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Hi, Kevin-

Without knowing a little more about the niche and the services, it's difficult to give a definitive answer. But I think that in most instances, I would be inclined to simply concentrate on fleshing out the pages that deal with each individual service, all contained within one site. In that fashion, I think you'll gain more authority to the site, while still focusing on each service as needed.

Generally speaking, I would agree that validation is often too strict.

Google seems to handle this well, however. In fact, I seem to recall Matt C. once saying that the VAST majority of websites don't validate. I think he may have been talking strictly about HTML, though.

Validation isn't a ranking factor, of course, and most prevalent browsers will compensate for minor errors and render a page, regardless. So I really wouldn't be too concerned about validation just for validation's sake. As long as your pages render in most common browsers and neither page functionality nor user experience is adversely affected, I'd consider it a non-issue. As to whether a bot could be fooled into thinking the head had ended and the body had begun, I suppose it's possible, but I've never seen it happen, even with some absolutely horrible coding.

Hi, Stephanie-

Googlebots read as raw code. But in the example you give, it would see those links, as well. What remains as a question is whether it recognizes the nature of those links and therefore pays them limited attention. Personally, I doubt Google ignores them, as it's a valuable source of data for them for both the link graph and the Knowledge Graph.

If you want to keep trackbacks enabled, but don't want to deal with the spammers, another option is Simple Trackback Validation with Topsy Blocker ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-trackback-validation-with-topsy-blocker/ ).  That plugin will stop 95-99% of spam trackbacks by comparing the IP addresses. As Alan says, it's nice to know right away when you get a new link.

Great, Gina! There's nothing like that feeling of satisfaction when you recover a site's positions. I wasn't around when you had your issue, but I do know what you mean about the value of the community. There's a lot of talent here, and many of them dedicate a lot of time to helping people learn how to do things the right way. You can't put a price on that. Congratulations on your success... now pay it forward.

I'm going to give two responses to each, one being what I suspect might be Google's take on it, the other which is my take.

Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying?  Assume all links are do-follow.

• You're a local business.  You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year.  In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. Google: paid; Me: paid

• You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• One of your clients is a college bar.  You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings.  Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. Google: paid; Me: paid

• You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab.  Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon." Google: paid; Me: paid

Scary! Turns out I agree with Google on those... purely coincidence

I'd certainly agree with that, Dunamis. I don't ask for links, and I don't respond well when asked for one, unless I have a relationship with the person.

I have even been asked for one by someone I knew, and tried to explain nicely that an OBL from an SEO site to a real estate site didn't really make much sense for either of us.

My advice, Rhys, would be to focus first on establishing a relationship. If the resulting relationship is solid, and both sites are relevant, a simple mention of your need to acquire more natural links may well spawn an offer.

Josh- I'm of the opinion that there is no tool in the wild that is consistently accurate, in any regard, including detection of 404 errors. There are a number of things that can cause one tool to detect an error, while another won't. Personally, I compare the results of all the different tools I use, and hopefully find a consensus. Failing that, I double check with them all, and look for consistent results. If nothing changes, you may just have to "consider the source" and decide in which tool you have greater confidence.

Not much help, I realize, but sometimes that's just the way it is.

Takeshi is right, James- you gain nothing by adding nofollow to internal links. In addition, if you attract attention with a lot of it, you could even incur a penalty. Matt Cutts has stated more than once that nofollowing internal links isn't advisable, except perhaps in limited special circumstances, such as to a contact form or privacy policy. If you get carried away with internal nofollow, it could look like you're trying to sculpt pagerank, and that could cause you problems you don't want to have.

I have to agree with Francisco... mentioning Android in your copy or even a title, is generally accepted practice (although technically, it must be followed by the symbol the first time it appears on the page). You can see more on this here: http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/brand.html

David, I've done a couple of proactive pruning jobs and it beats waiting 'til you've been slapped. The comments on that video are mostly uninformed, in my opinion. Disavow has worked for my clients.

You might want to watch this short hangout sponsored by Arnie Kuenn, on the topic. We discussed proactive link pruning as well. http://intrinsicvalueseo.com/googles-disavow-process-and-penguin-recovery/ Feel free to give me a shout if you like.

It's difficult to say whether you may have been smacked, from a superficial glance. But I will say this: your homepage copy is keyword stuffed and full of grammatical errors of the type that even algorithms can spot. I would certainly say that your site is a possible candidate for a Panda slap, judging just by the homepage.

