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Hi Mike, I am happy it worked out. you can use this to check as well http://seo-website-designer.com/Response-Redirect-Header-Checker All the best, Tom

Hi Mike, Before we go any further, I highly encourage you to read this blog post I wrote about 301 redirects: http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects Even more important than the raw "link juice" passed from a 301, you need to consider the relevance of the pages. If  your goal is to preserve link equity, then 301'ing everything to the homepage is likely to not to pass much value, and render those redirected pages to a state of little value. Does the purchased site have any content worth saving? Is it worth it to re-purpose this for your own means and keep the content live? This might make the most sense, but if not, does it feel right redirecting individual pages to the most relevant page on a one-to-one basis on your own site? You also suggested another possibility: "Maybe I should 301 the newly purchased domain to a sub-page on my site that explains the acquisition and asks them to sign up on my site?" From a user perspective this makes sense, but be warned that it might not pass much link equity. If it were me, I'd probably put a message on the site with an explanation that the site has been purchased, and offer a link to the new site. That said, be careful with repetitive, site-wide links. Then, after a time, redirect everything to the most appropriate pages on your own site. Hope this helps. Cheers.

Thanks, Tommy. That confirms what I thought. I wouldn't mind so much if the bigger site didn't nofollow my author tag but since they do then I'm getting little benefit from them other than exposure to their audience. And that is worth something, to be sure. Maybe I'll post on their site for a day or two and then delete the post on their site (I have that ability) so that I get some exposure there but then the only copy of the article will be on my site after a couple of days.

My goodness ! they atleast they can give a dofollow link ! this is bad ! As Irving told that no-follow will be a problem. link nofollow will be simple no backlink, but the authorship nofollow is new ! consider that advice of the expert one ! we sometimes make the link no-follow, but not for the author google plus !

Hi Mike, I kind of get the quesiton but not sure if I completely got it. You can place a Google+ icon at the bottom of every page and direct it to your corporate G+ page; however, that will require your webmaster or something that can edit the website to do so. Yes, it is good to include a rel="author" tag in a link to the author's G+ page.  It gives the author credit, help combine all of the authors post on your website when searched on Gogole and also the author's Google+ profile image will also in the search engine result page if the article shows up.  Based on researches, people are more likely to click on links on the SERP with the author's picture.  It kinds of give people a trust feeling. I also read an article together (can't find it now) saying that Google place links with author picture higher than those without. Hope this answer your questions.

Thanks, Tom. Just what I was looking for. Another question, kind of related: On my company's home page is it better to have a +1 button (so users can +1 the page) or a G+ button (so users can follow our company). Not sure which is a stronger signal -- lots of +1s or lots of followers? Thanks...

Great idea!  That would make our job a lit easier.

I think this also has something to do with user experience as well as SEO. You want to provide quality content for both Google and more importantly your user. Does this image provide value to your user? If the image provides value to each of those "widgets" then you should use a different image on each page specific to "blue widgets", "red widgets", etc.. If the image isnt really needed for user value and your just using it fo SEO. I have used the same image on different pages WITH different file names with no problem before, like you sad "red_widgets.jpg" & "blue_widgets.jpg" can be the same file. An easy way to do this is to just duplicate and rename in FTP rather than saving new files in PS. So either way I wouldn't use the same image with different ALT tags. Its worth it to go the extra mile on this one.

Mike - thanks for clarifying it a little more.  At this point I would turn to data for my decision rather than theory. Check your web analytics package and see how many people are searching for the phrase "blue widgets small."  Double check again to see how many actually drive revenue.  Do they convert better than "blue widgets" searchers?  How's their engagement rate?  Etc. I am confident once you find the answer to that it'll help you make your decision on whether or not you should create a new page and allocate link building resources to it.

There is a theory that spiders give more credit to domains linking to yours that aren't hosted in the same place. The idea is that these other domains are probably not owned by the same company and being used to create link farms. So when you look at your competitor's link map, removing the same c block can possibly give you an idea if they are creating a bunch of sites themselves for link building.

Thanks, Ryan. My entire site is https. I 301 any http request to the https version. That works fine. I also 301 any non-www to the www version. That works. I'm not currently doing anything special with the trailing slash (or lack of). I guess I should 301 anything with a trailing slash to the non-slash version, rather than serve up slash and non-slash each as status 200. Appreciate the guidance...

If you wanted to try this approach, the easiest dynamic piece of content you can add to a page is the current date. In my experience adding dynamic content of the nature you are describing would not offer any benefit at all. I believe the above information fully responds to your question as presented. This is where I feel compelled to at least explain a bit further regarding the topic you did not wish to discuss, adding "real" data to the page. I have spoken to people who have said "I read adding a blog to my site would help with my Google rankings. I added a blog and have not seen any benefit at all. Why not?" Whether you are adding a blog, social networking or dynamic content the point is not the physical structure (i.e. blog software, social icons or in your case a piece of data which changes on a page). The focus is the authentic engagement with visitors. For a blog, you are offering users the opportunity to generate fresh content by creating articles and responding to articles with comments. With dynamic content, if you link to "latest news", "latest comments", "twitter feed" and other information which is updated daily, then you are adding a real value for your users and Google will recognize that value. Making a change just for the sake of making a change does not offer any real value, therefore you will not be rewarded with any noticeable benefit.

Good answer, measure the results!

Pagerank does not flow through like a normal link would.  At this point its a "domain authority" type of link, still worthwhile to have.

You're right, I probably should block bots from crawling that xml file (yes, it duplicates what is on my blog). On the other hand, it may be a bug in SEOmoz's crawler that it's reporting a warning about a missing meta description tag in a .xml file, too. (so FYI SEOmoz, if you're listening...).

Mike, I edited the link in your original question to be http so the link will work, and I'll email the help staff and let them know about this bug.

Well, I'm listed in DMOZ along with my competitors. Why would google.com.sg show a different set of DMOZ listings? Maybe this is just random, or perhaps nothing I can do about it. I was merely trying to get the same (relevant) links my competitors had and was wondering if there's anything I can do to affect google.com.sg's showing them but not me...

You are never bleeding link equity. Link equity does not ever leave the page if you link out to others. It's more like you are sharing what you have with others. There is no SEO benefit to linking to others in terms of link equity but I believe the engines do pay attention to if you are link hoarding. Being a good member of the community is vital to growing in importance. Look and act like a leader in your space and soon people will regard you as such. Besides, backlinks to others are good ways to build relationships which can get you links later on. That is worth it alone.

Turns out I didn't need the sitemap. I just needed more time. Google crawled and indexed everything as I expected, but it took longer than I expected.

Hi Mike, From what I understand, there is no definitive time frame for how long it takes to update the webmaster  diagnostics. Check and see if your changes show up in the Google cache first. If nothing is changed on the indexed pages--something is wrong with the crawl of your site. If the changes are reflected in Google's cache, but are still missing from the webmaster diagnostics, I would just re-verify your site to get a clean start. One other thing to look out for: is your non-www domain 301'd to the www domain? If not, your webmaster tools may be running diagnostics on the wrong URLs, rendering your changes useless. Good luck! If all else fails, just wait it out and take solace in the fact that you've made the necessary changes.