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Yea, those types of links are usually no-follow.  As far as no-follow links being helpful for rankings - that's something that's been debated thoroughly and it's hard to say.  Like you said, they don't pass much juice, but can possibly be seen as a relevance signal.

I would also expect links from sites related to your niche to be of more value than social profile links.

Canonical URL's are two url's that point to the exact same webpage.

It's not a link that users can click on or anything.  It's like an invisible note to search engines that tells them there are other URL's on your website that point to the same page.  It keeps search engines from getting confused.

I believe google page service is still in beta and on an approval-only basis.  Looks useful and I've seen claims that it's shaved 1-2 secs of load times.

You really don't need to do anything, this is totally normal.  One of them is showing metrics for the specific page (your home page) and the other is metrics for your domain overall.

It's totally normally for the PA of the homepage to be higher than the DA...

If you receive a warning in Google Webmaster tools, that's seen as a manual penalty.  If you lose rank for a few keyword terms it might be an "algorithmic" penalty - which just means that Google no likey.  These types of penalties are difficult to assess.

Usually key phrases would be penalized because of unnatural patterns in anchor text.  I would look at your anchor text distribution in open site explorer and see what you've got going on.

Yea sorry, I can explain a little better.  The style.css in a wordpress theme will usually have theme developer information. Yours looks like this:

Theme Name: NewspaperTimes [SinglePro Version]
Theme URI: http://magazine3.com
Description: Newspaper/Political Wordpress Magazine Theme
Version: 4.1
Author: Magazine3
Author URI: [http://magazine3.com](http://magazine3.com/)

If you purchased it from them then you should be entitle to some sort of support.

And as for the firefox developer tools you're inspecting the CSS and HTML, there's a lot
involved in making the changes you want to make.  You'd need to be comfortable with
those as well as PHP to dynamically load in featured images and excerpts.

There's two sides to SEO.  Primarily, like you said it should be making improvements that help search engines properly crawl and idex the site.  On-page SEO is easy in sense, because the best practices are well established.

Off page SEO is where everything gets shady, way too many SEO companies automating link building, dummy sites with all scraped content, article spinners, the list goes on....
I just fixed up a site that an SEO company had been "building links" for over the last year.  The site didn't have keywords in the title tags, had tons of duplicate url issues, repeated content all over the place, etc.  Stuff like that just blows my mind, seen it quite a bit.Good SEO should be a solution based on what a client actually needs.  Most of the time they won't know, so it's on us to do our research and find out.  We need to research the niche, the competition, the whole 9 if we wanna actually provide value.

Well, the name of your theme folder is "newpaper times single pro."   Search returns pretty much all torrent and spam sites.  So theme support is probably nonexistent.  However, I think you have enough of the word Gattwick as it is.

Theme developers normally provide direct support for the themes they sell.  So it really depends who you purchased your theme from.

If you bought it directly from a vendor like woothemes, themify, etc., then you will definitely find support options on the website where you made the purchase.

If you bought your theme from a marketplace like themeforest.com, then you'd need to log back in and look for the developer or theme author - they will have some sort of theme support option through they're author profile.  If they don't, then they're probably not the most reputable vendor.

Also many SEO improvements won't be theme-dependent and are easy to make with the help of plugins like YoastSEO or All in One SEO pack.

What kinds of things are you trying to do? I may be able to point you in the right direction...

All of our websites are wordpress sites hosted by BlueHost, and I've been completely satisfied.  They are however lower traffic sites (30-100) visitors per day. When I called them I think I talked to someone in Utah and the support was great.

If I were in the market for new hosting right now I'd probably be looking into Media Temple.

I also believe it's absolutely useful, ODP data still gets aggregated by smaller search engines, other directories, etc...but like Robert said it's not gaurunteed, pay close attention to make sure you choose the most appropriate category and the listing description/title is quality for the best chances.

Good luck!

