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I agree with Alan.  Wordpress has been turned into a full blown CMS platform and is capable of handling well over 400 pages. A quick walk through some of the sites in the Wordpress Showcase (http://wordpress.org/showcase/) will reveal several sites that are well of 400/800 in page size.  And if you make the pages static there are going to be even fewer server calls.  Speed at that level will really be determined by server speeds, network bandwidth, connectivity, and up times.  Typically a slow site can be solved by a new host not a new CMS.

Even though it's not going to be a majority, there's always the opportunity for people to troll public facing blogs. Even private, paid membership sites have their share of user cancellations and people who tend towards negativity.  It takes a cultivated talent to disagree with someone politely, and even more talent to disagree with someone in a way that makes them reconsider their original position. That kind of talent is rare.  It's just easier to say, "I don't like what this person is saying. Thumbs down!"  And if you're uncomfortable disagreeing with someone you're not going to voice an opinion.

There's also a bit of the popularity factor going into things like these. If a user is consistently funny, or likeable they'll often garner fan thumbs.  The opposite is true for the consistently contrarian. Rebecca comes to mind for the former, Michael Ramirez for the latter.  Although if you push the envelop--like Rebecca regularly did  with her humor, you're going to get your share of thumbs down.

The short answer, I always try to think of the person on the other side of the screen, and avoid saying anything that I wouldn't want to say to them if they were actually here.

Very minimal.  A 301 redirect is delivered via an HTTP status code which is the first thing to get crawled on a page.  there won't be any other server load other than sending it along it's way to it's new location.

Edit: To put this in other words, it's not going to be any worse than your IIS server having to deliver an additional 500 plus HTTP status code 200.

That would be a pretty tricky case to chronicle, let alone find several situations like that. If forced to try and dig through those dregs though, I would do a search like this: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=viagra+site%3Aprweb.com or some other SPAM term + site:prweb.com (or other major news site) and start mining the back links of the articles in OSE.

Personally I haven't heard of this exact case, and someone trying this much manipulation probably has other areas where Google could say, "Oh, we penalized them because of reason XYZ, ABC was unrelated." Even though ABC could be a part of it.

Image maps present links in a very standardized way that the search engines definitely index so it's more of a question of how you want your information presented in results. If I'm presenting a cluster of results for a barbershop search in a local area with an image map, I wouldn't want that broken up until it got to the individual page for a specific location, as one example.

As for the alternate text tag, it's the same "alt" so it'll be read the same way.  A good practice for usability, regardless.

I've seen this as still effective in the B2B space, and other sectors that historically release company announcements via press releases instead of a blog.  If you're trying to optimize around B2C and it's not really a news worthy press release it probably won't have much pull.  Google has gotten better and better at correlating search spikes that merit news results and identifying the press releases that merit addition to their search results.  I'd look at press releases and use them in these areas:

1. Regular (Q, H, monthly, what not) Announcement / Core Value Statement
2. New product release
3. Corporate comments on business recognition: awards, analyst review, etc.

There are several variables that go into this depending on how you call the interstitial, etc. It'd probably be best to use javascript or some other user based trigger as that would be ignored by a spider.  I.e. try to do it for people, but keep it out of the way of the search engines.

Sort by domain name.
Export to Text.
Find replace / with tab character.
Put back into Excel.
Do a count of domain names.
Compress at totals.
You'll have a list of unique domains.

In the case of Gap, not only is their brand name short, but it is also the brand of their clothes.  People are going to be looking for Gap Jeans and the like.  If you're in a similar situation where it's your brand name + product that signifies a sale, it'd probably be wise to have the brand in the title tag in that case, but you'll want to consider whether or not it's worth it across your site globally.

In a case like Harbor Freight, their name is some what long, but they use it on their location specific pages because they have stores, they get localized searches, and they are going to pull in visitors, and the usage adds value. On product specific searches it makes fewer appearances.

