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This was spoken about at #searchlove in London this week by Patrick from Branded3 talked about how exact match domains are having a resurgence. Its something I would and am considering as I am sitting on some valuable keyword rich domain names myself.

I am a Flash Newbie, so I have been using a widget from another site to have a count down timer on my site, but it piles on about 1 to 2 second to our page load times.

The countdown timer has really improved sales at month end.

Does anyone know of where I might source a super fast flash count down timer from?

I completely agree with Ryan here.

When I started (@ the furniture market.co.uk) our home page was attempting to rank for loads of key words, I created sub pages.. long story short... Just yesterday in the Rank Tracker report I have guided a brand new sub page "glass-coffee-tables" to number 1 for that search term on Google.co.uk, against Argos, Amazon, John Lewis, M&S.. It can be done. (10 months later & all white hat)

Concentrate on 'On Page' basics before you go off page.

Hey Alex,

Hit the "oak furniture" analogy on the head there. I could go through our core pages disabling the canalizing link. So the Oak furniture didn't work on the oak page because the user is already there.

The CMS is reliable and a little FUGLY I can't get a nice font to work and align how I want so resorted to images.

How much of an edge do you think we are missing because of this issue? can you quantify it?Essentially this is not going to boost usability massively, just sculpt link juice hopefully.

I agree Alex the problem comes with link cannibalization. As the site works from templates there is a lot of variation with how the text renders across browsers so from a user point of view and with all the issues with w3c validation images were the best way to go.

Its a toss up between the links looking ugly and link juice.

From our home page we have all image links to our core pages, maybe I should add some exact match anchor text links to our core pages from there you mean?

It's an old CMS we are on but I still think I can squeeze some extra performance out of it.

Hey Alex,

So you would go for more of a 'link amputation' approach ?

Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text.

We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for.

I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links.

Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization.

Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.

I think this type of hands off approach is useful for smaller companies who are not accountable to share holders. I can well imagine the annoyance a team of link builders may experience documenting in forensic detail their activities.

There are lots of examples of blue chip's getting burned, by "don't ask don't tell" link building.

I only today saw a very high profile supermarket chain in the UK back linking to picture from "Japansesearthquakepictures.com"..

I don't know how much more tasteless back linking can get than that.

This is something I am considering myself, when I ask SEO companies where they source links from etc I  have had answers that range from...

"Our back linking methodology has been approved by the board" or

"It would be infringing on our intellectual property" or

"If we told you, you know enough about SEO to go out and do it yourself"..

My thoughts are if you have a number of responsibilities like I do, as long as you set out from the start what you need from an SEO company and keep them on a short leash for the first quarter you can get a good feeling if the links they are getting you are quality and equally as important are getting cached and indexed.

As with most things it comes down to budgets and resource.

It would be great if you kept this thread going

Automation of this has been problomatic because of the way our CMS paginates URL's, It was sending xml generators crazy.

looks like I am still going to have to have some involvement with this on an ongoing basis.

Thanks for mentioning BING..

I have been using multiple xml sitemaps for products for over 6 months and they are indexing well with GMT.

I have been having this manually amended when a product becomes obsolete or we no longer stock it.

I now have the option to automate the sitemaps from a SQL feed but using .asp sitemaps that I would submit the same way in GWT.

I'd like your thoughts on the Pro's and cons of this, pluses for me is realtime updates, con's I percieve GMT to prefer xml files.

what do you think?

That makes sense.. does FB's buttons load asynchronously?

My thinking would be to have them on the right hand side of the main body so users can interact with them the same as on Google and Facebook, they are in the same place and users are conditioned to look there.

I am thinking above the fold but my thinking is also that's a bit obvious and it would be best to mirror how the buttons are on the big boys sites.

Do you guys think there is a more strategic place to place these buttons?

below the fold, above, in the top nav menus...??

I would love to hear your thoughts..

I've been thinking about personalisation and PPC..

If you have a PPC campaign and a vistor comes to your site and has a look around, if that user doesn't clear there cache etc then that visit via PPC will start to effect their personalisation search results?

It would almost be worth maintaining a high level of PPC spend and counting on personalization bias in SERPs in the longer term..

What do you think about this?

Are there any safe guards in place to make sure this bias doesn't happen?

I would be intested in knowing what you guys think is the best way to name images?

say "rustic-oak-3-draw-bedside.jpg"

How long should the names be max and are hyphens ok do you think?

I originally turned them into image links because we were getting reports of link canibalisation and whilst our new static link pages bedded in and started building their own link profiles I felt it best to put a stop to this.

In other words I still wanted to the homepage to rank whilst the sub pages authority increased. I think we are at a point now where we flip back to text links.

our oakfurniture.asp page is around 6 months old now and has been indexing for "oak furniture " for the last 3...

now

we only have a fraction of the oak furniture content on our home page. thats on our oak furniture.asp page.

We did have a dynamic catergory page that I did a 301 yesterday to point the static page with the theory it would bolster its internal linking profile.

also I did this because I dont think our CMS cat page was very visually appealing and there was way too much content below the fold.

we do suffer a lot with pagination due to the dynamic URLs we have with this CMS.. on the whole the onpage improvements I have implemented has lead to pleasing amounts of pages being indexed.So I figure google can work around our onpage limitations thanks to webmaster tools etc and index our content.

Our on page is far from perfect though. I have been link building towards a number of inner pages and this page in particular being our flag ship.

I havent done anything silly with it as far am I am aware I just do link building as and when I have time.

Does this clarify anything?