Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Here's Matt Cutts speaking directly to this question: http://www.get.uk.com/page.php?article=1724&name=Better+Spelling+Equals+Better+Search+Results+%5BGOOGLE%5D

You can disable the click tracking with this code:

var addthis_config = {
   data_track_clickback: false
}

http://www.addthis.com/help/clickbacks

But I don't think the appended tag will do you any harm as is. It's just a tracking code for you to be able to track results in the AddThis dashboard.

The last time you used Google and it auto-suggested a result, you saw those terms/keywords. That impression may not have been tracked, but think of how useful that could be for branding. You type in "ACME" and you see "Acme Rubberbands."
Now you've associated the product with the brand whereas you may not have before, and you may well have been prompted to navigate to that search query.

It's also relevant to reputation management. If you've got a negative suggested query, you'd want to suppress that.

" I am convinced I know who the culprit is." I would tell a client to spend a bit of time sleuthing for evidence to corroborate that confident assertion. If you can flesh out a very strong case, I would then take it to Google spam team, and possibly talk to an attorney about sending a "we're on to you" letter. There's no criminal case, but a civil judgment need only show that they took actions that hurt you. The mere act of calling them out and threatening a suit will probably stop the abuse (well, unless you're dealing with a sociopath).

Definitely disavow the toxic links when necessary though...

Election year answer: It depends, and it's complicated.

For your local small business clients: Is there a specific communications or customer service strategy that could be augmented by the tactical presence of a  Facebook page? Is their marketing outreach already inclusive of content generation, maintaining branding impressions and buzz? Is there a competitive need in the target market for social proof: that is, within the sphere of competitors, would having a high fan count for the page tip the scales in your favor?

Is the product or service high touch, one that requires a lot of followup, training or service? Does servicing outside of consulting time affect revenue negatively or positively?

From an SEO standpoint: if a customer is willing to write a testimonial for you, that's more valuable than a like, to be sure. Why can't they do both? A good testimonial is content for the Facebook page as well.

From a search standpoint, there's little doubt that a consumer researching a business is going to probably check out the Facebook page (for certain kinds of small businesses) when that appears in SERPs.

Social media is best thought of as a customer and public relations vehicle, rather than a marketing vehicle. Customers want a way to be heard and want to know if they can trust you for the long haul, which is the CR side. And social media (not including paid ad campaigns) just doesn't scale in the way that marketing does: it's closer to a loyalty program than a net sales lead generator. The PR aspect is that if something you do, say or produce is interesting enough to get widely shared, you can get that publicity at a very low cost.

I think consumers are getting a bit jaded about being asked to like a new FB page.  So there has to be determination of whether there's enough of a promotional value to justify an incentive program. Again, just ask if it fits within their big-picture strategy.

Cheers,

Brian

1. It is not the equivalent of Google's Pagerank. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank
2. In OSE, look under "Compare Link Metrics" tab when exploring a specific URL.

I think most of the major media markets would have distribution in both, so there's a good possibility that the UK PRs would indeed "bleed."

I think your instincts are right: there's not a lot of risk, but not a lot of benefit either.

The algorithm doesn't "penalize" for sitewide footer links, it's just not as much of a ranking factor as it used to be. I guess the question is, knowing how popular the origin site is, if the links were set to nofollow, would you still do it? (branding, referral traffic)
If the answer is yes go for it. If it creates a relationship with that site's webmaster, it's a nobrainer.

What EGOL said. It's a given that almost any post author will eventually write elsewhere, and in all likelihood will leave your employ at some point while the post lives on.

"AuthoredRank" is going to be more important in some industry spaces than others.  I can envision some "retainer" arrangement being necessary for continued company presence within an ex-employee's linked profile. That is, once the author leave said company, there's no reason they can't delete the reference/citation from their profile and remove the value of the rel="author" altogether, and of course the rich snippet disappears. If the author achieves enough of an audience or authority, and that helps with direct or search traffic, we may just see ex-employees needing some form of contract. It is their personal profile after all...

Hi Debora,

There could be a number of reasons, but the first thing to do is double-check. http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ has a free tool to download: just enter the URL and you should get a spidered report on whether that many pages (50% of your pages!) are indeed returning HTTP Status "No Data"  or Not found/404 errors.

It could have been an anomaly in OSE, so cross check first.  Do a crawl test while you're at it: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

What kind of backlink profile do you have on these pages?

If you have no high-relevance links to speak of, just redirect the pages to the most relevant category or product page. If you have relevant links that pass some value to the domain, build the pages up with fresh content, deprecate the video, and update the meta and sitemap.

Would it be possible to create a category page for the product type, and represent the models with expandable divs?

If you have to maintain separate pages for models with unique feature sets (separate SKUs) one tactic you could employ is to rel=canonical the individual product pages to the main category page.

Other questions: are the images unique: is the alt tag unique for each image, and filename?  Is there a distinctive SKU or model name which can be part of the canonical?

I had a similar situation with an audio product manufacturer. Some speakers were sold as pairs, some as individual units, some where identical product information except for color. Our solution was a a change towards category pages, since for the most part that was better for retail partners discussing our products in general, and it was easier to handle the issues involved with product end-of-life.

Dana,

I'm looking forward to seeing that happen. Hope you're composing a blog piece on that topic now: when it's announced that publisher's brand images will appear in SERPS, you'll be able to publish that news and get the lion's share of news cycle traffic.

