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I'm not seeing strong evidence of an algorithm update, but it's far from a perfect science. There's flux every day (a lot of it). We're testing an expanded data set that will let us drill down by 20 industry categories and 10+ data centers, but we have to collect enough data to tell what's normal. It could be that 65 degrees is a "hot" day in consumer electronics but a cool day in real estate. It can get subjective fast.

Definitely working on tools to answer those questions, but I don't have much solid information for you about yesterday. Best we know, the moderately high temps we original observed (and they weren't even all that high) were a fluke of changing our data collection method.

I'd tend to agree with Troy (and I'm thumbing up his replies). This isn't your home-page or sitewide navigation - having too many links on just this one page probably isn't worth worrying about too much. You could nofollow the tag links - they are redundant. Realistically, though, since they link to the same URLs, Google probably already ignores those links (even though we count them twice).

You could argue that maybe the page isn't that helpful for users and prune it down somehow, but purely from an SEO standpoint, it's not a big deal. The main issue with too many links is one of dilution. I wrote about it more here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

I recognize you're trying to be helpful, but I have to warn that, in this particular case, I think that's a bad idea. It would basically collapse all the products down into one page. This isn't a situation where the colors are variants of the same product (like 3 colors of the same t-shirt). The swatches ARE the product, in a sense.

Just a minor clarification - you can use both rel=prev/next and rel=canonical, IF you have something like search filters. Then, the canonical would point to the unfiltered current page and the rel=prev/next would point to the filtered paginated pages. Yeah, I know, that made a lot of sense. Let's say your page is:

http://example.com/stuff?page=2&sort=price

...then you might have

It's more than a little confusing.

Definitely check out that JavaScript issue, though - it might be that bots aren't seeing what people are seeing, and that could be very dangerous.

I think you have to separate out a couple of issues here...

First off, 250 links distributed across a site or 50 across 10 blog posts may have very little additional value than a few links on a site or 10 links on 10 blog posts. Linking root domains generally have a lot more impact than total links. If you've got 50 links on 10 posts to the same site, it's very likely some of those links are low quality (even not having any idea what the anchor text is). I'm assuming you mean inbound links all to the same site (and even the same page), though. It's really tough to talk in generalities.

It depends a lot on the targeted text. If your exact-match anchor text is your brand name, or if it's product-oriented but matches your domain name, you'll get more leeway. If Apple has 10,000,000 links to "Apple, Inc.", Google won't care. If Bob's plumbing has 1,000 links and 90% of them are to "buy cheap viagra", that's going to look bad really fast. So, "excessive" can be very situational.

If you're targeting one phrase over and over, most of your links are built/paid (not "natural") and that phrase is keyword-loaded without reflecting your brand, you're probably pushing too hard. Diversification is very important. I think targeting is important, to a point, but it's really easy to over-think it.

All else being equal, I think it's very similar - you're just diluting your unique keywords. The only exception would be if the phrase "cheap 2012 honda accord" is very high volume. Then, you might want to target that on the page. I'd be selective about that, though - don't just add it to every URL.

Unfortunately, "cheap" is just one of those words that looks low quality to Google, because everyone is chasing. So, I think you have to be all that much more careful. If you sold only used cars and you wanted "used-" ("used-2012-honda-accord", for example) in your URLs, that might be different. I'd still proceed with caution, but at least "used" would be a meaningful aspect of your business and the user experience. "Cheap" is a value judgment that everyone wants to claim.

I wouldn't go crazy on the local-specific pages, but picking a couple and building them up is probably a good idea. It makes sense to have a Santa Barbara page, as long as you can get some solid content on it.

This is one area where I am 99.99999% confident saying that Google's past statements are incorrect and even irresponsible. Panda is, in many ways, an assault on thin content, and duplicates are worse than thin. I've seen many large-scale sites take massive hits from duplicates (as much as 80% traffic loss).

The "myth" is that duplicate content causes a Capital-P Penalty, but Google uses a very narrow and self-serving definition of that term. Duplicate content does not cause a manual penalty and they probably don't consider Panda to be a penalty internally at Google. However, the consequences are very severe.

