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Hard to beat what Dan has said here.

The only think I could possibly add is to monitor whether google has added those pages to the index, and/or removed them. I find it telling to see what google acknowledges by way of their own search results.

I agree with Jesse. Pull quotes isn't the problem. Copy article and add nothing extra of value is the duplicate content problem.

lol... "wait 'googs stolz my cheezburger??"

You pay a "ghost writer" to be invisible. Therefore you claim the content as your own. If the content is original quality content than it could and most like would boost your authority. But author rank is more than just having a lot of content published by you, it is about influence. So simply writing a lot of good content does not make you an influencer. Your influence and in turn author rank are based on the citations you receive and the traffic you command.

Back to your 'ghost writer" question. Ghost writers have been used on and offline for sometime now. It seems to be a generally acceptable practice. But this does not mean that Google does or will always accept this. So if you were to ask me if this were acceptable, then I would judge this by how much you are contributing to the content.

An alternative method would be to set up a "persona" as the writer. This is justified by saying authors use pen names. Indeed, Franklin once wrote newspaper columns under a pen name in his early years for fear his age would discredit his work. But this "persona" approach may also run a risk with google.

So pick one or the other, and stick with your story.

That is a tall order, especially when you throw in local directories like Yelp and Yellow Pages. I'd love to know if there is such a tool out there. I do know that Authority Labs provides results based on a location. Have you check theirs out?

The re-ordering of content on a page could give the page different emphasis. You would have to take a look at the page as a Google bot, to determine if the responsive theme displays the content differently. This could even go as far as throwing up links that should be navigational as content. What does or doesn't fall between a

and

makes a difference.

For the most part, I wouldn't expect a properly designed responsive site to change your SEO.

I don't believe adding a blog to a website would generally cause a drop in authority. But here are a few scenarios where I feel it could drop your authority.

• It could be negative if the content added to that blog section is duplicate content.
• It could be negative if the content is too thin in that blog section.
• It could be negative if the bounce back rate is too high in the blog section.
• It could be negative if the blog is overly syndicated to other low quality blogs.

So unless you fall into one of those, then I don't think your drop in authority is likely related to you adding a blog. Now if you lost rank, then perhaps google is trying to determine between pages that are too similar which one should rank.

To your 2nd question, internal links to your homepage will most likely not hurt you especially if they are part of the navigation structure. It is natural for a page to link back to the home page in the navigation. But links to your home page within the blog content that are keyword stuffed could hurt you, these links are not natural.

Have you lost a significant amount of traffic? What exactly do you consider a loss of authority?

Classic answer, ..."It depends."

At one time theses links would have been considered external. But Google has grown up and realizes that most of these are internal links. Maybe it had something to do with Hubpages using sub-domains to escape the panda.

While this article is not specific to your link graph, it may help to realize that google is on to this type of linking... http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html

However, the "it depends" can come into play when you don't own the domain, say wordpress.com. Those subdomains are likely treated very differently. Each subdomain on wordpress.com is unique it's authors. Perhaps this is why Google wants to push authorhship.

If it makes sense for sites to link back and forth then I don't see a problem.

I'm a local pest control company. I can create a page for other local businesses I would recommend. They can do the same.

But as with anything, don't go crazy with it. If the links are given solely to get reciprocal links then you are in trouble.

I look at site authority. I look at the number of comments other articles get on the site. I look at distribution of articles (tweets, digg, facebook). But more than anything, "how relative is the site my subject?". A link from a high authority video game site really isn't going to pass much juice to a pest control site.

Who is the linking root domain?

Start by figuring out if you can change the link from the linking root domain. If it's your own website then you've got to fix the problem yourself. There are a lot of reasons that 404's happen across a domain. Usually it's a matter of a page or template referencing the wrong source. Or a folder not referencing the root domain.

If it's outside of your website then try contacting the owner. If that doesn't work then create redirects where needed.

I've noticed several discrepancies in google's cache system. It seems many of their documents lag and are not updated immediately. It could just be errors in cross data population. If you really want to know the last time the Google bot visited your website then you will want to visit your server logs.

If your server logs don't show a visit from google on the 25th then we really do have to wonder. My guess is that the webmaster tools is reflective of the correct date. Either way, I'd check for the error they are reporting.

I am sure there are number of opinions on the best way to accomplish this. I for one still believe you can create a unique page for each of the surrounding areas of a metro city. Metro areas are commonly associated with their surrounding towns and suburbs. In fact, if you search "Wellington town fl" in the related search you will find "town of jupiter" which then has "village of tequesta" in it's related search.

I do so for locations like San Antonio. San Antonio is the main city, Converse, TX would be a subset of that metro.

Was Diablo 3 prior to Matt's 2005 post?

I show you as number 6 for "Psoriasis videos" that seems pretty good.... although google didn't pick up the actual video.

Where were you before the release?

With many of the updates over the last year, do you think that scraper sites like chron.com could actually hurt your SEO efforts?

I am sure the general SEO statement of "It depends" applies here as well. I picked on PRweb.com specifically because they are not a "Free-For-All" PR site.

My suspicion is that many of the sites that call themselves PR sites are of very poor quality.

Do PR releases help? Do links from PRweb.com carry no value? Was Matt Cutts being specific to the user's website in the Google Webmaster discussion, when Matt said "I wouldn't expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however."

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/O178PwARnZw/discussion