Michael- You're definitely facing an odd situation here... makes no sense. Have you tried posting an inquiry on the Google Webmaster Help Forum? I'd say there's a good chance you can get a Googler's attention there and maybe get a hint as to where the problem lies.

The only limit that I'm aware of is that you shouldn't use more than one H1

I would think that unless the various sites are very closely related, that you'd be better off with individual accounts, but I can see how there would be benefit in consolidating, say with various geo-separated sites on the same theme (Denver real estate, Colorado Springs real estate, Aspen real estate...)

I'd agree that it's a bad idea, particularly at that scale. If relevance of the redirected domains is high, and it's just a couple of domains, I imagine it wouldn't be a problem. The fact that they're using a 302 will afford them some protection, but how long are they planning to leave that "temporary" redirect in place?

I agree with Oznappies' recommendation... tell them "this vehicle has been sold, but we have other similar models". Personally, I would offer them a link to similar models and a Back link, as some people will take exception to being led to a different car than the one they wanted to see. I would definitely not get rid of the old content, however. I would simply do a noindex follow.

Jared-

I think it's quite possible that one of the factors that played into the lack of response is that a fair amount of research is required. With comprehensive research, a spreadsheet and lots of graphics, you're asking for a piece that is definitely a cut above what many typical freelancers find themselves asked to provide.

I have found some outstanding copywriters on textbroker, and I have no doubt that you can find several there that can and will meet your standards. I would suggest that you might get more response by simply soliciting a writer that is willing to do more than just basic research, and then "interview" two or three of the most promising candidates. Ask them for samples that required a similar level of workmanship. Sure, you'll get a few that can only claim to be fluent English-speakers with their fingers crossed or are simply not up to the task. But IMO, since you're looking for quality work, you'll need to invest some extra effort in your search to qualify the respondents.

Get 'em interested, then thin the herd.

Gina is correct, Eliran. rel="author" is intended only for personal G+ profiles. You would need to set up your company's G+ page as the publisher and embed the rel="publisher" tag on your site, then use rel="author" for each individual author. You can review the procedure here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1708844

I'd say you covered all the bases, Brad. I don't know what you could have done to protect yourself any more. Sean, I think your client is playing a dangerous game. My advice would be to first cull any of those additional sites that aren't highly relevant to their own. Write them off as a bad investment. One thought that occurs to me is that rather than setting a 302 from all the remaining sites to the client's site, maybe you could redirect them to a selected site from their recent acquisitions. Then redirect THAT site to the client's site. Using 302s is still safer, IMO, while you go through the process of requesting changes on link destinations. Relevance is obviously the key... stretching that is treading on thin ice. My approach to that is, if it needs any statement of justification.... it's not justifiable.

The first thing that I would do on a revival project is a site survey, to identify your on-page situation. You'll also want to dive into your link profile, as you're bound to have a number of issues there, on an aged, unmaintained site.

I only glanced at the site, but it seems like you definitely have some meat on the bone there to work with. Looking at the meta data, I'd guess that it may have been optimized by someone that thought "if a little bit is good, then a lot is better."

There's definitely a lot that can be done with the on-page. Good luck on it! Should be a fun one.

I have not used Headway, but a good friend of mine, that is a coder, was a die-hard Thesis fan... until he tried Headway. While he has no problem tweaking the code in Thesis to accomplish what he needs, he has been quite vocal about Headway being more secure and more user-friendly to the novice coder. Coming from him, that's mighty high praise. FWIW.

That's correct, Gina. Eliran, you need to set rel="publisher" on your home page and tie it to the company page on G+. Using rel="author" set to a company page won't work (it may check out as okay on the rich snippet testing tool, but it won't appear in the SERPs, and it won't tie the G+ page and the site together in the Knowledge Graph)

If you're unable to get the webmasters to remove the links, I would definitely disavow them, by domain. They may be unwilling to remove the articles, but as long as you're not using them on your own site, the links are really your only concern. If they're showing your author profile on those sites, then I do think it would be a good idea to have that removed, as well, since Google still stumbles occasionally on attribution issues. That wouldn't have any effect on your link profile, but it could conceivably muddy the authorship waters.

I agree that there's no longer any difference to the crawlers. However, one other thing worthy of consideration is the possibility of moving the site to a new URL. With relative URLs, you may be saved a lot of painstaking work, whereas with absolutes, every single page will have to be rewritten. There are tools to assist in the task, but it's still a lousy job to undertake.