Even before Panda, I saw cases studies where reducing duplicate content greatly improved rankings. I had a client whose "product" pages (it was an event site) were being filtered out due to massive duplication. Once we fixed the problem, their search traffic tripled over the course of 3 months. This was well before May Day and Panda (2007, if memory serves). Today, it's 10X worse.

When you get into e-commerce, the problem is almost inevitable and needs to be managed. Now, does that mean that you're currently facing ranking issues, Panda, etc.? No, not necessarily. You have less than 2K indexed pages, which is hardly excessive. If each product page has one duplicate, and you know that can't spin out of control, the consequences are limited. Still, you're diluting your ranking ability to some extent. I think it's well worth addressing the problem and being proactive.

It's really difficult to tell what Google will do in these situations, and it's generally a bad idea to chain redirects and caonicals, but I suspect the canonicals will be ignored. The bigger problem here is that the 301 is basically saying that "realsite.com" is canonical, but then the canonical is saying that "1234.com" is canonical. Even as a human, the logic doesn't make any sense, unless I'm missing something. You may see unpredictable results (and unpredictable is usually bad).

Marisa's right - we're seeing evidence that trusted outbound links can actually help a site, not harm it. Nofollow really came out of problems where sites had a lot of links they couldn't vouch for. For example, if you have a blog that allows comments and 100s of people comment, you can't tell if all of those links to their sites are legit, relevant, etc. So, you'd add nofollow to say "I can't vouch for this link" (that was the original intent, anyway). When you've chosen the resource and it's relevant to your site, let Google follow it.

Since these are really external links, it's a bit different calculus, especially since they're deeper on the site. "Nofollow" won't really help from a link juice perspective (it still gets burnt), although it would disavow those links, in a sense.

How is the target page redirecting to the outside site? I'm having a hard time telling with header checkers. That could impact the SEO implications quite a bit. This almost seems like an affiliate link sort of scenario, so it's more a matter of how Google sees the hundreds of links between these two sites.

They're definitely burning up some internal link equity, but at this level of the site (search results to product pages), that's not as big of an issue as if this were the home-page or a major category page, etc.

It's ahrd to address in blog comments, but these things can be very situational. In a perfect world, I don't like those phantom folder levels for 2 reasons:

(1) Someone will eventually try to link to or access one, including possibly Google, and that may lead to odd behavior. I've seen claims Google will extrapolate URLs, but have never seen clear proof.

(2) It just makes for long URLs that, in this case, look a bit spammy.

Practically, is it making a difference? They aren't being indexed, so that's certainly a positive sign - it indicates no weird extrapolation by Google and no inbound links to those levels. At the same time, as discussed in my post, revamping your entire URL structure does carry risk.

So, it's not ideal (IMO), but I'm not sure I'd mess with it unless you're changing URLs for other reasons (then, do it all at once).

Unfortunately, there's a lot about Hummingbird we don't know right now. I think Danny Sullivan's FAQ piece is the closest we have to reliable information, but that still leaves a lot of holes:

FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm

Google claims that Hummingbird is a substantial rewrite of the core algorithm (more than just your typical update), and yet we haven't seen large-scale movements on many client rankings. So, what's going on? A couple of things, I think:

(1) As Peter said (and this seems to be pretty well confirmed), Hummingbird changes how Google interprets some queries, especially natural language queries, and attempts to find relevant results based on a more complex, semantic analysis of phrases, and not just keyword matching. It's unclear how this practically impacts your average query today (especially head terms and the "chunky middle"), but as voice-based searches become more common and people get used to natural language queries, the impact will increase over time.

(2) Hummingbird seems to have increased Google's ability to use historical information to personalize queries. This extends a long-term evolution and means that any given person might see a different result for an ambiguous query based on previous queries. Even now, searches like "weather" bring up local information, whereas they used to bring up generic information (like weather sites). Practically, we're not seeing this personalization impact affect a ton of queries yet, but we will over time. There are ways to check ranking using context and limited personalization, but it's technically very difficult. This is certainly a concern for rank-tracking tools, including ours (and something we're thinking about even now).

