Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ah, when you said ad units, I assumed you mean AdSense. In terms of non G ads, I run 4 per page with no issues. You could probably stretch this to 6 though.

click to read full transcript, using CSS or JS would be better. So the content is shown once the user clicks the link.

Hi, Try this tool http://sharedcount.com/

This all depends on what your site is written in. We have an extensive guide for Apache, and in this post, Jen links to several other rewrites in different languages.

We have vendors from whom I was hoping to get links. To make it more enticing to them I was planning to select a small number of vendors (with good site metrics) and create a "Featured Vendor" module on some pages that would link back to the vendor's site as well--thereby created reciprocal links. I was planning to only have one vendor to one page and only for the pages that we are locally targeting. Is this a bad strategy? Thanks!

Good answer, also we have seen that sometimes bots come directly to your site via a link and do not always visit the robots.txt file and will therefore index the first page they come to. Matt Cutts has said before that the only 100% fail safe way of blocking search engines indexing something will be to have it password protected

If your using Wordpress and a plugin for showing a mobile version, you don't have to worry. But if you're simple copy & pasting on another site - then it can be a problem. Watch the vid's John links and you'll see.

Not unless you want to rank for more information on the search engines. Anchor text is one of the most important ranking factors; if your page is about brilliant bacon, and you want to rank for brilliant bacon, good anchor text would be brilliant bacon - that's if that keyphrase isn't too competitive and it makes sense to the user. It also depends what you mean by a 'normal link' - if the normal link contains your keyphrase e.g. www.randomwebsite.com/brilliant-bacon - then that will hold more weight for keyword targeting than 'more information'. There should be a good mix of anchor text linking to your pages though, as would naturally build around the web, so there's no harm having 'more information' or 'click here' linking to your page on occasions. Here's a brief overview: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/anchor-text

Are you getting these results when logged in? Or logged out of you Google account. I have found that some times you see crazy data when you are logged out, yet when you log in the data seems a lot better.

<cite>www.google.co.uk/trends</cite> very useful for this type of thing

I would always recommend when implementing canonical tags that you use an absolute links, which just means your entire url starting with http:// When they are talking about relative canonical links they mean relative to the "base" link, which could also be called the root of your website.  So if your url was: http://www.rootdomain.com then your relative rel canonical tag would be

Mike is right about the shared hosting - just make sure that there are no outbound links to the affected site.  Shared WMT account won't matter. You can always use a different Google account if you're still worried

Adding Google Analytics is not absolutely necessary but there could be a lot of advantages over your current analytics. Since Google also provides a bunch of other tools  and services like PageSpeed, Adwords, it integrates rather pretty well with analytics and could potentially give you a better view. Why not add it? It hardly takes any time to integrate (if you have a common page element) and it barely adds to site load time.

I don't know that there is one best answer for this. For a given site, I'd try a couple of things. If I'm using a CMS for shopping cart, look at the documentation and see if it references parameters used. A shopping cart often uses parameters, as does anything that involves sorting results in different orders. I'd do a site:domain.com search on the site and look at the URLs that are indexed and see if any are indexed with parameters, and determine if those need to be indexed or should be excluded.

It seems like canonicalizing the URLs is still a good idea.  For one, there are other search engines that respect the tag, so you want them to do the right things.  However, it does sound like for Google that this could replace the need for canonicalization tags due to URL parameters.  If you have duplicate content that's not caused by URL parameters, you'd still need the canonical tag. Just to be safe, I'm still doing both. When I logged into my webmaster tools, all of the parameters Google had found were there already.  I went through and edited them and added the new information.

Yeah, Google generally will come across just about all of the parameters while indexing your site, but you can add parameters as well.  When you log into Google Webmaster Tools, you should see a list of parameters when you go to the Site configuration > URL parameters page.  They've given more options now that you can change for each parameters, beyond whether or not Google should ignore them.  If you click Edit for a parameter, now you can set: Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? (Yes, No) How does this parameter affect page content? (Sorts, Narrows, Specifies, Translates, Paginates, Other) Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? (Let Googlebot decide, Every URL, Only URLs with value ___, No URLs) It will also show you sample URLs with the parameter to make it easier to figure out when these parameters appear, which is very useful, as sometimes you don't which pages have which parameters. Google's help file for this can be found here.

That would be bad for SEO, and search engines would not likely index the content. It's possible, but not likely. I am working with a site that has done this exact thing, and the content is not indexed.

You would determine the quality of a site based on all the normal factors. If you have a URL to share I would be happy to take a look and share an opinion on it's quality.

That is great advice, but difficult to scale when evaluating thousands of keywords...

what causes it?  There are new web sites popping up all the time.  And existing sites are already out there with new content on those all the time as well. While some content, specifically that classified as "evergreen" deserves to be found, the task of determining what older content deserves to remain high as compared to other content is extremely difficult - far from perfect.