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As Eric and Saibose have said, this is a duplicate page issue which needs to be resolved using a redirect. You also need to redirect non-www to www.

However it would depend what kind of server you have as to how to fix it

If you have a Linux server use .htaccess and put this in

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^aboutaburningfire.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.aboutaburningfire.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you have a Windows server then I dunno how to change it in IIS, your host should be able to help (NB: You're probably on a Linux server :D)

IIS? Controversial you first think it's on a windows server rather than linux

The structure of your site will help determine which links are shown once you have sitelinks, but structure alone will not help you get sitelinks in the first place.

Normally sitelinks are your top level pages, so navigation and internal linking to reflect those you most value would place some emphasis on which ones Google may choose to show.

Alas, links remain a big ranking factor and is often the hardest part of the job for a SEO.

Part 7 of the beginners guide gives some good advice on how to get started - http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-7-growing-popularity-and-links

Page authority is determined by the number of links coming into that page (good on page SEO helps too), whereas domain authority is number of links into the whole domain (to simplify it).

If you have an outstanding page on an otherwise low authority site you can still rank, but bolstering your domain with a number of outside will help.

You mean you have the links hidden using js and clicking 'more' expands the hidden content section to reveal the links?

While search engines can execute some js the list of links is effectively always expanded to the bots.

The only issue would be if the hidden section didn't actually load until the 'more' button was clicked (maybe if you instead used ajax or something) then they'd not be able to see the links.

Only thing to really worry about is if you end up having hundreds of links on the page.

For a reasonable facsimilie of what bots see you can put the page into - http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php - and see what links it can pull out.

KW research is indeed tough and the Google Keyword Tool is designed to get lots of people bidding on the same keyword

The difficulty score and adwords traffic aren't related (as far as I know) but instead the difficulty score analyses the strength of the top X site in the results for that term.

They are working on improving the tool to take into account more factors but for the time being just use it as one of several ways to determine how hard ranking for a term would be.

Here's a link from Richard Baxter on understanding the toll more - http://seogadget.co.uk/understanding-search-rankings-competitiveness/

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

Part of relevance -

Can the link be relative or absolute?

The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.

Spamming, but I assume you're looking for something more long term

If it's not that competitive then you're not going to need that much to rank. You might be able to get away with some directory and article submissions to give you enough linking domain diversity to rank, but if you can get a few quality links in as well I would guess that could do it.

Really there's nothing different you need to do for low competition keywords, you just need to do less of it

I've been looking into this but don't have the technical chops to give you a definitive answer.

@Guillaume How can you say conclusively that it passes link juice when you don't know what redirect.php does? Unless you were able to see what it does.

For a straight php redirect to count as a 301 I believe it'd need to look like

header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

However I assume that you can't do these sort of header redirects as you have multiple ids going into the same redirect.php file?

Do you put cookies on people before redirecting them (I assume there's some sort of affiliation reason to redirect this way)?

Without understanding how it works I'm not sure if it does or doesn't pass value, but please make sure you're happy with the information given to you.

Site links? - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523

Really just a result of getting enough authority (ie links) to your site that the big G deems you worthy of them.

Hard to get them to show for anything except brand terms for a lot of the time but occasionally you can dominate a keyword enough to have them show up.

"Welcome to SEO, the industry where everything's made up and the points don't matter!"

Realistically there's no 'international standard' as everybody does their keyword research slightly differently.

If you're looking for a step by step I recommend starting with the SEOmoz guide - http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-5-keyword-research - there are a list of tools in there that most of us use.

10 steps to advanced keyword research - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research

And an alternative approach (though still similar) from Lisa Barone - http://www.searchengineguide.com/lisa-barone/five-steps-to-effective-keywor.php

Read these, combine and compare and you should be able to come up with something that is workable for you.

Simple, Google will only display 65 characters in the SERPs pages and you need to craft your titles for the maximum benefit which includes getting click throughs.

Also If you have 100 - 150 characters then each word is diluted in strength (to a degree) and if it needs to be that long then your page isn't as focused as it could be, you may be better off with 2 pages targeting different aspects of the keywords.

Keywords at the beginning of a title tag are currently thought to be useful - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

However correlation data shows keywords in title may actually have a negative correlation to ranking - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements - (On Page Keyword Usage section)

You won't really be penalized for it, but it's certainly not best practise.

Depends how competitive, but around 3 days if you're lucky and the search matches

Usually I only see our stories in there for 1 or 2 days tops, but then again smaller and smaller sites run with the story and our results get replaced with the same story but more recent updates.

If you become the authority on that story (ie, lots of links and references) I would imagine you could stay in there for longer, but alas, never seen it.

Geotargeting is not uncommon and the search engines are pretty good at negotiating sites using it, depends on your implimentation though.

We use geotargeting of users on our site to send users to /country/ based on their IP, with a few conditions.

1. Users are only redirected when coming to the homepage, either as direct or from search.
   If a user from France is coming to the main dot com we'll send them to the /fr/ site automatically.
   If the user tries to get to the homepage via a search engine we redirect them to the appropriate language site. This is because the main dot com often shows up above or near the /country/ sites in search, especially for brand terms.
   If a user has been given a subpage for a search (e.g. site/cat/page/) then they won't be redirected as we assume the search engines have done a decent enough job at matching them to a page they want.

2. Users/bots can override the routing.
   Users can internally navigate to other languages through the language menu.
   If we send somebody in France to the French site, but they only speak English, instantly forcing them back to the /fr/ site will just frustrate them.
   Link to the other language sites on your pages and check referral headers, if internal do not redirect.

All language folders are specified in WMT and it definitely works.

So Google comes in to the dot com, in the header there is a link to the /us/, so they'll crawl down that link getting both versions of the sites in their index.

You biggest challenge here is getting the /us/ ranking above the dot com in the USA, which will require some creative link building

Make sense?

It's against the ToS to have multiple adwords accounts unless you've sought prior permission. If caught I'd expect them to shut down all your accounts.

The end of your question is just nonsense though and you seem to have accidentally a word or two.

Are you looking for a contact who can help you remove the ban?

No point in irrelevant linking.

There's no harm in going back and adding links once you have relevant content to link to, sometimes you even change where links are pointing, but I wouldn't aim to have X amount of links in each article.

For my own sites the more powerful the page the more likely I am to put extra links in but as a rule I try not to have more than 3 links in the body of an article. But, simply linking when it seems useful is a good rule of thumb.

You want to place banner ads on them or you want your stock to appear on their sites?

If the former you're looking for an ad buying agency (assuming you don't want to do it yourself), if the latter you're probably going to have to provide the sites an API into your product database so they can query stock and prices.

I've been having a think about this one and while I'm not sure, I'm going to say I don't think it wouldn't have an effect on link juice passing. As in if there were 4 links and an empty anchor the juice would be divided by 4 and not 5.

Current W3 anchor use - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.1.3 - allows for various parameters in the <a>tag, however I'm willing to bet (not a huge sum of money though) that the href itself triggers the link part of a link (and am I right saying even js links need href="#" or similar to trigger?).</a>

<a>Plus I think older versions of HTML allowed things other than links within anchors (though I may be making that up) so if the engines have grown around those older versions it makes sense they look for something other than the 'a' in the tag to work.

I can't think of a good way to test though, maybe somebody can clarify my thinking or tell me if I'm wrong.

I agree with you though that it's not wise to put quirky elements like this on a page, especially if there's a lot of dropdowns. How do the navigation links work if there's no href?</a>

Probably going to need the URL on this one.

I presume you can access the site as a user? What's in your robots.txt file? You using the SEOmoz tools?