(3) Finally, I suspect Hummingbird laid the groundwork for an expansion of Knowledge Graph, not only in its pairing to more queries, but in how Google extracts data from the index to create answers. I'm seeing many examples in testing where Google is pulling answer-like information from websites beyond its current data partners. This is speculation, and it may not be connected to Hummingbird, but these changes are definitely coming.

(1) and (2) impact rank-tracking directly, whereas (3) impacts how we view ranking and signals the need to go beyond just counting blue links. We take both trends seriously, but getting from here to there is a gradual process, not just for technical reasons, but because our mindset as SEOs has to evolve.

From a competitive standpoint, you won't see huge changes in the short term. If a change impacts any given query, that impact is felt for both you and your competitors, in most cases. There may be isolated examples where a re-interpretation of a query means that you or your competitor rise or fall in ranking relative to the other, but our tools would see that and I expect that's a relatively small amount of searches right now. At this point, we're keeping our eyes open and trying to predict where Google is headed. Now that Moz Analytics is launched, we're working hard to be more agile and iterate new functions in smaller chunks and at a faster pace.

Some links may be unremovable. If they're all coming from one domain, they'll likely just be devalued - Google is going to see this as a single pile of links (not 900 different entities) and probably ignore it. I'd leave it, in most cases, and move forward with higher-quality links. Blogspot isn't paid or a link network, so those links are just low quality.

Many "branded" queries do result in 7-result SERPs, but not all, and some non-branded queries can generate them. I've dug into this in some detail, and the picture is pretty complex:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/secrets-of-the-7-result-serp

Google is doing more and more entity association - trying to match queries to concepts, and that could tie into brand detection, but there's really no simple way to identify a query as being a brand, and there are many exceptions to simple rules.

I also think they factor in the usual signals - links, social, etc. They are working hard to integrate offline signals and this all factors into Google's general idea of dominant intent. In other words, if someone types "IBM", it should bring up the IBM home-page, even if that page happened to have terrible SEO and no links, because that's the best answer.

There are many, many arguments, though about whether Google actually favors big brands, or if big brands dominate through other, more mundane factors. Keep in mind, too, that "brand" doesn't mean big. Bob's Plumbing in Walla Walla, Washington should rank for brand queries (assuming that there's only one Bob's Plumbing), too, even without links/trust/social signals, for the same reason. In other words, someone looking for Bob's Plumbing wants to find that specific business, not just plumbers named Bob.

My post has a lot more details, but there's no clear or easy answer, I'm afraid.

Are your sites cross-linked at all (I'm not seeing anything obvious)? The cascade effect across all of them almost suggests they were either (1) seen as a link network, or (2) you're using the same link strategy across all of them.

I'd watch the keyword stuffing - your titles are pretty aggressive, and then you repeat those lists in the copy at the top and bottom of the page. It's borderline at best. I don't think it's enough to get multiple sites penalized, but it may not be helping you right now.

You've got a duplicate of the London Escape home-page floating out there in the index:

http://www.londonescape.com/index.php?option=com_wesearch&task=loginVIAFacebook

Might want to add rel=canonical to the home-page, just to sweep up things like that.

You're indexed and I'm able to get the site ranking on very targeted keywords (exact-match and fairly unique), but you fall off the map for everything else. That's definitely indicative of a link-based penalty.

This is a really complex topic and a special case of the canonical tag.. It also doesn't help that Google keeps adjusting their advice. See this thread:

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

"When Google discovers a cluster of pages with a single canonical URL, our algorithms will use the title and snippet from the canonical version in our search results. Therefore, it's a good idea not to include region-specific content in the title and meta description tags of the canonical URL. For example, use "Example Widget Inc" instead of "Example Widget USA Inc" or "Example Widget UK"."