Oh, I see, that does make a difference.

What kind of relationship do you have with the partner websites?

I wouldn't remove the pages. Can you archive all of the videos into one page, create a video sitemap, redirect all the existing URLs to that central archive, and then add a Hero video or slideshow at the top encouraging visitors to check out the new content? If you're still getting traffic from customers to those pages, the main thing is conversion and getting them into someplace valuable for them and you.

UPDATE: just read in another comment that you're getting rid of all videos on the site. That's an inhouse decision but I must say if you abandon all of these pages don't sacrifice the link juice, at least redirect the URLs to the homepage.

Have you suggested he use an iframe to host the content from one site into the satellites?
Or maybe simply a feed to show the fresh content to visitors? 
Does he convert on those satellite sites or are they micros to drive to the main?

The thing is, it is definitely going to be duplicate content, and since the host is presumably the same... well... Not good.

I would ask: "why?" He is expecting to get links to this content on this site one day, the same content on this site the next? If it's a good post, what would happen if someone shares it socially from one domain, and those exposed to it see it elsewhere?

I think noindexing is a good half measure, but if the point of the content is to be consumed, enjoyed, attract social shares and links, build traffic and then convert, then there's really little if any gain to be had in even doing that. A noindexed blog post getting links? A noindexed blog category getting social buzz?

Force your client to understand the end goal. If he just wants something for them to read, add a feed. Then the social shares and links will do some good to at least the most important domain.

This. The aggregator's big win could be fulfilling their role in the form of a media publisher and community hub, serving as a nexus for honest and objective opinions. Aggregators are a form of retailer except that the customer purchase is information exchange. When they abandon this opportunity and instead supply subjective info that doesn't put the consumer first, well, this is what makes the organic results such a polluted mess.

Whew, that is a tough one. IMHO, you are better off with a useful Meta description--one that is accurate to what the SITE is about--than none, IF there's a risk that bots will pull something other than useful text (like the social button or image alt text). Just think how the SERPs would look if only Title is visible, or a mess.

But, better with none, and let the bots pull in their own, than an inaccurate one (what you have now).

Have you talked to a dev about a dynamic and programmatic way to make unique meta descriptions for these 6500 pages? What kind of result do you get if you delete the meta description? Can you use a testing tool to fetch the site without meta description, just to see what searchers will see? If it's not bad and is more useful than a sitewide duplicate, just blank the majority out,

It does make a difference.  I agree with your preference to set it to generic "en":

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

"If you have several alternate URLs targeted at users with the same language but in different locales, it's a good idea to provide a generic URL for geographically unspecified users. For example, you may have specific URLs for English speakers in Ireland (en-ie), Canada (en-ca), and Australia (en-au), but want all other English speakers to see your generic English (en) page. In this case you should specify the generic English-language (en) page for searchers in, say, the UK."

_To me, the best-case scenario would be to use these blogs to pump out fresh, authoritative content for each satellite site blog -- a more intensive undertaking, to be sure, but a best practice -- and include an RSS feed. _

Agreed. Also, there's no reason he can't write a post for one audience that references a post he made on another domain. It's hard to get a good feel for the whole situation without viewing the sites and blogs themselves.

To be more specific, if you have good body text, Google/Bing can pull that into the SERPs if there is no meta description. That shortens your efforts. What I'm saying is, A/B test a page with Fetch or some other headless browser tool to see what the SERP is like without Meta description. I'm sure you've seen cruddy SERP results with Alt-text or code or unpronouncable characters: that's a coding issue. In many cases the result will be the H1 text, or the first sentence of the body.

As for what Luke said, yes, if bots aren't pulling good text into that space, a dynamic programmatically generated meta can work. It depends on goals. The downsides are that it can lose you a click if the searcher doesn't like what they see, as in, if the CTA or hook is ineffective. With body text they might give you the benefit of the doubt.

They  no longer appear in searches as we put a "no follow" on them..that is fine we don't want to rank for the older product but the URL has history if you will.

I assume the old pages had some external links from product reviews? Since you want to harvest that link juice for the new pages, if you don't want to do a redirect you can set rel="canonical" on the old page to the new pages; though that means the older products will still be visible in SERPs, the SE juice would pass to the new. Better though to redirect to equivalent product pages.

Noticed there's no sitemap, or at least it's hard to find... http://goo.gl/ULW69

Also, I googled "Machete 1213" and got this as #1, as we would expect: http://ridesnowboards.com/snowboards/machete-1213

1. Expandable divs. You can feature each image as the visible portion of an expandable div. It's fairly easy to code.

Check out @ipullrank Michael King's  presentation which touches on the subject: http://www.slideshare.net/ipullrank/ux-seo-lets-be-friends-by-michael-king

This is entirely white-hat btw: it's creating a cleaner user experience, while allowing visitor to read more if they want, without being directed to a new page.

2. Put text portion, such as a feed with excerpts from a blog, "below the fold."

That said, be sure to name your image files with relevant keywords as well as appropriate alt-text and description. And don't forget the OGP and schema markup too.

Googlebot is most definitely able to run scripts: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/just-how-smart-are-search-robots How is your link positioned inside the script? Is there visible anchor text anywhere in the widget/pop-up window?