Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Taking into account what your're saying here, one would then assume that inbound backlinks could never cause a penalty too - since competitors could do that intentionally as well? If Matt Cutts was reading this, he'd probably be all over you...

I am not a big fan of auto text->link widgets but if I were you I'd put a condition to replace text to a specific link only once per post. You do not want to 'over-optimize' your Internal links/ anchor text. Regular variations, whether its an inbound link from external site or just an internal is most effective.

About 2 years ago I tried to validate 6 locations for clients - a month passes and there was no sign of any mail from Google. So I tried the verification by phone (SMS) and it worked. This might have changed now but find out if the SMS verification option is available for you as it depends if your listing is an old one or if you just created it (bad luck!).

You can also try phone verification if you haven't already used it to validate other locations for 3 times. Make sure you have enough citations (local directory listings, etc) to have a higher likelyhood of being considered as a legit place.

Don't forget the Pininterest - if you have good images, incredible SEO potential there.

Also, find relevant websites who might find your images interesting - not difficult if your pics are unique and not-so-common. You can allow them to use it if they link to you.

Since there are mixed opinions here, probably my short 'yes' didn't help, so here is my opinion, in little more details.

If 301s could ONLY pass juice but not penalty, wouldn't everyone try to get as many 301s as possible - ie. acquire dozens of sites, pay other webmasters to do 301s, etc? Think about it. In effect, the 301 would act as a 'paid' backlink except only more powerful and it would be much easier for everyone (with $) to game rankings.

If you still don't believe 301s can potentially pass a penalty, you can refer to this thread:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4323639.htm

There is no research that cites that links lose or gain value with age, but I believe both are equally important. A lot of people who buy links will lose it after a certain period and if a lot of such links are lost, Google can detect something (if it hadn't already!) and would remove juice/ demote accordingly.  As the links age, the trust to those links increases as well.

New links are very important as well as it gives signals of 'freshness' of the quality of the content/page that it hasn't become obsolete with time.

In short - Yes it can

I usually don't sweat a lot for ranks and such but last couple of days, our rankings have been moving drastically.

'Rank Tracker' shows 1st position for many keywords and the "keyword difficulty tool" shows 2nd and 3rd positions.  Is is just me or this is a common thing?

Yes ,there is a difference. Product_type is the category that you think fits best for your productand google_product_type is the product type or product category that you think fits best within the category structure specified by Google - i.e. defined in Google product  taxonomy.

Here is Google's product  taxonomy: http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160081

Sometimes your category might not be listed in their taxonomy, in which case you might want to list the on you think is closest to what the product is about.

Is your blog hosted on a subdomain?

Personally I have noticed that Panda is sitewide but the subdomains might remain unaffected. In our case, our ecommerce site with 6,000+ pages got affected but the blog (subdomain) actually increased in traffic due to better content, more social signals and other factors.

Its difficult to say what happens exactly in this scenario but some value of the links might be discredited as Google's algo may be able to identify the relation.

Absolutely no penalty for multiple links to a single page!

Thanks Stephan

Thats what we are planning to do - not create a separate site as there are many other issues with that - site management, potential duplicate content issue, etc.

To me it seems logical that assuming Google is able to identify if a website is optimized for Mobile, they would reward them for it when mobile users are searching, as that obviously leads to better user experience.

More info on the size of your company and also the industry and what you expect from Twitter would help.
Personally, I don't think there is any harm in maintaining both accounts.

Have employees create their own Twitter accounts and use their Firstname-YourBrand (e.g. Craig-SEOMoz) as handles - that way it has a personal feel but it also helps in branding each time other viewers look at their profiles/tweets.

There is not a whole lot of information on available on the web for Google Shopping optimization but from what I have researched and few that I tried over time, here is the factors I think that do weigh in:

• Reviews: Its the 'links' in Google Shopping. In Google, websites refer to other websites. In Google Shopping, customers refer to other websites

• Title

• Attributes: more data  you feed Google, the better they feel about ranking you higher

• Price: Not 100% sure about this but definitely worth considering. Seems logical that Google wants to provide users with best deals

• Few others.

Just creating zillions of social profiles for a link isn't going to help much. In fact there are many automated software, the borderline spammy ones, that does it for you but those links don't add value and if you domain is not of high authority, it could potentially even cause a dent on the domain 'trust' level.

If I were you, I would focus on few in the beginning - Twitter, FB, Linked & Youtube or other one depending on your niche, and add couple of more social networks every month, so you are building on social signals without quickly thinning out on the activity levels for each. You don't have to be very active in all networks, but have more than just couple of social profiles is good. Digg and SU is definitely worth considering because of the traffic they can send to you along with the longer term social juice for SEO

HIGHLY unlikely that your website got pandalized due to "duplicate video" content hosted on your server.

If the videos were embeds (youtube, etc) and the creator of the video  has higher authority website and has the videos embedded too, then yes, your site might throw off 'thin' content trait but even then it shouldn't be enough to attract the Panda to its door.

If I were you, I'd look at all the pages for the text content they have and if any are duplicates or close to duplicates, and if I find any I would have original content written for each . I would also look the title and meta tags and check for duplicates also analyze see the # of backlinks to all the pages.If 1% of your websites pages have all the backlinks and rest have no links or social activity at all, that could throw off a thin content profile as well. I would also get lot of social signals (retweets, etc) - get those pages on Twitter and other social networks including Digg, Stumbleupon, etc to show Google that these pages don't simply exist for the sake of it but they are shared (liked) by people as well.
Take a look at other metrics as well - time on site, bounce rate, etc as they are getting more important.

Does anyone know if there are any theories or evidence that a mobile optimized website (CSS) has better chances of ranking on Mobile platforms - assuming links and other factors being equal?

In other words, is Google able to identify that a website has been optimized for mobiles and gives them preference/weight to rank over other websites that are not mobile optimized?

Google still does not have access to Facebook data, specifically to private walls of 100s of millions of users where a big majority of links are shared. Google has the tweet links and other data shared on Twitter and tweeted links has been shown to improve ranks even if temporarily. I'd vote for Twitter in terms of SEO at the moment but this might change should there be some sort of data sharing agreement between Google and Facebook.

You might also want to read this article regarding Twitter signals & its effect on rankings: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

Fortunately or unfortunately Google still gives pretty good weight to exact match domains and for the search query you pointed you I think its definitely possible that the domain is what got it the high positions.

The #5 ranking site is:
interimcfoservices.net - registered 2 years, not many links and not much authority.

However, Google is reducing the authority of exact match domains so I wouldn't go out my way and invest in such domains as it is unlikely to benefit in SEO in the long run.

What many do not consider or cannot calculate is the number of visitrs/ potential clients lost due to to having such a keywordy" domains that not only appear unprofessional but are very difficult to remember.