So, what about the non-canonical pages? Well, the implication is that, if you use hreflang AND canonical, you'll avoid dupe content problems but the proper pages may rank in the proper regions, even with the canonical tag. In that case, you'd want to include regional variations in the non-canonical META data (for regional searchers). Unfortunately, I haven't seen good data on this yet.

Like Istvan, my gut reaction is to try hreflang first, without the canonical, IF you're not having duplicate content issues or seeing regional variations cross over into inappropriate regions. If you are seeing that, then you'll probably need both.

Yeah, one thing I think is critically important is to try to divorce yourself from your own creation and think in terms of what Google finds valuable. We all think our sites are the greatest and every page we create is a masterpiece, even when we'd ignore or trash the same kind of page on someone else's site. When you're talking about a 100X increase, brutal honesty with yourself is very important.

While I do think you can trade off positive link-building vs. cutting negative links (depending on the severity), I have to disagree with "the warning will still be there no matter what you do". We're seeing accounts from reputable firms that this warning is real, can be followed by a penalty, and will be lifted if action is taken.

The trick is that the warning covers many levels of severity, and there's no good way to tell how severe this one is. If you know you have very questionable links, I'd kill the worst of them, personally. This would include paid links or very obvious, low-value spam.

I'd also tell your SEO company to shift gears ASAP. As Ivaylo said, diverify - no matter whether you cut links or don't.

I'm sorry, but I think "onpage SEO has almost nothing to do with SEO anymore" is a very, very misguided statement. On-page covers a lot of ground, including using keywords in your content and titles, technical SEO, etc. I can absolutely guarantee that on-page can have a dramatic impact on rankings. It's also highly situational - your one case doesn't speak to the many thousands of variations of competitive niches out there. That's why I wrote this post a while back:

http://moz.com/blog/whats-better-on-page-seo-or-link-building

Google has said that site speed is a ranking factor, but our best guess is that it's probably mild right now. A site that is very slow could suffer problems and a site that's very fast could get a small boost. There are also indirect impacts. If your site is slow and people bounce, it could harm dwell time, which may be a ranking signal. There's a mountain of data to show that site speed impacts conversion, so I'd never want to suggest that site speed isn't important, no matter what it's weight as a ranking factor.

It's tough, because these variations/customizations are legitimately what you do. My gut feeling, though, is that 80K (I'm seeing 90K with a site: search) indexed pages is just too much for your current link profile. It doesn't mean you'll get in trouble, but it could mean that your ranking power is spread far too thin.

While it's not a decision I'd take lightly, I do think there's an advantage here to either:

(1) Consolidating variations under one URL

(2) Having multiple URLs, but possibly using rel=canonical (I think that's your best bet) to focus Google on one parent URL for each product

My experience matches Nakul's. Technically, Bing claims you shouldn't have canonicals on the canonical page itself, but I've never seen evidence that they actually do anything about that or don't honor the tags. I think they just don't like processing the extra tags. Google originally suggested the same thing, but then softened their stance. I've NEVER seen a practical issue with it on Google.

So, by the book, Bing would rather you only put it on non-canonical URLs. Practically, though, it seems to work absolutely fine. I wouldn't lose sleep over it. So many big sites are doing this now that I don't think the engines can devalue the tactic. It's not spammy - it's just mildly inconvenient for them (some extra processing).

It can vary quite a bit. The page has to be recrawled/recached, which can take anywhere from hours to weeks, depending on how much authority the page has. That's usually the big delay. After that, Google may on occasion delay passing authority, but we don't have proof of that (there are just cases where it seems like they do).

If it's just a handful of pages, re-fetch them through Google Webmaster Tools. It never hurts to kick the crawlers.

Unfortunately, we are experiencing a delay, due to an attempt to expand and improve the crawl. I don't have an exact ETA, but this is our TOP priority and we definitely regret the issues people are having.

I would double-check that Google has indexed and re-cached the page with the link on it. It's not instantaneous, in practice. Also make sure the link isn't nofollow'ed, etc.

