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I totally understand, I've been spoiled by working with web designers that are very customer service oriented and who have not held their customers hostage...so this has been very disheartening on several levels. All three of the clients have been referred to other web designers per my recommendation. One has moved, one is waiting for a little while, and the other has not decided yet. I have managed to do some canonical meta work using the plug-in and appreciate your sharing the other options available.

Thanks Ian...I'll take a look. Nothing I can do but depending what I see I can add it to the "to do" list.

I hate when I reply and it doesn't post! Thanks Ryan, Appreciate your sharing your experience in submission before posts are made. I would not have thought about doing one for subdomains--great insight and suggestion. The site in question has been up a while and is pretty comprehensive so I thought it would be a good practice. Another site I am working on did not have one either and it will be interesting to see how the XML sitemap added today will impact it. Thanks again to all of you for chiming in. Very helpful, I just had  not heard of someone declining to create one as a general practice before.

hi i have a question related to this but havent got answers yet i have purchased a lot of different domains and realize now that many of them have backlinks from pornsite and maybe even spamming sites. will that effect the sites i am about to link to? i give you an example i purchase domain abcdef.com which has over 1.000.000 backlinks from different sites, all from adult to spammy - many of them also good I put a simple wordpress blog on abcdef.com and write an article about sexdating or sextoys and link to fx. sexshop.com and sexdating.com which are also adult sites - will this help the ranking for sexshop.com and sexdating.com or will it hurt them? thx

Thanks Ryan, I can play with the widget code for the Facebook. Yes, I am doing an entire site redesign but I wanted to run a few things over here at SEOMoz as well. It is pretty comprehensive based on all the topics and content and so it is taking a while. My designer so rocks--and has some great ideas.

Hi There, I decided a long time ago that the best way to handle the issue of the client deciding they want things changed is to allow them to decide for themselves that it may not be such a good idea. I have found a very effective way of achieving this. As soon as we receive a request or instruction from the client that we believe to be detrimental to the SEO for the site, we immediately forward to them a Disclaimer and Acknowledgement Form. The form is accompanied by a request for them to sign and return it so that the requested changes can be completed. Similar to Ninjamarketer's disclaimer, the most important part is that the form carries the words "hereby acknowledge and accept" and requires a signature. We make no attempt to dissuade the client - just forward the form and require it to be executed and returned before the work can proceed. It generally takes 5- 10 minutes for the client to call me once the form has been sent and in every case to date, they have decided before I answered the call, that they may not want to make the changes after all It is at this point that I am able to talk it through with them and do a little gentle SEO "Training" which they are very receptive to. It works for me As to partial SEO - we offer on-page services on a per-page basis (minimum 3 pages), but for any project of more than 5 pages, our quotation includes site wide audit, structural review and recommendations for further work. We also provide on-page work via direct access OR as a detailed report which can be handed to the existing developer for action. For clients with limited budgets, this can be helpful as they can attack the work in manageable chunks. We conduct the site assessment and advise them which pages are highest priority for action. It is nice when you have a client coming back to you for more work because they have seen marked improvement from the original project and want some more of that action Hope that helps, Sha