Hi PJ,  to make sure the sitemap actually gets crawled, its a good idea to have it linked.  This way search crawlers hit that link and then the sitemap - which obviously has links to all pages,  categories, etc. as well as info about how important pages are and how often they change.

The point is just to make sure your pages and images get properly indexed - you can also submit xml sitempaps and check up on indexing in google webmaster tools.

I haven't looked into it extensively, but given Google's recommendations about the tool I wouldn't expect that kind of flexibility.  It's really meant as last resort type of tool, after you've tried contacting webmasters to get the links taken down.

I would just be sure your situation is really bad enough to warrant disavowal.  Maybe consult a doctor.  Hope that helps!

You know, I think you have your keywords in the right places that it shouldn't be an issue of relevance.  Just about every popular news site would be given an on-page "F" by the grader for general searches like that.  But popular news sites also have large amounts of natural backlinks/socialshares/etc...

Hope I'm not being too harsh here, but don't expect a magic wand in your situation.  A quick link profile comparison between you and your competitors is enough to raise an eyebrow, and the ad-banner/logo combo in your header kind of begs a bounce.

Not every improvement that effects rank is an "SEO" improvement.  If I were you I would focus on making my site the absolute best experience it can be for my visitors - both in user experience and quality of written content.

Where does the potential hazard come in? Wouldnt there be more of a hazard in running out of date WP versions and server applications? Im no developer, but I'd say unless theres some older theme/plugin that requires a previous php or wp version, theres no risk to the site's functionality.

I'll be honest, it's pretty shameful how little attention I give Bing and Yahoo. But something recently caught my eye - I have a client who according to rank tracker is all over the place in yahoo/bing...up 20 positions for some kw's, down 12 for others...meanwhile Google's holding steady, and Google data seems mostly accurate - with one exception of showing 46th position for an exact match branded search that they're #1 for.

I know Rank Tracker has been going through some fine tuning, right?  I don't manually check Yahoo/Bing - I can't imagine those #'s are accurate though.  Am I right to assume it's incorrect data?

Just curious, any insight would be much appreciated.  Thanks

Do you want the "clients" page to rank/pass rank back to your clients?  I don't think there's much value in a page of outbound links for rankings, but It shouldn't hurt you - as long as its just one page to a site of real content.

A list of clients can be valuable for visitors though like was said - establishing credibility, etc. Keep the page for visitors but don't count on it mattering much to search engines or passing rank.

Any link that points to an external url technically has the http protocol, it just may be inferred or added by a browser/visual editor, etc. - so it's all the same to a search engine.

There is a difference between http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com, or any other time a single resource has multiple URL's...and this does matter. You don't need to try to control how you're linked to (cuz you can't) but make these duplicate url's are canonicalized (rel="canonical") or 301 redirected, so that search engines don't see it as duplicate content.

Here's Mr. Cutts explaining 301 vs. rel="canonical" in case you're headed down that road.

I don't believe you'll lose any benefit by having a responsive site, as long as it still contains the same content/html markup. You may have trouble converting your current fixed-width site to a responsive layout though.  Responsive layouts are accomplished through CSS media queries (different properties/values based on viewport size).

If you're using a "template" it may be easier to just get a different one that's responsive and re-create it.  I don't know jack about SiteBuilder, but there's loads of responsive templates out there for Joomla and Wordpress.

I'll echo the first 2 responses - don't hire a tele/email marketing "SEO company."  Google's webmaster guidelines should give you a good idea of what kind of questions you should be asking an SEO.  Check this out ... and ask the questions, if they're a real SEO they will appreciate that you care enough to ask.....

Be very wary of companies that only talk about "links/link-building,"  and not on-site optimization.  I have a few clients who before hiring me, were paying SEO companies $500-$1000 a month for "link building" - and the only thing they have to show for it is a bunch of automated comment and article spam. - (these links are useless/harmful)....

Good luck to you, you're in the right place to find a good upstanding SEO!