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I'd say you can safely put this issue aside. As you've mentioned yourself, xml files don't need title tags, and I presume you aren't trying to have this page rank in the SERPS in the first place anyway. Perhaps one of the SEOmoz fellows can look into this?

"99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it's the best choice for all parties." (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains).

Even though this is a post made in 2006, I don't know of any relevant changes that would alter this advice.

That depends a lot on what you're trying to achieve with those titles. Are you looking for maximum exposure of the title to the user? Then I'd suggest ~45 characters (which is the maximum number of characters visible in the Safari browser, my personal favorite 'Atomic' shows only 10 characters in the tabbed interface). If you're trying to have the page ranked in the iPhone version of Google, I'd advice the regularly advised title tag length of no more than 65 characters as Google appears to have the same cut-off on mobile and desktop browsers. Or perhaps there is another goal you're trying to achieve?

There isn't really a maximum or optimal length to a URL (well, technically it is 2048 characters [http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html], but I don't think that was the kind of limit you were refering too).

In general it is a good idea to keep the URL as short as possible, but at the same time try to include keywords in it that make it clear to both the user and the search engine what the article is about. As with many things in SEO: try to find the right balance.

Even though I'm not a SEOmoz employee, I think I can answer this answer on behalf of them.

SEOmoz will not make your website more visible or accessible as a direct result of your payment. If you decide to take a PRO membership with the site however, you'll get access to premium resources that will enable you to take your website to the next level with regards to SEO, and keep increasing that level over time.

By using the (premium) tools that are available to PRO members (such as the campaigns that you can use to monitor weekly crawls of your selected websites), you can see very clearly which mistakes you've made on these sites and what you can do to improve your SEO.

Unfortunately you can't, as Dr. Pete explained in the following blog post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks

From what I've read on the internet, it is best to "noindex,follow" all pages >1. This issue had bugged me for quite some time as well, and I've struggled to find good resources explaining why their solution was the best. Now that I've actually given the subject some thought, and finally managed to read some quality material on the matter, it all makes sense.

It's basically a checklist. Do you want search engines to

• index your paginated result pages: yes / no

• reach the items that are listed in your paginated result pages: yes / no

In most cases you don't want your paginated result pages to be indexed. With our without Panda, visitors get little value from actually viewing 'page 7' in your result pages. That actual page provides little or no value to those visitors. However, you DO want those items listed on these paginated pages to be crawled, especially when you don't have any other pages linking to them (which you should by the way). This boils down to:

• Don't nofollow your paginated links (because you want search engine spiders to reach them)

• Put "noindex,follow" in the meta robots tag for all pages >1 (thus page 2 and greater) so the engines will no index these paginated results, but will crawl on to the pages that are behind the listings

Good luck!

You should be looking at this from two different angles: (1) how would the hosting affect your rankings and (2) how will it affect the loading time of your website.

In terms of rankings, especially since you're considering to purchase a .info domain (side note: are you sure about this? Domains with .info isn't exactly considered a super premium TLD), I don't think it'll make much of a difference whether you'll be hosting in the USA or in Germany. Had it been a .de targeting Germany (much like the articles you're referencing) things had been different and I would've advised you to keep hosting the website in Germany.

Add the fact that it seems that fewer than 5% of your visitors are coming from Germany in the first place, I would say a move to an IP located in the US wouldn't hurt your number of visitors. Perhaps it might even increase your rankings in the USA marginally because Google now finds your IP hosted over there.

In terms of loading time you might want to consider CDN solutions to serve your website as quickly as possible to a global crowd.

You're stating "I tend to link using Branded ...", are these links internal or coming from external websites? If they are internal, there isn't anything to worry about. When you have actively 'build' those links from other websites, I would be more cautious with pages that you're giving keyword-rich links, and indeed mix it up a little.

What you would want most is to have a natural overall profile. Not necessary a perfect profiles for each page (which, ironically, would be unnatural), but a pattern that would look perfectly diverse, skewed and chaotic in all its natural perfection.

You could use OpenSiteExplorer to see if any of those pages still has incoming links. If so, I'd recommend to redirect those pages to (in order of preference): an updated version of that article, the category page for this article or your main page. This would make sure the least amount of dead links turn up on the internet (and on Google) and the most link value is saved for you in one move.

I personally wouldn't rely on the advice of just one company that 'your domain is toxic' (whatever that might mean). In order to make such a drastic move, I'd first get a second opinion on this, or run the site through some tools.

Perhaps the company doing the SEO just isn't capable enough to get your higher rankings? What arguments are they presenting that might be causing the 'toxicity' for your domain?

I've recently written a blog about this very subject, you might find it interesting:

http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/34/google-rankings-dropped-after-switching-to-joomla/

You'll have to wait a LOT more. Results such as these coming from a couple backlinks might take weeks if not months to actually process into higher ranks for specific keywords. Hang in there, keep getting great links, and eventually your rank will start increasing!

"99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it's the best choice for all parties." (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains).

Even though this is a post made in 2006, I don't know of any relevant changes that would alter this advice.

It is not absolutely necessary to choose a local server in the UK. However, these servers will serve the content faster to visitors from the UK than servers from (for example) the USA will.

There was quite a good Whiteboard Friday on the subject on international SEO a couple of months ago, you might wanna check it out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

As long as these links are acquired in a natural and valid way, I wouldn't worry too much about them.

If you had acquired a couple hundred links in a short time, when your website had only ten before, that looks unnatural, which isn't good. If you already have thousands of valid backlinks, a couple hundred extra won't hurt you as this fits the natural pattern. Besides, PageRank isn't a great metric to base any decision on these days anyway as it seems (http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/33/why-pagerank-lost-its-value-for-seo/).

In regards to the rankings: I personally think these are either natural swings or there is more at play than just a handful of new and naturally acquired backlinks.

My gut feeling says #2. I'll spend the rest of this post thinking out loud why I think that one is there better option (though I don't think there is actually a 'wrong' and a 'good' option here, both have their advantages en disadvantages).

• Both your visitors and the search engines will stop visiting the old URLs as fast as possible (saving you bandwidth on the redirects).

• Less 'code overhead' regarding cases such as 'did I change that one already?'

• You are treating search engine robots and human visitors equally

Love to see what others have to say about this!

Yes, a followed link is still a followed link. It was like that before Panda and it is like that after Panda.

However, not every followed link has the same value. For example: a link from CNN.com has more value than a link from buy-viagra-online-now.info, this holds true both before and after Panda.

What Panda did was decrease the value to you that a link from eZineArticles.com has. Whether you're wasting your time is up to you to decide. Given that you know the article submitted to eZineArticles will only generate a low-value link, is that a wise task to spend your time on, or is that time better spend elsewhere?

Both are equally good and neither are preferred more or less by the search engines. Just choose which one you like more (for whatever reasons) and redirect the one you don't choose to the one you do.

My personal choice is www as it looks more 'classic', but various reasons could be given for the non-www as well (such as the fact that it creates shorter URLs for example when Tweeting one)

It was all good until you've mentioned that you intend to like to 100 'spammy looking' URLs. 'Just a couple' wouldn't have been a problem, but 100 (especially since you'll start linking to them in a short period of time) seems a bit much.

Linking out to bad neighbourhoods is seen as a general negative signal for your position in the search engines. This does make sense from the perspective that in the real world you don't want to be linked to too many bad neightbourhoods as well. Why exactly do you want to start linking to those 100 'spammy domains'?