i dont think he needs to mislead, they can just not count them.

Rand recently stated that at a conference, some one asked about their website, and Matt Cutts had a look at it, he said you have about 14,000 links but we are counting only 30 of them.

Matt has said, if just anyone can get a link, then it is proabably not going to pass any value

So I just dont think that comment spam will be counted. If you found a home made comment system, you might have a chace as google may not reconize it as that, but disqus would easaly be reconized by google.

He was joking, Google can tell what is content and what is layout, making content appear before the sidebar means little to google unless your side bar is very very big

I believe you are right, i think i have a site that is been hit, yet I cant see what couild be wrong.

Maybe i spoke too soon

It may be that the timeing is just a coinsidence, as there has been a update a few days ago that has caused many people to lose ranking, look into the penguin update

Its not the link juice of the checkout page, its the link juice of the link pointing to the checkout page that is wasted.

if you did not have a link to the checkout page at all, but rather a link like login.aspx?url=checkout.aspx then you could redirect after the login, you would need a canonical in the login page to cater for the url parameter, but this way the link juice would go to the login page that is not behind authentication, and as long as you have a link back to the home page the link jucie would be returned. This way you will no longer have the warning, nor would you have the link juice leak

You can send people directly to the login page and then send them to the checkout page when loged in.

You can allow googles ip to go to the page without authentication, but you might be seen as cloacking.

You could show a login on checkout page then, with ajax show page after login,

Or you can leave it how it is. Your only problem is that you are wasting link juice on the link that gets 302'ed

I prefere option 1, use a parameter to pass final destination, but put a canonical tag in the login page, make sure you have a link on the login page back to your home page to get the link juice back

You must remember, that those that have been penalized, have been taking ranking from those that have been doing the right thing, If you rankings came from spam tacktics, you may not have deserved the #1 rankings you had.

If you had come to this forum over the last few years and taken the advice given, you may not have been penalized.

If you really believe that you have done nothing wrong, then you need to talk to google.

The update he is refereing to is for un-natural text, keyword stuffing, i dont think he has anything to worry about there, un-natural in-links is another story

i dont think what you have is wrong at all. nor do i think the google example affects you.

Do not use read more, as you want to pass relevant link text to the page.

I think Bobs advice is need edhere, dont panic.

Could very well be,

Google has stated that they penalized m,any sites because the wrongly thought they were parked

http://searchengineland.com/dropped-in-rankings-google-mistake-over-parked-domains-118979?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed-main

Yes just noticed, i thought we were all talking of the last over-op update

I wonder if anyone noticed this update http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

should be hitting now