Ya, saw it in a brief search.  For Timur, this brings up a point about guessing what Google considers spam, their Adwords guidelines will give you a pretty good starting point: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide_toc.cs&path=policy

Short answer, yes. Even more so if your clients are actual brick and mortar businesses that can benefit form walk in traffic.  It's important to remember that Google does a TON of scrubbing of the data it presents to the outside world.  To see this for yourself, take a site you currently run--or where you have access via analytics--and pull some long tail keyword search data from over the course of a year.  Find a few phrases that have brought you 10 or more visits. Plug those in to Google Keyword Tool in a different browser.  Do they have any search volumes?

Dedicating an entire page to an extremely long tail phrase is likely still over kill in a lot of cases, but a quick glance at analytics will give you a solid idea of the search patterns that would help create the content of a great page.

Lastly, part of Google's scrubbing is normalization for a globalized audience.  Only major cities are going to rank in that segment, but would a customer living in a smaller city or neighborhood see a benefit of doing business locally?  Probably.  Always a good idea to make the distance from searcher to sale as short as possible.

With your site being so new, you were probably getting a fresh content boost and now that it is gone your site is ranking where it most likely stacks up against the competition.  Here are few problems right off the bat though:

1: A large % of pages' title tags are duplicated - | Get Your FREE Trial NOW!!! | Shiva23
2: The title tag itself is kind of spammy with 3 exclamation points
3: Your content is all highly similar to "acne scar removal" so as you add more content, you're getting too dense around that phrase.
4: Your text is almost the same color as your background.  Old school, but still a spam penalty to have "hidden text".  It's best to stay away from styles that could cause this.

Many websites rank well that are using a CPA model.  Use the tools here and else where to see how you really measure up to your competition and you'll have a lot more insight into what you need to change.

In most cases I'm a fan of leaving the brand name off of the title tag as EOGL mentions. It's probably in your URL and all over the page that someone is going to see if they click on your search result, so you should do as much as possible to get that click. His examples are great.

Also consider that people searching for your brand already know about your site and if they don't they still have a VERY high likelihood of interacting with your site at some point.  With generic searches you want to do as much as possible to expose your brand to people that are unfamiliar with your brand, the ones that are the farthest from knowing who you are and what you do.  If you track how someone arrives at your site via search, you're very likely to see this progression:

1. Generic search
2. Generic search + brand or domain name
3. Brand name search
4. Purchase

Your brand is important, but having it in your title tag has very little influence over steps 2-4.  Focus on getting those initial visits.

Especially in blogs you're likely to get comment links as well, i.e. someone links to http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps#jtc78388 instead of the original blog post URL.  The content is going to be the same for both of those links, so it's best to say the post without the comment anchor is the canonical page.

Also remember, you put the canonical tag on the page that you want to be the canonical version AND pages that you want to point to that page as canonical, so in one instance the canonical tag is going to be the exact same as the page you're on, like the example you're citing.

They might have been counting the site itself or the assumed link from blog.url.com, but what they were really trying to emphasize that subdomain sites are considered separate sites from the site on the root domain and you'll need to plan your linking strategies accordingly.

Matt Cutts discusses the differences between subdirectories and subfolders here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Hi Andy.  If your 30 websites are all similar content and a similar template you can probably just go ahead and redirect them straight away to the community website, especially if they haven't been performing up to your expectations.

If your 30 websites already have some of their own traction you'll probably want to redirect them piecemeal in order to see how users react to the new, singular website; and to see how the new website measures up in analytics.

I would definitely do the BBB and look around for other applicable organizations: Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, that sort of thing. You're going to get a lot more lift from sites that are tied to legitimate orgs.

The best course is to 301 redirect them which is what most (and Google) will suggest.  Even though they're obscure you'll still get a certain amount of PR/link juice from redirecting them.  If you're not worried about them lining up to contemporary pages, you could direct them all to your home page.

If you absolutely don't want to do any 301s, you can use Webmaster Tools and it won't hurt your healthy pages.  You should also consider making a custom 404 page that helps with the transition to the new software.

Edit feature isn't working for some reason.  Forgot to add this link which is recent and useful: http://www.flavordesigns.com/2011/04/how-to-use-technorati/

Of note, you can also customize your built-in internal Google site search: http://www.google.com/sitesearch/

"Customize search box and results using XML"