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This is usually caused by plugins that pull PageRank such as SEOQuake. I've never had that experience with the MozBar.

I think you mean splash pages, not landing pages. Splash pages are almost never a good idea from an SEO perspective, and are generally not a good user experience either.

If there are links pointing to your old pages, whether on your site or from external sources, Google will continue to try to index them and return 404s. The best way to tell Google that these pages have moved is to add 301 redirects from your new content to your old content. This will eliminate the 404s and help you retain and link juice the old pages had.

Vimeo Pro can work. Here are some good resources to make sure you are embedding the videos properly:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/video-seo-tactics-to-get-ranked/

Google has never really shown an accurate count of backlinks.

Your best bet is to look at 3rd party backlink tools. The top 3 tools are OSE, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs. Each of these indexes the web separately from Google, so can provide information that Google withholds. However, these are all paid tools, and are not comprehensive, but they do a good job of detecting the highest value links.

Another great free tool is the site explorer in Bing Webmaster Tools, which uses Bing's index to identify backlinks.

PageRank and mozRank are good metrics to look at when evaluating a blog.

I'm not sure how wide a net you want to cast with your contest, but I wouldn't be too quick to ignore links from even relatively low PR sites. As long as the site is in the same niche, getting links from a bunch of relevant sites (especially with good anchor text) can do more for your pages' rankings than just increasing your domain authority.

First of all, don't panic. New sites fluctuate in rankings all the time, as Google tries to figure out where your site fits best in the SERPs. Penguin was mostly about spammy links, not on-page optimization.

Your site is relatively new and still doesn't have much content or links. Work on writing more content and building more authoritative links, and your rankings will improve over time.

It's unlikely to be harmful since you're not doing anything malicious or misleading.

Meta descriptions are not a huge issue. Google will use them as a suggestion for description in the search results, but will generate a description even if the meta tag is missing.

What may be a bigger problem is that you have all these blog pages indexed, which is basically just duplicate content. I would go ahead and put a noindex/follow meta tag on these pages to prevent them from getting indexed.

http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

I wouldn't remove any links unless you've determined that a site has been hit by Penguin. The way you can do this is by looking at the traffic history for the site, and see if there have been any drops that correspond to Penguin updates, or rankings drops that correspond to Penguin updates and the anchor text being optimized.

Otherwise, I would leave links alone, as any normal site will accumulate low quality links, sitewide links, etc. Just focus on having a strong & balanced backlink profile. 70 links is not a lot, and leaves you more vulnerable to low quality links throwing off your profile.

Looks like there are a bunch of tag and category pages indexed in Google, which could be leading to duplicate content issues. I would consider noindexing these using the Yoast plugin you have installed.

It may help with consistency, but it certainly has no benefit from an SEO perspective.

Trailing slashes are treated as separate pages. Best to stick to one, and configure your .htaccess file so that one 301s to the other:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Hi, it's possible. What do you mean by "It just happens to be the time when we removed a bunch of paid links"? When were the links removed in relation to the traffic drop?

I would take a deeper look into which pages caused the traffic drop. Look at the 30 day period before the drop and compare it to the 30 day period after the drop. Where is the majority of the traffic loss coming from? Which keywords? Penguin tends to impact the homepage or the specific keywords you are over optimizing.

In regards to paid links, Google has a very hard time detecting these unless you are being blatant about them, and you will typically receive a notice in GWT if you receive a penalty for it. Check to see if there are any manual penalties on your site in GWT. If not, chances are Google has not discovered that the links are paid (yet).

The main thing to watch out for with Penguin is low quality links (relative to your high quality links) and the anchor text of your links. With the latest updates, you want to keep your keyword anchor text below 25-30% of your total links. So if your ratio is higher than that, try to get that changed. And focus on building more links, because 70 is not a lot. The stronger your backlink profile is, the more resilient it is to spammy links.

This is the code you want to add to your /htaccess file:

#Options +FollowSymlinks
Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

redirect 301 index.html http://www.domain.com/

This will make it so http://www.domain.com/ is the correct link for your site.

This should not result in any redirect loops unless you already have redirects in place.

From my experiences and from the case studies I've read, schema.org generally helps with rankings. If it's a products site, then there should be no harm in using product specific semantic markup. Rich snippets such as review ratings can also increase CTR.

You're not going to fool Google into thinking a product site is a news site. If you want to compete on news, then create a separate section of the site that is news focused.

301 redirects don't pass all their link juice, so you may see a slight rankings drop, but otherwise Google should treat the site the same.

As long as the sites are high quality (i.e. high pagerank/mozrank) I wouldn't worry about it. There is nothing wrong with linking to 3 sites in a post that happen to be from the same C-Block. As long as you're not linking to the same 3 sites over and over in a spammy or manipulative way, you should be perfectly fine.

There is also nothing wrong with getting links from 3 sites from the same C-Block. Happens all the time. As long as Google doesn't suspect that you own all 3 sites and are linking out in a manipulative manner, you should be fine.

Unless you are actively trying to do something sneaky like create a link network, C-Blocks should be the last thing you're worried about as an SEO.

Have you received any warnings in Google Webmaster Tools or seen a drop in ranking for keywords that are targeted in the sitewide links? If not, I would not remove any links, as they could be passing link juice. If you ever receive a link warning, then I would consider disavowing or removing links at that time.

"DayTripFinder - Things to do reviewed by you - 7,000 attractions" and "Read Reviews, Browse Opening Hours and Prices. View Photos, Maps. 7,000 UK Visitor Attractions." is what I see on my computer.

Maybe you are serving different content to different users? Or you are seeing something different because you are logged in?