Good catch, Anders!

The hierarchy of headers would require an H2 to be a subheading within the more general topic area of the H1. I can't imagine there would be any requirement for content between the H1 and the first H2, although, from the users' standpoint, it might help them to better understand what the page is about and how the H2's content applies.

I'm of the opinion that an XML sitemap is unnecessary, IF your site navigation is in order. That said, though, we all know how easy it is for a five or ten thousand page ecommerce site's navigation to get out of whack.

The bottom line, I think, is that it costs nothing but a few minutes to build and submit, and it can't do you any harm. Cheap insurance, no?

Hi, Travis-

I wouldn't be concerned with "diluting" any pagerank that you already have, if that's your question. You may be setting up new pages in competition with existing pages, if they're going after the same terms, though. The longer the existing pages have been out there, unmodified, the easier a new page may outrank it, all other things being equal.

Unfortunately, without seeing the site, it's impossible to even render a guestimate. For instance, how's your crawl budget? if it's limited, QDF could possibly allow newer pages to push older pages into the shadows. You might check out this post: http://www.algohunters.com/building-solid-index-presence-optimizing-crawl-budget/

As Mat said, you could be risking more scrutiny, so if you submit a recon request, be sure you can endure the attention your site will get.
However, I can see no possible gain to doing so. So why bother? All you'll get out of it is a message saying they found no manual action against your site, and advising you to check for other possible causes of a loss of traffic, yada, yada, yada...

As Loudogg says, with a 301 redirect you'll be fine, although you will experience a slight loss of link juice through the 301. Further losses can be avoided by ensuring (as much as is possible) that links are directed to your destination page, so they don't go through the redirect.

I'd definitely make sure to implement a rel="canonical" directive, and focus on being consistent.

Hi, Egol-

From what they say here, I don't read it to indicate that schema markup is required.

As for ranking articles losing their spot by submission as In-Depth Articles, I see that as unlikely. If you want to play it safe, you could submit one and watch its rankings in SERPs after it pops up in the In-Depth index.

Dave, you might want to check out UN.CO.VER, from Textbroker: http://www.textbroker.com/uncover/

I use it a lot, and it's customizable to the level of checking you desire. Nice, because it'll give you a live link to the location where it's detected duplicate content. Free, by the way.

Your terminology of "one-way" and link "exchange" would seem to be in conflict. Since it seems that you're not really talking about one-way, but actual link exchanges, I'd echo what searchpl says: be really careful. In my opinion, the risk is far greater than the potential reward, and you'd be better off acquiring true one-way links.

I haven't seen a sitemap.php in a long time, Sha. Certainly Google could  read it if they want, but whether they will or not is the question. I would be inclined to doubt it.

If he says that it's generating a sitemap.xml, but none is present on WMT, then I would respond that one of two things is happening:

1. It isn't generating the sitemap in an xml format at all, but only in php, or

2. For some reason, the xml version is either not transmitted, or not received.

The only other possibility that comes to mind is that perhaps the conversion from php to xml is not tagged in a fashion to be recognized as an xml file, and WMT is detecting it as php and assigning it that status accordingly. I suppose that could happen, particularly if he is using an outdated plugin or if of his own coding, the conversion is faulty.

I'd be interested in hearing what you ultimately learn on this.

Absolutely, Jonny. This week, Google introduced a change to this (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077) which allows a default setting. But I've been doing this for a couple of years, with just one or two pages of a foreign language, placing idiom-specific hreflang attributes on those pages, and none at all on the rest of the pages, which are all in English. It works just fine, so I really don't know exactly what the x-default is supposed to accomplish, other than perhaps avoid having the rest of the site bracketed with a foreign language page.

I agree with Tim... I'd even say that I seriously doubt that 302s had any impact at all in moving a site up, given that Google has stated many times that a 302 passes no link equity.

I'd agree that sitewides should be avoided whenever possible. It sounds as though you may be flirting with disaster. If it were me, I'd nofollow them, at the least.

Branden, I used to use Platinum SEO and occasionally had some quirky behavior like this with custom pages. Since the Blog page is basically an empty page importing recent posts, it might be playing poorly with PSEO. Have you tried turning that plugin off for a minute, doing a hard refresh and seeing what happens?

I changed to Wordpress SEO by Yoast. I had some issues with both Platinum SEO and Ultimate SEO, and have never had a problem with Joost's plugin.

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/