We're seeing some mixed messages from Google in this regard. They have suggested recently that links do have to be re-crawled to be disavowed. For an algorithmic penalty, that should be enough. For a manual penalty, even if the links are disavowed and re-crawled, Google still may require a reconsideration request. So, it can be a bit tricky.

For reconsideration, someone is looking at the request, so we assume they take the disavow into account and try to adjust for that, but it may depend on the person and the situation. It's important that you thoroughly document what you've done in the reconsideration request. Don't just disavow a ton of stuff and then say "Hey, can we get back in?" They won't take that seriously, in most cases.

It used to be that titles only came from two sources - the <title>tag and DMOZ. If the organic result title didn't match the title tag, then you'd check DMOZ. Unfortunately, now Google pulls data from all over the place, including Google+ listings and the Knowledge Graph. Google has become very interested in understanding brands as entities and is bringing a lot of data into play, sometimes poorly.</p></title>

The category/tag issue is tricky - sometimes, it does make sense to NOINDEX/FOLLOW, if those categories and tags spin out into a ton of internal search pages. My worry is that you're noindex'ing main navigation links - which is really a mixed signal. Those pages are important enough to get top billing, but not to index (?)

I have a feeling the best answer is a balance, but that takes a really deep knowledge of the site to sort out. If it's only been a week, it's really tough to tell. On a big site and deeper pages, it can take weeks to sort out, I'm afraid to say. NOINDEX is far from instantaneous.

Your main categories could potentially get ranked over your blog posts in some cases, but again, that's partially the site architecture. If you don't want them to rank, why are they main navigation links? Another, more radical options would be to kill the drop-down menus and add a layer (each main-nav home page would have left-side links or something to that effect) - that would drive more link-juice to the main sections and articles, and less to the sub-categories.

There's something very wrong with your article/blog navigation. If I click the ">>", I jump to page 417, but then there are dozens of empty pages. This is part of why all those paginated versions are getting indexed. I don't know if this is a WP issue or a quirk of your implementation (maybe a bunch of blank entries in the database), but it's creating dozens or hundreds of empty pages for Google to crawl. Since that's available right from the home-page, it's definitely a problem.

I wouldn't get too hung up on the Moz timeline, since that's only correlated with what Google does, to build a broader model. If Google has crawled/cached the 404 and the page actually is no longer in the index, then that page should stop inheriting and passing link equity. It can get complicated, because sometimes 404s have inbound links and other issues tied to them that can confuse the crawlers. So, I'd say it's situational.

Moz (specifically, OSE) can help you determine what links still exist to those URLs, which really should guide whether you let them stay 404s or 301-redirect them to something relevant. The other aspect of the decision is just whether something relevant exists. If you clearly have built a page to replace the old one then 301-redirect it. If the old page is something that ceased to exist for a reason, then a 404 is probably fine unless that old page had a ton of inbound links. In that case, the 404 has essentially cut off those links.

The problem is that those inbound links are still out there, so it's not that the authority has ceased to exist. It's that you've basically cut the pipe through which the authority flows.

I'm afraid that there's no one-sized-fits-all answer to that question. I'd be very wary of being charged by the link, because anyone who focuses on quantity is going to inevitably sacrifice quality. If I promise to build you 50 links for $500, you'll get what you paid for (i.e. not much). Worse yet, below a certain quality threshold, you're taking a long-term risk. In other words, you won't just risk spending your money poorly - you'll risk a penalty or serious SEO problems.

On the other hand, I definitely don't think you should settle for "give us some money and we will do our best" - your link-building company should definitely have a plan and be transparent about it. Preferably, that's going to be a mix of helping you develop content and build/attract links to it, but it should be quantifiable.

Anything related to real estate is going to be competitive, and that means expensive (done right). I'd definitely stay local, honestly - someone who knows the UK and even London market will have not only more relevant experience but more relevant connections. A bunch of links from Istanbul aren't going to help you much. A really great firm may even have PR connections, but obviously that's a different price level.

