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This is really to be expected. The authorship is in beta and their is no guarantee that google will use your picture or that you will be included in the beta. That being said, my best guess is that they do this so they can monitor click thru rate. Every site I manage has this problem, so I wouldn't fret.

Thanks Anthony. I have read Adam's article and after further research this was the direction I was leaning in. You have definitely helped me choose a direction.

Inside the wordpress loop on the homepage/category/archive theme pages. right now it probably has the_content() --> replace this with the_excerpt()

We've added both subdomain blogs and   .com/blog & .com/news  to start creating better content.  We have had a blog for years that lived under another name with 100's of post be find it necessary to create better quality content that lives on our site. hope that helps. Chad

From my experience as an SEO for a large eCommerce site (our own products), I tend to think that Google has a way of recognizing eCommerce site from purely informational ones and takes that into consideration when analyzing content. As you say Chris, many producers will distribute their catalogs to all their dealers and they in turn will put those online. The same happens with our products here. Our dealers use the very description we provide them with and no one has ever been penalized for that. As said, I personally think that Google takes the intent of your site (eCommerce, informational etc. ) into consideration when slapping duplicate content penalties. Having said that, i have no data to back up that claim so go easy on me, it's only based on my gut feeling and practical observations.

Yep, it is definitely best practice to come up with unique titles and descriptions for the shopping sites. If you have a large number of products, you might want to use a service like TextBroker or ContentWriters.us to handle the work for you.

As others here have addressed the merits of directory links, let me address your question more narrowly. Do deep links, if they are from the same page, count? Short answer, yes. Results from several experiments over the years have shown that Google only counts the first link on a page to a particular URL, but links to multiple URLs still count. (although there are ways to get around this as well.) Think of them like links on your homepage, all pointing to various internal pages on your site. Each link passes value, although certain links pass more weight than others. Almost always, the first link in any price of editorial content carries more weight than all the others. Multiple links to the same domain carry much, much less value. Best advice: Deep linking from directories may carry value, but in light of Penguin and Google's mass de-listing of several directories, I'd be careful to only obtain links from the highest quality of human-edited niche and specialty directories. I'm no longer a fan of general directories at all, although more testing needs to be done.

I think you have to be a little careful here, and not just from an SEO standpoint. Now, you're talking about potentially taking someone else's content from behind their paywall and posting it publicly. I don't know the context or the industry very well, but you may be encroaching on a legal gray-area.

Yep that's a good idea to.  You can see SEOMoz's ranking factors has an example, each year they keep the same url and update the survey.

Thanks for the information you provided... I believe the shift in rankings will be primarily due to a weak link profile for your domain but also a stronger backlink profile from some of your competitors which has seen them rise above you in the organic rankings. These changes coming since the additional Penguin algorithm updates rolled out by Google. (Incidentally, have you seen a decline in Yahoo/Bing if you monitor positions at these search engines too)? When seeking link opportunities, it's not advisable to chase PR - if 95% of your backlinks all come from pages with a PR3+, then this in itself looks unnatural and will have been a signal flagged. It is also possible, that those domains you have previously sourced backlinks from via building content relationships could also have suffered as a result of the latest algorithm updates - if they look to sell/provide backlinks using their page PR as selling point, and subsequently link out to various websites from sidebar placements (which they do looking at some of the pages containing your backlinks), this could also have made your domain suffer as less weight/authority is being passed through your links. I would recommend acquiring some new backlinks, don't worry about the PR of a page and don't focus on using keywords in your anchor text. Perhaps consider some guest content at a few blogs, writing a few pieces of content at each related to your products/services using an author byline with branded backlinkS - for example:- <name>is the marketing manager at RentalInsurance.org for a leading provider of renters insurance in New York.</name> Perhaps also consider contributing via comments to some blogs, doesn't matter whether backlinks are nofollow or otherwise, just ensure your brand and where possible,link back to your site (using your name for commenting instead of keywords) via making some relevant and genuine comments to other blogs. Build a few handfuls of backlinks such as these which will counterweight the links in your existing backlink profile and ensure there are some more genuine and natural links being built. I would expect this to prove a step in the right direction however there is also the possibility Google could also be looking at onsite elements and the practically exact match domain name too which have also seen changes from recent algorithm updates. Hope that helps for now.

From a designers point of view the amount of time and effort that will go into creating and presenting an alternative site for google bots and browsers would be the same as just creating a new functional website that is Search engine Friendly. I would rather create a new website using XHTML with CSS which gets picked up in search engines really well as the content and styling code are handled on separate pages. Its important to keep the styling and coding separate as bots read the contents and styling codes that are on the page just act as a barrier. don't forget to use H1 tags for your targeted keywords and if you decide to use a flash movie - you can add additional css to bring up an still image for browsers that don't support flash.

No problem, good luck with your link building and rankings. Ally

I have never heard of anyone being penalized for inbound links, site wide or otherwise. If one could lower the rank of a rival site by linking to  a competitor with the site wide links or  "bad neighborhood" links, well, we'd all be buying links to the other guy's site, wouldn't we? Here's what SEOs seem to believe about site wide links; they aren't worth much, if any, more than a single link from a site. I am not quite sure that's true, but 1,000 links from 1,000 domains is certainly worth a great deal more than 1,000 links from a single domain.

Will do. Thanks for the help.

How clean do you want your new domain to be?  What percentage of the total inbound link profile comes from that network?  How relevant are the relationships between the pages those links are on and the pages on your domain they point to? If the answer to any of those falls within the realm of "polluted" or "over-saturated", I'd ask to get those links removed.  While Google does a fair job of devaluing bad links, and they're getting better all the time, if it's a majority of your profile, it's still a red flag that the site is, at the very least, on shaky ground, or built on a house of cards.