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Perfect! Thanks for your help Kristen

Thanks for your thoughts on this, Dirk. I really appreciate them. E

Thank you both - and sorry for not replying earlier. It sounds like we have some work to do

Thanks for your reply Monica. The blog is a landing page where the separate blog posts were listed, which is what I think you are suggesting so I'll go ahead and recommend that we do the re-directs to the corresponding page. Thank you all for your replies - it's helped to get my thinking right

Thanks for your thoughts Linda - much appreciated

As part of the measure of impartiality, it'd be up to the reviewer to decide whether or not they link to your site with follow or nofollow. Also, in a video from Matt Cutts discussing paid links, he mentions as one measurement whether the payment would be surprising or not. As his example, he says it's not a surprise if you're a movie reviewer and they let you into the movie for free. Likewise, if the company providing a review is a firm of analysts and there's a minimum payment required in order to pay analysts for the hours involved in the review that wouldn't be surprising and is advertised up front.  The last thing to consider, is the value in this review the link or being reviewed and having your company exposed to the people who read those reviews. Matt's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zupIbMyMfBI

Thanks for the help Ryan

Excellent - thanks for your responses guys, that's a great help!

Glad I could help Best wishes, Don

You're welcome.  Definitely get to the 'whys' behind what they're doing or thinking about doing. Also ask them who they hope to compete with by doing so, or what problems they currently see that they think this will fix. Things like that should give you a much better understanding of what they're doing as well as ideas on alternate solutions.

Makes sense - I understand now. Thanks for the clarification

Thanks both - I wasn't expecting that answer. I suppose you learn something every day. I have now submitted the reconsideration request so hopefully that will go through fine!

Thanks for those answers, that's really useful. It sounds like this is not something to worry about too much, but something that is not ideal for the site's appearance in the search results!

Thanks all that's good advice. It sounds like this is a fairly grey area. Based on this, we've decided to run some checks on the domain first before proceeding.

You may want to watch this Google hangout: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NNf_AhA1gw&feature=share&t=42m25s (42:25).  The question is exactly what you are asking.  John Mueller says that if you are showing Googlebot your full content but users can only see it by logging in then that is cloaking and is against the Google guidelines.  If you show a snippet of your page to users and Google sees the same snippet then that's ok.  He said another possibility is to use "first link free" where you allow the user to see a limited amount of content and then put the rest behind a paywall or other type of a read gate. I'm also in agreement with Egol in the fact that putting content behind a read gate could really turn away users.  I hate it when I search for something and find what looks to be the perfect answer to my question only to find that it's behind a gate.  The result of this is that I immediately click away.  And, for sites that I know regularly have gated content, I won't click on them at all in the search results.  If this type of user behavior happens often then there's a good chance that it will be seen as a sign of low quality and the Panda algorithm will affect your site which could result in drastic drops in rankings across the board.

Thanks both - it's interesting that there is no 'standard' method, but it makes sense that this would very much depend on the situation.

Hello, I'm working on the same niche (software), the best practice from my point of view is ALWAYS use the same page, and update it according the new release of the product, never remove (you're losing inbound links, Authority and even other important trust factors. Only is recommended "remove" the discontinued products as by including a 301 to the most similar product page on your site and also take care about never redirect all your discontinued pages to the home page (a very common error). I hope it helps Claudio

you took offense for how I communicated, and for that I apologize.  However if you read the opening of my initial response, I stated that what I was going to write was a more complete response because over-simplification is very dangerous in our industry. People make jumps and leaps of assumption all too often when they don't have a more thorough understanding of the nuances of acceptable vs unacceptable.

Unless they have fixed it in recent months, xml-sitemaps does not generate correct video sitemaps.

Yes, if you can quickly write unique meta descriptions you can start doing that immediately and if the site is not big and you manage to finish it in 1- 2 weeks there is no use to delete meta descriptions. If you see that this will occupy more then 2 weeks it is better to delete duplicated metadescriptions. But the best solution will be to write unique meta description immediately for home page and other important pages which rank right now.