Just to second @Jarno - my immediate reaction is that the implementation went very wrong (which is far too easy when you're messing with .htaccess). The only times I've seen rel=canonical harm a site's rankings is when an implementation cause a ton of non-identical pages to be canonical'ed to just a few pages.

It depends a lot on scale, too. Google has had issues with very large-scale 301 redirect implementations, for example - especially if the 301s don't seem to be appropriate or are just to consolidate authority. I expect them to crack down more on that.

When you say "Moz Ranking", do you mean the MozRank metric, or the actual search rankings as measured by our tools?

I can't find a reference for what I'm about to say, unfortunately, but I seem to recall Google suggesting that https is a per-page consideration (and that's consistent with Google's overall philosophy) and not domain-based. So, if your indexed pages are all on "www.domain.com" (for the most part) and that version is secured, you should be ok. I've used "www" specific certs and not seen any particular signs of a problem.

Of course, if you secure "www.domain.com" and then canonicalize your entire site to "domain.com," then that's going to be a problem.

Unfortunately, although Bing is more transparent about some policies, they're a little quieter about specific updates, and the SEO community just doesn't track the Bing algorithm very carefully. I'm not seeing any evidence of a similar drop in my own client sites, but that's anecdotal at best.

As Alan said, Bing is more aggressive about user signals and I'd add that social signals may have more impact as well, but like Google they seem to be changing the mix frequently.

I always start with the facts. You know you had a recent relaunch - are you seeing any side effects? Is Bing indexing a lot more pages (or duplicates)? Are they have any crawl issues. I'd definitely dig into Bing Webmaster Tools and see what kind of signals they're reporting - not just since 3/27, but since the relaunch. This could be a delayed impact of the changes you made.

I think we only collect data from when the campaigns are first created, so it might vary depending on the account age, but I'll check that with the product team and get back to you. That graph was just the default for me.

Broadly, yes - we're very interested in this issue. Unfortunately, it's incredibly complicated. A couple of key points:

(1) We have no idea which links Google discounts. There's no API or signal or crawl trick that will tell us, and there's really no way to measure the impact of any single link. So, we're forced to try to deduce the signals they use. Unfortunately, even those signals can take a mountain of data to process, and so it gets computationally more and more complex.

(2) Our crawl does bias toward what we believe are higher-quality links. In other words, we try to focus on quality over quantity in our data. So, in that sense, we do discount them, to some degree. This is mostly based on authority-based metrics, though, not on "spamminess".

(3) Dr. Matt Peters here at SEOmoz is actively working on a project to classify link spam and try to emulate Google's behavior. That's been a very difficult project, but the goal is to measure spam more effectively and eventually try to integrate what we learn back into the crawl. I can't currently give you an ETA on that project, but it is something the Data Science team is working hard on.

It is tricky. As Michael said it is important to get your content indexed first, which can help identify you as the source. Google doesn't always do a great job of that. Generally, I don't worry too much about Case 1, but in your case, it can be tougher. The problem is that many download sites can have very high authority and could start outranking you for these product descriptions. If that happens, it's unlikely you'd be penalized, but you could be filtered out or knocked down the rankings, which might feel like a penalty.

Here's the thing, with Case 1, though. If these download sites are simply outranking you, but you're distributing product, is it so awful? I think you have to look at the trade-off through the lens of your broader business goals.

Case 2 is tougher, since there's not a lot you can do about it, short of DMCA takedowns. You've got to hope Google sorts it out. Again, getting in front of it and getting your content in the index quickly is critical.

If you were hit by Panda, I'd take a hard look at anything on your own site that could be harming you. Are you spinning out variations of your own content? Are you creating potentially duplicate URLs? Are you indexing a ton of paginated content (internal searches, for example). You may find that the external duplicates are only part of your Panda problem - if you can clean up what you control, you'll be much better off. I have an extensive duplicate content write-up here:

http://moz.com/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Ah, got it - the "A/B testing" in your questions threw me off. I was wondering if you were looking for a different type of service than they used to sell.

