your domain URL in. When you say your page has no snippet have you checked what your meta description is as this can help influence your snippet text. I would work at getting your development site removed a.s.a.p and then seeing what happens with your snippet - I think that there is a good chance it could be down to duplicate content issues. Have you checked what the cache for your homepage is in Googles results?

When you say "duplicate blog content", do you mean that the paths are creating duplicate URLs for the post themselves, or for that the tags, categories, etc. have overlapping search results? If it's the latter (more common), I'd generally NOINDEX those. They aren't really duplicates, and canonical isn't appropriate in most of those cases. Agreed with @Boomajoom, though, it does depend on how integral those paths are for search. Some people use tags as major category navigation and build links to them. For others, the tags are just secondary navigation. If your paths are all creating different URLs for the individual blog post, definitely use rel-canonical on those. That's a problem, and they are true duplicates. I'd even advise seeing if you can not do that - it's just messy long-term, and the perceived usability benefits are very, very small in my experience. It's almost never worth having multiple URLs for the same final page.

I understand. Good reminder.

That's really useful (and interesting) Erica - thanks so much

Thanks Marcus - that's very useful. I am using Wordpress as it happens   Off to do some reading...

I guess there's a risk Google may flag spammy close-repeat page titles in the future too? ** actually you can change as many times as you want as long as it makes sense with the content on the page. How often is it safe to change page titles too, without upsetting Google? I've heard of people experiencing problems because Google can flag regular changes (or perhaps this is simply an urban myth of some kind ;-)) ** It won't get upset but ranking will change - better or worse. You can only upset it if the title tags will read one thing and the content will be on a totally different subject - that can be interpreted as manipulative but it won't ever get you into real trouble like a penalization (actually as long as you don't do it on a large scale - thousands or more pages like this as that can trigger a manual penalization).

Make sure that the old URL is at least 301 redirected to a "current" URL to pass on the link juice Next, see if you can contact all the external link sources that point to the old page & ask them to update to point to a different page (if possible)

You're welcome Luke, glad to have helped

Good to hear

You're welcome Luke. Not seen any testing about the importance of those counters with respect to Google. I'm not sure they would have an effect...if Google can find the links in tweets etc. I don't think it would need to 'check' what a page says/claims the number of tweets is too. I see those counters as more of a signal to human visitors...the 'implicit message of 100 tweets on a counter is: 'hey this is great, it got a hundred tweets, you should read it!'

Thanks for reply John - appreciated. Pretty infuriating isn't it, huh. To be honest, I think the SEO industry needs a minimum standard, a code of conduct that's policed in some way. There really is so much awful stuff being carried out in the name of SEO. From what I've seen, the SEO agencies I've come across do it (1) Because it's easy (2) Because they can show their clients quick results.