What does a Ruby site map look like? Surely Ruby just runs something like 'gen_url_list' and you can output it in sitemap.xml, no?

Ignore that, ROR is an XML format, lol.

Eh, no search engines support them as far a I know.

Why not test it by submitting one through WMT and seeing if Google accepts it and let us know the results?

Well, surely you're now in an excellent position to tell all of us?!

I don't think the issue is whether going from 51 > 92 will help, but more whether you've gone from X seconds to less than 1.5 seconds.

In webmaster tools if you look at labs > site performance, you should see a graph of your time.

Can also use something like - http://tools.pingdom.com/ - to check how fast a page loads.

I would suggest collecting your own data (especially since you've already made the changes) and evaluating whether it's been worth it or not. You should also monitor things like conversions and bounce rate.

Might take a couple of days unfortunately, but should be only a few hours.

The malware error is not being produced by people coming to the site specifically, as in it's not being checked and generated each time.

Google itself is probably getting the data from stopbadware (I think) and you'll find it's only on certain browsers as well that subscribe.

Rather than rely on solving the problem through WMT I had better success by tackling a similar problem through the stopbadware (or whatever site it is) channels.

Try accessing the site through bing/google on IE/FF/Chrome/Opera/Safari and see what advice is thrown up during the warning. It should give you a link to the appropriate site to fix things on.

In fact, try going here - http://stopbadware.org/home/reviewinfo - use the tool and then request a check.

Google now treats sub domains as a key element of the site

[citation needed]

Though I know you're talking about  - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html

However, as far as I'm aware, there's no information yet as to how Google are changing the weighting of these links (or even if they are), so I'd still be wary of charging ahead with a subdomain

I'm in agreement with Stefano that I've been using it for years and never had any problems that weren't my fault/settings.

Is the problem that it simply can't write to your server? I've had that before. Create the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files manually via ftp, then play around with the permissions until the plugin can write to the files.

If you can tell us exactly what the issue is we might be able to get it working

"Yeast is a great all-in one seo plugin"

Agree with Wayne, but for reference I'll have a large, good quality image at around 70kb and a standard image at around 20 - 30kb. If I can get it in for less without it looking terrible I will.

If you have photoshop it shouldn't be much of a problem playing with the save for web setting and seeing how much you can trim off. 60% is a good standard for jpg files.

So you use robots.txt to disallow indexing of anything under the /bet/ folder, you link to 'bet/XYZ' using nofollow and 'bet/XYZ' has a redirect on it?

I'm going to go with safe. It's a fairly common practice.

If Google's stopped telling me what the problem files are, any idea how to find out what they are seeing?

I think I've plugged the problem and removed the suspicious files, but I can't really be sure.

One of our sites was haXX0red and at the moment I'm thinking it was a non-updated paid for WP plugin using the old version of timthumb.

While not important to my question, the hack included .htaccess files in all the /uploads/ to redirect to a site (tonycar dot com) which I assume installed some sort of malware or spyware.

I changed all ftp and admin log ins, updated the timthumb files and deleted all the .htaccess files, for added measure I've currently made the upload folders read only.

I've requested a review through webmaster tools and the image that WMT claimed to be an issue has been removed as being an issue. That is to say if I clicked on the malware warning in WMT, it told me imagex.jpg was a problem and now it doesn't tell me anything is an issue, though the malware warning still persists.

As I no longer have any indication as to what (if anything) is wrong, I tried going through some contacts at adwords to no avail, though they have said there's a note saying there's no malware currently on the site (I'm hoping that's by them and not just my reinclusion request).

Assuming the all mighty G is now satisfied there's no malware on the site (or being processed by the site), does anyone have any idea how to get rid of the warning?

Alternatively if the warning is accurate, how can I find out what's being effected?

Michael Gray does talk about that in the first article, along with making things easier to update if you want to change where the link goes, so there are some valid reasons for doing it

You're looking to mask your affiliate links to preserve link juice, yeah? I'd consider masking the links for a couple of reasons.

Have a quick read of this - http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/cloaking-affiliate-links/ - and maybe this will help too (if you're on Wordpress) - http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/

If you need more specifics on how to do it, then ask away.

Keyword density?

ಠ_ಠ

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/seo-myths-that-persist-keyword-density

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/some-opinions-on-the-seo-myths-realities-fight

http://www.miislita.com/fractals/keyword-density-optimization.html

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

`Is that right? Should it not be` 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

or even

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

To be fair, I think all three of these will work.

From another post I answered

"Maybe XPATH and PHP could get this? I'll point you at this - http://www.css-resources.com/list-a-websites-external-links-alphabetically-using-xpath-and-php.html - but don't ask me how to do it ;)"

Maybe ask Richard here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/list-of-links-pointing-out-of-my-site - and see if he found a way

I'll jump in even though you didn't ask

Really I think it makes the URI unnecessarily long.

While thinking about your site in terms of 'levels' the URI doesn't play that big a part (if all the posts are linked to from the home page for example that's still a second level page [for the most part]). However it is located at site/blog/category/page in the URI, which has at least one unnecessary directory.

Also, as a personal preference, I'd rather call my blog 'news', 'updates' or 'notices' in the URI.

I'm going to assume you don't already have many links into these pages since you're going to be messing around with them. If they do (and really even if they don't) make sure and set up the redirects correctly.

Site structure really depends a lot on the content that's on the site.

'example.com/category/title' is quite a good way of doing it.

It could; but unless you've been very bad, I wouldn't imagine that you would be penalized .

Google is a registrar, so has access to the whois details on all your domains, but if it's used I doubt it's for any sort of automatic penalty.

If you host your sites on the same server, again, Google can see that, but is unlikely to effect each other unless there's some cross linking - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/ - (I presume that link is still mostly true).

If you don't link the Google account to the new sites then there shouldn't be any automatic penalty applied either, just make sure and follow the rules regarding not opening a new adwords account.

Always exceptions, but you're probably okay.

1. Doesn't matter too much.

2. Yes - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

3. Yes.

Things to maybe think about though is HTML 5 and the

<header>tag for sections. Read - http://html5doctor.com/the-header-element/ - and - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

At the moment there will be some accessibility issues with screen readers when using multiple

s but that should get better.

Headers aren't a big ranking factor - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-five-least-important-ranking-factors - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6

A vast majority of the web isn't coded correctly and the above points to it not really mattering, however, it's worth thinking about your structure and still only really using one

if you can.

</header>

Bribes or maybe just dinner and a few drinks

Alas, you can't force Roger to crawl your site

"**Q.  I just fixed a ton of issues. Can I get a new crawl?**SEOmoz crawls your site once per week. The start date is based on the date you first set up your campaign. Unfortunately, there is no way to change this date or force an earlier crawl. However, you can use the SEOmoz Custom Crawl tool to crawl up to 3000 pages of your website. We’ll email you the resulting CSV file within 24 hours."