Nice. Can you do one for all the way back to 2003?

I don't think it exists really, but I reckon we can piece things together

2000 - 2003 :- Practically monthly updates, pretty much shooting in the dark to remember what it was the changes as I don't think anybody really understood things as fully nor monitored as closely.

Feb 2003 :- First 'named' update, Boston.

April 2003 :- Cassandra

May 2003 :- Dominic

June 2003 :- Esmerelda

November 2003 :- FLORIDA! Boom, this was the first one that made SEO what it is today. It started ranking sites in a way that nobody could fully work out. It blasted the spammers (although many quality pages were also effected if they were using the same over-optimisation/ stuffing techniques) and started the link race game that we have today.

January 2004 :- Austin. Hammered some more sites in a Florida type fashion. Seemed to introduce the QDF factor.

February 2004 :- Brandy.

February 2005 :- Allegra.

September 2005 :- Something funny happens here

October 2005 : - JAGGER! First step in the fight back against the new link currency. Recipricol links devalued, link farms devalued, paid links (where detected) penalised and/or devalued. Sandbox changes to make it harder to rank for new sites.

October 2005 :- Jagger 2. Domain age seems to play a bigger part of the algorithm.

October 2005 :- Jagger 3. Refinements to the first 2.

December 2005 to March 2006 :- BIG DADDY! Algorithm change to evaluate link trust. Non-thematic links, lots of recipricol links, lots of links on a page, lots of links from low quality sites all

August 2006 :- Lots of little things.

November 2006 :- Lots of minus position penalties for unnatural looking link profiles.

June 2007 :- Buffy. Not a real update apparently but there was one earlier that month which I think added some ridiculous penalties of up to -950!

April 2008 :- Dewey. Massive changes depending on what data centre you went through and changed SERPs multiple time each day. Google may have also given a cheeky little boost to their own intellectual property... Also think it was this one that started to stink up the UK search results with loads of foreign sites (not as xenophobic as it sounds, lol).

August 2008 :- Devalued exact anchor text links?

March 2009 :- VINCE! Also known as the brand update. Google gave a significant boost for sites that had a 'brand' (under the guise of 'trust'). Ultimately this moved the playing field to give the advantage to bigger sites with bigger budgets. Requires SEOs to improve visibility across sites to show that they're not a fly-by-night organisation. [Thanks Gianluca]

January 2010 :- Caffeine. Fresher results, more verticals, real time. Algorithm itself doesn't seem to change much. More of a sys admin change than anything.

May 2010 :- MAY DAY. Smacked some thin affiliates and pages with no content (auto-generated pages without products specifically).

December 2010 :- Started taking into account poor reviews and penalising those merchants. Black hats get to work reviewing their competitors. Perhaps the start of a bigger sentiment change with them also using Facebook and Twitter (though if that were the case I'd expect to never see Virgin Media in the search results :D).

January 2011 :- Content farms that scrape content take a hit. Harbinger of Panda.

March to April 2011 :- PANDA! Hammers (some) content farms.

All right, I'm probably missing lots of big ones, but if other people want to contribute I'm sure we can do something with this

Ha ha. Brilliant.

I would like to see Whiteboard Fridays go back to this format. The more thumping horror-techno and flickering images the better!

I'll take a crack if you trust me enough with your files

You don't seem to be doing anything wrong, but I could always take a second look for you.

Personally I always unzip before uploading to the themes folder, shouldn't make much of a difference though.

I'd like to see Q&A stats on the main users page as well - http://www.seomoz.org/users?show=100

In terms of what I'd want to see from stats

Answers

Good Answers

Endorsed Answers (also, please go and endorse more of my answers :p)

Thumbs up (Combined or Separate from blog comment/YOUmoz thumbs)

Thumbs down (Combined or Separate from blog comment/YOUmoz thumbs)

or

Combined UP - DOWN

MozPoints
Level (also when do I get my t-shirt? :D)

In terms of a badge however, you don't want too much info so:

TOP X SEOmoz Member (5000,1000,500,200,100,50,20,10-1)
AND/OR
MozPoints

Level

Comments/Answers

Helpful/Endorsed

I'd also like to be able to show other people my answers, as in a publically (or at least available to members) viewable - http://www.seomoz.org/q/my-answers

While not 100% effective you can tell Google to ignore the ?dealer parameter in Webmaster Tools but that would involve setting up the parameter differently so it looks like ?dealer=1234 rather than ?dealer1234, so not sure how big a pain that is.

Otherwise you can set up a canonical tag so that the canonical version of the page is always /index.aspx for every parameter.

Ideally do both if it will help you get the links in. You should lose very little of the link juice by ignoring the parameter and using canonical.

