Good stuff, and good tip about the cached test only version. I hadn't heard that one before, and it looks like I might use it plenty. Thanks!

I would like to use the website logo on our site as the H1 for the homepage (see top 'Covers' logo http://www.covers.com/index.aspx ). I have found one of our sister sites with code like this

Gracenote

with CSS that sets the text to 'transparent' and the background image to the logo.

My question is would the text be consumed or ignored by the robot? Unfortunately, wedging an H1 in anywhere else is not possible at this time, so this is my best option. Is this change worthwhile?

THanks in advance.

Thanks for the interest. The domain is Covers.com (think: the ESPN for people who sports bet) and there is good reason why Venezuelans would visit since they are crazy for baseball, but the numbers are so wildly out of proportion there must be more at play here. I can telly you that from a sales standpoint and from a participation in contests and the forums that Venezuelans are not over represented in site use.

Another factor could be size perhaps? We serve about 1.2 Billion pages a year, and have reached the extent of Google Analytics free product long ago. We don't have the Premium yet though.

We did have the geo-target set in WMT to 'undefined' but recently have switched to 'United States'

Thanks again for any help!

Our site gets a significant amount of traffic from Venezuela, about 9% based on our Google Analytics (the US being 63%). According to Webmaster Tools we get 48% of our clicks from Venezuela. That discrepancy is massive, considering we are an English site. My theory is that they are not allowed/capable of using secure search in Venezuela for some legal reason and therefore their searches are much more 'visible'. Does anyone have any insight?

Thank you. We did try to have a .uk version of our site, which failed, but there was less of a focus on making that change for SEO reasons. I will keep the country TLD in mind going forward. We are on the verge of some language-specific content so that might be a good time to consider this.

Thanks!

Some more context: we get a large and disproportionate quantity of traffic from Canada, which generally indicates we are being treated as 'Canadian content'.

I would classify our site as large (www.covers.com), with our primary target being traffic within the US (about 70%) but I have a feeling we are limited by our IP being located within Canada. I have changed all the targeting to the US in WMT, but could undertake a project to virtually 'move' the site to a US IP, if there would be benefit. I have found articles coming down on both sides of the issue.

Thoughts?

Addendum to this story: it turns out that this was likely a malicious activity with an extremely similar IP address to ours so we might not notice. We have disavowed.

Was going to disavow them but have reached out and asked for a nofollow on the menu because they do have some legitimate mentions in their forums that are worth preserving.

We actually have no manual actions against us, but we do have some links that are very dodgy ( like the 6.4 million links from these paragons of virtue: http://ebetsports.com/). I am trying to stay on top of it before we get the call. We also have what I would consider a low DA versus our competitors, since we are a 20+ year old domain, so I am stripping the low hanging fruit while trying to get back to basic 'average' SEO.

Hello,

I am digging in to our in-links in WMT and notice that we have a number of sites that link to us in their menu or every page on their site, making for hundreds of thousands of links to our site. Here is an example: 
http://www.askthebookie.com/ (in the topmost  right menu there is a link to our forums) http://www.covers.com/postingforum/

There are about a dozen or so sites that link to our homepage tens-of-thousands of times. Should I disavow them, or is this be viewed as a legitimate link?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I would classify our site as large (www.covers.com), with our primary target being traffic within the US (about 70%) but I have a feeling we are limited by our IP being located within Canada. I have changed all the targeting to the US in WMT, but could undertake a project to virtually 'move' the site to a US IP, if there would be benefit. I have found articles coming down on both sides of the issue.

Thoughts?