Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks, everyone, for your responses. My gut was telling me to keep it in tact. Thanks for confirming it.

it doesn't! but i had no where better to put it!

We are seeing some campaigns drop down to crawling just one page. Emailing help@seomoz.org and getting in touch with the help team is the best thing at this point. So sorry for the rude awakening on a Monday morning!

If your still looking for resources, I downloaded this great ebook from Boostability.  It's got a lot of basic stuff, but is also a great tool to reference.

Cool. Maybe I'll contact the people who ordered each of those dragon patches and tell them they're included in the list. I could also add something on the bottom such as, "Want to change this list? Vote for your favorite in the comments." Thanks for all your great advice!

With a quick glance at both blogs, it looks like you're doing just fine. Both have a distinct look and feel (the Boy Scout blog is by far the more attractive - but that's just my opinion) You might get a higher click-through rate if you were to move the Boy Scout Blog to it's own keyword rich (and shorter) domain, but the hassle and potential downsides of moving it means it probably isn't worth the hassle. Regardless, if you've been doing it for awhile and it's working for you, I wouldn't change a thing.

Only once has a site I reported been penalized in any way. It will probably not happen for most people

I know this isn't exactly what you're saying, but you indirectly gave me a good idea. I could find a good image and hold a contest to have our customers come up with a caption.

Glad to hear everything is working for you Marisa. It's hard to know the root issue but again, it's great to know you are OK now.

So here's something interesting. If those PR toolbars are so behind, why is it alreay showing http://www.buildmyrank.com/ to be a PR0 when it was just de-indexed by Google a couple weeks ago?

Is the place where you submit a txt sitemap in Webmaster tools different from where you'd submit an XML version?

Hi Marisa, Thanks for your inquiry. We created a local search tool which matches relevant content with local information and data.  The tool is an option for websites to use, we would at NO time use anyone's content without them requesting us to use it or without their permission. Also, all of the content that is included in the search algorithm is dynamically pulled at time of the search. If you wish to see a demo, please let me know and I'd be happy to connect with you to show you. Kindly, Matt Mantyla www.nsphere.net

OK, I found the answer, and here is the blog post in case anyone else is having this question. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday

Its not just from backlinks.  I've got blogs where the  homepage is PR1 but posts are PR3, due to social signals and shares of the post.  This seems to be happening more recently.

Hi Marisa, PR is a great tactic as you can get great number of links, so yes you are correct. In terms of duplication, I wouldn't be too concerned. Think of these sites as news sites. Most them contain duplicate content but rank highly due to their authority and overall brand reputation. I do see that they are trying to create unique content but to create 100% unique content on topical news is impossible. In my experience it would be better to target a few great paid PR directories with social media features (they tweeting the link of the PR which will give you exposure). Most paid pr directories have the ability to push their content in their networks.That means when they pick up the content, it will also include links to your website (if you have included this ofcourse). Publishing the same PR on multiple sites won't penalise you, however if it is a bad site Google will simply ignore it. Hope this helps, Vahe

There are good and bad things about it. It is very well-researched and pretty complete. Whoever made it put clearly put countless hours of work into it. On the downside, it needs some serious maintenance. SOOOOOO many of the links are outdated or completely dead. Others seem irrelevant. I.E. The Huffington post is one of the things listed--how are you supposed to get a link from them? Also, a lot of the sites are listed as giving followed links when they're really nofollow, and pagerank is pretty much wrong for the majority of them. My advice would be if you could buy it with your clients money, go for it. If you have to use your own . . . meh.

Something I don't think I was clear on is the fact that I'm not very concerned with the caps page itself. My ultimate goal with almost every SEO thing I do is to give the entire site more authority so that the home page will rank higher. In that case, is the blog post without question the better option?

Thank you! I'm glad someone finally answered this! I really need to get going on it. I think that is what I'm going to do--make a top-level page for the main categories and then only have navigation to the sub-categories on the top top-level page for each category. It seems like the best solutions for both humans and bots.

I think everyone hit this on the head but I had one quick point to drop. It might be good to search over the sites as well to look at the most valued sites that are linking to you with 404 errors. I would try to then reach out to them personally and ask if they could update the link. You often can get a specific anchor text or a link to a page deeper within your website. Good luck with it!