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Typically Technorati requires you to post a unique code in your blog to display that you're the author when you sign up for their service. Also of note, Technorati's search is pretty bad. It's better to go to Google and search: yourblogname site:technorati.com.

It's not really useless as there is page rank passed through most links on the web to some degree, it's just harder to classify what the image means in a keyword sense.  Also, if this is a banner link, there's likely to be a redirect script or discounted link value because you're paying for the placement anyways.

If you do acquire other image links though, having the image be in a table cell with related text nearby helps, having the image and text be part of the link also heps, if the image is in a div or other markup along with related text, that helps too... Basically anything that correlates the image to some text in a common web structure.  And of course, alt or title text.

There's a lot of shades of gray to this question. The more spam-like versions most likely would be discounted, while guest posts on strong websites would still drive link value. For example, if I wrote an article or story that was picked up by the mainstream news and placed on a site like ESPN, USA Today, NYT, etc. the link in the story would be valuable.

If the site that picked up my article or story was a paid repository of low quality content then the link would likely count for much less or could possibly be considered spam if the website was considered a bad neighborhood in regards to linking.

I chuckled when I saw us respond to this simultaneously with, "Christmas, duh." 

Matthew, to help clarify things you'll want to look at ranking differences and exactly what keywords are/were doing well and what ones are/were not doing well now.  This post doesn't reference any of that.

I've frequently been referencing this SEOmoz post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ as a great practice to go through in your analytics to give you a better idea of what's going on, and giving yourself actionable goals.

There's always a decline on Christmas and New Years as people typically tend to unplug on those days, especially if you're B2B or running a commerce site.  The bad news is that you didn't climb back up to previous levels, but you're still not comparing year over year.  I'd go to Google Trends, and plug in several years of competitors and some of your top performing keywords to give yourself a better idea of seasonal tendencies.

After you get a solid idea of those swings and figure out which competitors got a boost when you got the boot I'd do site audits on those successful competitors as well as some of the people currently beating you in the SERPs to figure out if there are ways you can improve your content and links.

Finally, I'd look into social media and advertising solutions that could help me boost traffic or natural linking as well as directing some qualified traffic to a few different types of landing pages in order to maximize conversions.

I would turn the free question section into a FAQ and hire on an editor or VA to help organize it for you.  Similar to here, you'll probably get a lot of repeats, but that data will help you to figure out what's popular and what needs to be added to your FAQ.

You'd also get the benefit of content freshness as related questions just help modify and build out your existing answers.

My pleasure! Glad I could help.

I'm not sure on that one, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't as you can do so in Adwords and that's where Youtube gets its ads.

Likester? http://www.likester.com/
Twitalyzer? http://www.twitalyzer.com/

Hi Ralph.  You should be able to accomplish this with Event Tracking in GA. See: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html

From that page:

"In Event Tracking, each interaction with a tracked web page object is counted, and each interaction is associated with a given user session. In the reports, Total Events are calculated as the total number of interactions with a tracked web page object. On the other hand, where a single user session (or visit) has one or more events, this is calculated as a single Visit w/Event, or Unique Event in the reports.

For example, if one user clicks the same button on a video 5 times, the total number of events associated with the video is 5, and the number of unique events is 1."

Hope that helps.

I haven't seen URL structures as a deal breaker when it comes to ranking, other than when it's full of session IDs, variable strings, and is a massively large URL.  Mostly I consider using folder names for tracking purposes and try to keep them short for the most part.  That way I can plug in a few to analytics and have a pretty good idea of that area of the site's performance.  SEOmoz wrote a great article on this type of analysis at: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ

You could accomplish the same thing with URL naming convention, but a folder would give you a quick way to organize and allow you to use shorter URL names. Back to the SEOmoz example, their folder names are extremely short, and sacrifice keyword targeting for the sake of length.  As EGOL says, links are going to matter more than the word(s) in your folder name.

I agree with EGOL.  Typically a blog is used to enhance the content and freshness of the site where the blog is located and getting links to the blog enhances the site as a whole.  Sites that are exclusively blogging platforms (wordpress, blogspot, livejournal, blogger, etc.) typically make use of the USERNAME.domainname.com structure.  This is the flipside of the coin that EGOL outlined: these companies want to disassociate themselves from the content on those new domains.

If you feel like your theme site is going to be far enough removed from your company that it could stand on its own, there could be justification for the new domain.  It also might be easier to get linked to on design forums and resource guides if that site is its own entity. As you mentioned it would also give you flexibility in linking back to your company site.

To recap, consider how much effort the new domain can be given, who is going to own keeping it fresh, and check to see if it can stand on its own in your target market space.

That's a tough one, huh Irina? If sites are only agreeing to link via payment, I'd try to add some value by looking for content sharing opportunities and slightly more robust ways of purchasing an associated link than just the link alone. This way there's some justification to the payment and the link can be considered residual.  It sounds like you're doing all the right things so far. 

You'll want to tag your versions on www.mysite.com as the canonical ones and then have www.othersite.com point to those. The WBF explains it pretty well, and here's Google's explanation: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394. The tags will look the same on both sites, as they'll both point to the page you specify.

Right. I just wanted to give you other options aside from the canonical tag, but if your site governance doesn't allow for these solutions the canonical tag as described by SSCDavis should work well.

This is always a difficult question when you enter a market that is heavily in to link buying / manipulation.  It's pretty logical to conclude that Google knows this is going on, so you're left wondering if it's the only way, or if everyone else is doing it would I really get penalized for it too?

If your websites in the Ukraine are new, I'd recommend sticking to creating links and signals that are from trusted sources before going down the link buying road. Google also gives positive weight to sites that have more links from other countries so you could link to your Ukrainian sites from Romania and Hungry where applicable. Try spending a few months getting social traction and non-bought links and see if that begins to make you competitive.  At that point you should have a better idea of what to do.

One option, aside from the canonical tag, is to put the new content on the old URL and add an archive tag to the older articles, like 10tr033-archive.cfm. Or, if that's not workable, create a new URL and 301 redirect all articles to that page and only ever keep your latest article there, but link to the older ones.  By redirecting several articles to a new page and then linking out to the older ones from there on new URLs that new article page should out-rank all others and continue to do so as you update it.

Are you trying to get in the local listings? If that's the case just get the address on the page and start submitting through Google Local.  If it's a chain submit the bulk listings and/or service areas.  Pages like this: http://www.mrswitch.com.au/location are going to hurt you as the engines will see it as a keyword stuffing attempt to manipulate results around any Sydney suburb + "Electrician". I'd recommend getting rid of the location page in its current format and replace it with a few of your actual locations.  Use your keywords sparingly, and use the tools Google provides, especially mapping and reviews.

Google Trends allows you to get an idea of something like that and the Google Keyword Tool will show you data from the previous twelve months.

http://trends.google.com
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You could display the comments and make the add a comment boxes a lightbox.  It's those fields that take up a lot of real estate and are unnecessary in regards to indexing.