If you're looking for structured interviews, it definitely can get a lot more expensive very quickly. It used to be that this stuff ran $10K+, before companies like UserTesting.com came along a couple of years back.

I've occasionally heard good things about UserBrain (https://userbrain.net/), but I haven't used their service personally. UserLytics (http://www.userlytics.com/sitepublic/) also used to be a lower-priced alternative, but again, it's been a while since I've dug into their service offerings and prices.

If it's something you plan to do a fair amount of, it may be worth training someone in-house and getting a basic set up. Steve Krug's more recent book (http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-Do-It-Yourself/dp/0321657292) is a great starting point. Some time and equipment investment up front may be enough to get you a lot of insights. The nice thing about in-person testing is that it's really exploratory - you don't have to be an expert to get at least some results.

While we don't know the exact math, I think the existence of two PR measures (internal and Toolbar) is pretty much established fact at this point. TBPR is a simplification of a much more continuous PR scale and is almost definitely non-linear. The difference between TBPR 6 vs. 7 is MUCH greater than the difference between TBPR 1 vs. 2, for example.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's as simple as an equation - we use a machine-learning algorithm and I think the result just happens to be logarithmic. I know who knows the answer, though, so let me ask and see if it's something we're able to discuss.

This is a very complex issue, but I think Jonathan's summed it up pretty well. Generally, home pages collect a lot of the "mass" of inbound links, and so they can overpower other pages. On the other hand, deep pages are easier to target to specific keywords and sometimes have targeted anchor text. I've seen cases where someone wanted the home-page to rank, but a deep page was ranking, and I've seen the opposite.

Rand wrote about that general problem here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

While it's not exactly what you're asking, it covers the general logic of why one page might win over another.

It's interesting, because they made such a big announcement about it, and it had been in testing prior to that. I think they may have had more backlash than expected - on many screens, the #1 spot was taking up most of the real estate.

I'd just warn that Google seems to be signalling that toolbar PR updates may slow down or eventually stop altogether. If it wasn't for industry outcry, they would've stopped a while ago, I'm sure.

Thumbed up Matt and Moosa - I think I'd make sure first that the PA/DA is telling the whole story. PA, for example, doesn't take into account possible Google devaluations or penalties (which we can't really measure). That PA of 80 may be over-estimated for a lot of reasons. It may be that you have a solid link profile, but your on-page targeting is lacking. There are a lot of ways to target without switching to a partial-match domain.

Now, would a partial-match domain help a bit? Probably, for now, but Google seems to be dialing that down slowly (exact-match domains really are too powerful, and are still being abused like crazy). Keep in mind, though, that the 301-redirect does carry risk, and may not transfer all of the link-juice. Also, if you 301-redirect just this one powerful page, it could impact your main site's Domain Authority and potentially harm your other rankings on that site (if that page has a huge concentration of the site's links).

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to measure the impact of proactive disavow, for a number of reasons:

(1) The timeline of if and when Google processes disavows isn't very transparent
(2) The impact of bad links is usually only seen in large drops, and long after the fact of those links

For most of us, I think proactively disavowing links carries the risk that those links might actually be passing value. So, if you start carving away at your link profile before you're in any danger, you stand to lose as much as you might gain down the road.

Risk profiling is tricky, and there are certainly sites on the verge of penalties or at high risk who should be proactive. I can't tell you where on the continuum you fall from just a couple of linking domains, but my gut reaction is that disavowing links isn't a good use of your time and energy right now.

I think Paul's got you on the right track, although I'll just add a couple of things:

(1) META Refresh can be a bit unpredictable, in terms of passing inbound linking power and SEO benefits. Google has generally recommended against using it the last couple of years.

(2) 301-redirects would be the preferred solution, but you could use rel=canonical in a pinch. It will generally help consolidate any duplicates and pass any inbound link "juice":

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

The disadvantage is what Paul discussed - canonical tags won't send the visitors to the canonical URL - they're only seen by search engines. The advantage is that you could create them within the HTML itself and don't need the Yahoo platform to support it.

