Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can use OpenGraph markup for images that you want to use as a preview in Google, but don't want displayed on the page:

Just place that code in the header, and the image will show up as one of the options when you share your link on G+.

Pagination can is a somewhat tricky subject. The best solution is usually to include pagination markup (rel=next/prev) and include the appropriate canonical tags to avoid duplicate content. This brief tutorial from Google explains what to do:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

If you really want 68 pages of archives indexed (not recommended post-Panda, but it's up to you) at least have your CMS generate unique titles for each page ("Blog Archive Page 1 | Sageworks", "Blog Archive Page 2 | Sageworks", etc).

Just be sure to put in 301 redirects from site B to site A, so that Google doesn't think the blog content is duplicate content, and you should be fine.

In general, Google does not like search results in its search results. Dynamically generating content can get you some traffic in the short term, but puts you at a big risk for Panda and other thin-quality content penalties in the longterm.

I think it's a good practice in general to have the blog hosted on your main site in a subdirectory like you mentioned (sitea/blog). Having a separate blog site means more work you have to do in terms of link building and promotion in order for links from that site to have any value. Having the blog on your main site takes less work, and your site will benefit more directly from links coming to the content.

Having the errors in Webmaster Tools is not going to negatively impact your SEO in any way. It's more of a heads up to you, the webmaster, that they have found a page that is missing.

As long as there are no internal or external links to those pages, they should disappear automatically, although it could take months. If you don't want the errors cluttering up your report, then manually marking them as fixed is the way to go.

I'm not a Penguin-recovery expert, but it is possible to recover from the penalty. I would continue to reach out to the site owners who are linking to you and disavow any spammy links in webmaster tools.

You might also want to focus more on longer tail keywords like "balloons UK", "where to buy balloons", "balloons cheap" etc that probably convert better than a broad term like "balloon" anyway.

No problem. You can't sit back and hope people find you, you have to actively promote your content. This could mean e-mailing your customers, promoting through social media, posting links Reddit, contacting other people in your industry, etc. You can't just have great content, you need to go out there and spread the word about it.

Also, if you are looking for link building ideas, this is a great list: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

This could be because your homepage is being penalized for over-optimization, but your contact page doesn't have any spammy links, hence it still ranks for "balloon" based on the strength of your domain. Likewise, if you over-optimized for "balloon" your site may be penalized for that keyword, but "balloons" is a separate keyword and you may still rank for it.

"Content is king" means that content should be the foundation of your marketing efforts, because your content is going to be what drives your leads and customers. If you have truly amazing content, you won't have to put as much effort into link building, because people will link to it naturally.

But a site still needs links to rank. Links are the primary component of Google's algorithm. Links help Google determine if your content is "high quality". A search engine bot can't just read your content to determine whether it's valuable (beyond basic grammar and spelling), it looks to see if other people are linking to that content, to determine its quality.

If you really want to just focus on content, create absolutely amazing content about storage bins, or come up with a clever or funny twist that can help your content go viral. But remember that your site needs links to rank, and those links have to come from somewhere.

Hi, you asked why your sire isn't ranking. It's not ranking because the site doesn't have any links. Your site needs links if you want it to rank. The links to your e-comm site aren't going to have any value unless your microsite has a strong backlink profile.

Microsites can be done in a spammy or non-spammy way. I don't think the content of your site is necessarily spammy, but the domain name (plastic-storage-bins.com) does seem a little spammy. Most web users do not trust domains with tons of dashes in them, and exact match domain names (especially those with dashes) were devalued quite a bit with recent Google updates.

And again, your site needs backlinks. A link from a microsite with zero backlinks does not count for anything. You need to build links to your microsite in order for it to have any value. But if you're spending all that effort building links to your microsite, why not just build the links directly to your main site, which will have more impact?

A microsite is only a viable strategy if you have the resources to do twice the amount of work link building, or your microsite lends itself to getting backlinks easily in a way your main site cannot (for example, a meme tumblr or a joke site).

If the ranking dropped around a Penguin launch, then it could be a Penguin penalty. What does your anchor text profile look like? With the latest updates, anything over 30% is considered risky, although you might get a little more wiggle room since the keyword is your domain name.

If directories are all you can think of, this list should get your head buzzing with new ideas:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

The content seems fine, but you're seriously lacking in the backlinks department. Having good content isn't enough to get a site ranked, you also need external links pointing to the site.

Also, the design of the site (especially the header) could use some improvement. The more professional & attractive your site looks, the easier it will be to build links to it. A better design will help reduce bounce rate and improve customer trust as well.

I would still start with the sites that aren't ranking first. The more things you try to do at once, the less predictable the outcome is and the greater the risk of a negative impact.

Start by moving over a few sites that aren't ranking that well. Gauge the impact. Do their rankings increase or drop? What about a month after you've made the move? Once you have a better idea of what the impact will be, you can move over a few more sites, and repeat the process.

A piecemeal approach may take a little longer, but it reduces your risk and gives you a more predictable outcome. It also will allow you to perfect the process of moving sites before you get to the moneymakers that are already ranking well.

How do you know that you've been "penalized"? If it's Penguin penalty, avoid using exact keyword match anchors when linking between your domains. And diversify your link profile by building more external links.

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.

Just make sure they're linking to your most important pages, and the link equity should flow to them. Otherwise I wouldn't worry about it.

If you can add additional content to your product pages that add value to them, that would be ideal. The most obvious is product reviews. By having reviews on your product, you can add tons of unique content to your pages and you can get your customers to do it for you! You can incentivize your customers to write reviews by offering discount coupons or similar.

Other things you can add are things like videos, ingredients, how tos, faqs, usage info, etc. Just overall more content to flesh out your product pages. If you can't tackle all 2,000 pages at once, start by identifying your highest revenue pages and the pages that are within striking distance in Google (positions 5-15) and see if you can bump those up with a little more content.