EDIT: Here's a little bit on parameter handling - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=147959 - complete with clever Barenaked Ladies reference

Very possible, I've never even seen one of their sites before so am completely unfamiliar with them.

Fell into the same trap I've seen others fall into before and attribute everything to a known change if it occurs around the same time and not think whether it could have been something different.

Glad you're keeping me honest

This is interesting though - http://www.jobmagic.com/job/Internet-Marketing-Internship-SEO-Job-Omaha-NE-68114-US-6904531.html -

Doh, apologies, I didn't read the question right.

Never the less, looks like it could be Panda.

Hard to pinpoint exactly what Google doesn't like about it. Their main site does look a massive link farm with that many domains and links on it.

I think they've just been caught in the cross-fire rather than having done anything wrong, but as the main sign of a link farm is the interlinking of sites I would guess that, though can't be sure (doesn't seem to be anything dodgy in their code, not looked into their link profile and there's not too much else they could really do to be more authoratative with content).

If you have a similar site then I'm not sure what I would do to demonstrate that it was simply a directory of your other sites.

Sorry I couldn't be more help.

Oh, you should definitely either always have www or not have www on both your site and the canonical tags.

I would imagine it'd cause a problem if you're saying http//domain.com is canonical but it then redirects to http://www.domain.com as you're sending mixed messages.

I would definitely sort it out so it used the right version of the URL.

301 redirect them to their new page location.

EDIT: To clarify, there are probably some links coming in to those pages or there are new page equivilents that could better serve customers.

If there's definitely no match then I'd still consider redirecting them to the home page (or even a custom landing page, rather than the custom 404 page) to preserve as much link juice as possible.

Are you telling me domain.com/blog (or wherever WP is) has the canonicalization tag of just domain.com?

That is bad! Read this - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

The canonicalization tag should be the canonical version of the page and used to eliminate duplicate version of a page (such as those with tracking parameters).

Have a read of this - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html - and let me know if you have specific questions

Sounds like Panda got you - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html - It's designed to get rid of content farm style sites and thin affiliates.

It seemed to get a 3rd update towards the end of last week (or a little before) which may be what caught you.

Good news is Google tells you what they want you to do about it - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Bad news is there are very few success stories and you're at the mercy of Google as to when they'll run the check again (the update is not part of the main algorithm but a supplemental one run intermittently).

The fact it's hit all of your sites suggests that you're not recognised as high quality sites or appeared to be a farm. Did all your sites link to each other in some way?

Pretty sure you mean IIS now

Speak to your server side guy, he might be able to come up with a rule.

If not, you could start here - http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/461/creating-rewrite-rules-for-the-url-rewrite-module/ - and be prepared for some of the most torturous learings of your life

In the meantime I would still probably make a nice 404 page helping those get to the page they want.

As per the comment below, is it possible to create a rule that would rewrite the URLs to match the new ones, following perhaps the same rules that you're using to cut down on the URLs?

So a formulaic rewrite rather than doing them all manually.

Do you mean IIS? (again I'm unsure, you might mean exactly what you say :D)

If you're on a windows server IIS is the equivilent of .htaccess on a Linux server, so you'd have to apply the rules using that, but same principle.

I'm going to hijack your question a little bit, sorry, but I was wondering what sort of people are getting traffic through Bing to make it worthwhile?

I've been first in Bing and some local Yahoo sites and still get negligible traffic versus being anywhere on page 1 in Google.

Actually, scratch that. I guess US facing companies where Bing has a bigger share as opposed to my Europe facing operations

Anybody got the latest figures on search engine share by territory?

So, it's the same domain but new site structure/underlying CMS which has different URLs? I don't quite understand how you have multiple sites, vs multiple pages, but that's because I'm reasonably unfamiliar with DNN. Or am I wrong and you've consolidated multiple domains under a new URL?

Assuming 1 to 1 mapping of redirects is out, are there any opportunities to map folders? As in anything under site/folder/pages is mapped to the new site/new-folder? It's not ideal but gets them one step closer.

Alternatively you should make a very good 404 page explaining why they've ended up there, give them suggestions for top pages and a search function to find what they want. Bounce rate will still probably be quite high.

You can request removal of URLs through WMT or also tell them about a change of domain, but I'm a little unclear as to what you've actually done.

Meh, kind of. It's frustrating when I don't make money from my efforts, but there's always something else to try and something else to chase. I have to believe I'll strike it rich one day

Will still require a manual check before hand but 'Right Click > Properties' will give you a link relationship.

For FF you'll need - https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/element-properties/

Alternatively you can get a nofollow highlight plugin

FF - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nodofollow/

Chrome - http://floridaventureblog.com/2009/03/highlight-nofollow-links-chrome-plugin.html - (Not tested)

Then you can see at a glance if a page comment does give followed or unfollowed links, though you still have to visit the page first.