I tend to agree with Paul, though - there are plenty of inexpensive hosting options that do support redirects. If it's important, it's worth considering a switch.

I have to echo what others are saying, just to be honest with you - even most decent consultants I know have minimums of about $1,500/month for retainer work. Most agencies won't deal with anything below $2,500/month (here in the US).

You could work with a freelancer (domestic or overseas) and get a decent chunk of hours for $500/month, but you'd be talking about a lower level of experience. If you can segment what you want and really lay out projects, I think that's fine. If you need someone to tell you what you should be doing and guide the process, it's going to be a lot tougher.

We do have a recently updated recommended list, but many of the firms are higher-priced:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended

I think that Portent Interactive out of Seattle does reasonably priced audits (starting in the $1,500 range) - that might be a good starting point, as @Nakul said. Spend your first 3 months of budget on a solid site audit, figure out where your gaps are, and then go from there. You can do some of the initial work yourself and then hire a freelancer/contractor to do some small-scale projects based on what the audit found.

I have to second Matt - both and neither are probably right. This is an extremely difficult thing to measure, especially at large scale, and only Google has the numbers. Even purely organic CTR studies (not accounting for paid search) show numbers all over the place. The one consistent aspect is that we typically see a similar shaped curve, with a clear preference for #1 and a pretty steep drop-off.

It also appears that one of these studies is based on US data and the other on UK data. The "War on Free Clicks" was a WordStream study, if I recall, so their PPC data is generally pretty solid. It also reflects things like paid shopping results and uses a query set that's a bit more commercial. So, it's probably solid, but it reflects a specific niche.

With the diversity of new SERPs, I think it's vitally important to know your own industry landscape. Organic SERPs now have answer boxes, Knowledge Graph, carousels, expanded site-links, in-depth articles, and many features that can radically alter CTR. There's no "average" answer - it's critical to know the space you operate in.

Ultimately, there are two ways to get a sense of CTR data for yourself. Google Webmaster Tools has some clues - I don't completely trust their data, but it's a good starting point. The other option is simply to run some small-scale PPC campaigns and measure yourself. I've done some PPC work in the past in competitive niches, and I'll be blunt - it's all theory until you get out there and try it. CTR also differs radically across ads, based on copy, brand strength, etc.

There's nothing wrong with doing this, as long as the "title" attribute is accurate (DON'T spam it with non-relevant keywords), but I haven't seem compelling evidence that it acts as a ranking signal.

I empathize with your frustration, and we certainly take it seriously. Let me first say that I've been involved in the Keyword Explorer project for a while, and I assure you that this was not about releasing a new product just to have something to do. Our goal was to really reinvent and help automate the keyword research process. We did re-work Keyword Difficulty as part of that, but there are many more features that we sincerely believe help simplify a difficult and time-consuming process. I'd encourage you to check out lists and Keyword Potential, as it helps balance Difficulty w/ Volume and other considerations.

The changes to Keyword Difficulty were carefully considered and tested. That's not to say they're perfect, and we are evaluating them based on large-scale customer data as we collect it. There were issues with V1, though, that we felt needed addressing. The original Keyword Difficulty score tended to bunch up on the middle values, didn't take into account the disproportionate impact of the top of the SERP, and handled missing data poorly. We may have overcompensated on the bunching up problem, based on what we're seeing over a lot of data, and are looking to address that ASAP.

I'm not clear on what tool you were comparing, but it's important to note that Keyword Difficulty isn't like volume, which has a real-world answer (Google won't tell us what it is, but there is one, in theory). So, every tool measures difficulty a bit differently. It doesn't really make sense to compare different tools - that difference won't be meaningful. Keyword Difficulty, in our design, isn't meant to be used in a vacuum - it's meant to be used to compare target keywords to each other. In other words, it's not so much that Keyword X scores a 30, but how it compares to Keyword Y. Our goal is to help you pick the best target from your list of potential targets, but any given score out of context isn't very useful. No single keyword tells the whole story.