Hey G!

You can serve your sitemap in both versions, that won't be any problem and won't trigger the duplicate content issue. So you are safe both ways.

As for the second question: Yes, you should, unless you don't want your pages indexed (any HTTP or HTTPS). I think I saw your site before, and if I remember correctly you had your homepage and login script under SSL, right? Then you should definitely include your homepage in the sitemap but you can leave the login script file out as you don't need that indexed nor google will index it either.

Once you have your sitemap ready, consider including a path in the robots file, like this:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://[your website address here]/sitemap.xml

Hope that helps!

Have you tried looking at the headers response you get when accessing those pages? Try with http://web-sniffer.net/ to verify that your site is actually responding with a 301.

Anyway, I think Mozbot AKA Roger, scrapes sites once a week, so if you made the changes only 4 days ago, I would hold for a few more days.

Yes. Links from PRWeb are considered unnatural if not no-followed. You must nofollow all the links in your releases, and in case other sites pickup your PRs, just make sure those links are no followed.

PRWeb claimed they made several changes to comply with Google guidelines, but given the amount of people that use their services only for the SEO effect, it would be hard to believe that they actually force the nofollow to all their releases and the sites that syndicates them.

From PRWeb:

"As far as changes in links and backlinking these changes come from google and apply to all press release distribution. We have been proactive in these changes and marking all outgoing syndication as ‘no-follow’ in accordance with Googles new rules."

They should be no-follow even on those sites that may pick the news up. Like the question says, the response from Google to the reconsideration request mentions links that were on syndicating sites, not on the actual PRWeb site.

And the statement I mentioned was a quote from PRWeb, and it says and I quote "all outgoing syndication" meaning that even those outside PRWeb site are being no-followed.

I have been using xml-sitemaps (paid version) for all my sites over 5 years and they work like a charm, scraping and indexing what it needs to be indexed ans scraped, plus it consumes really low resources. 100% recommended (they have nice plugins too for extra sitempas (video, news, images, etc).

Hope that helps!

Yeah, they offer free and paid hosted versions too. But I found the server side version much simpler to setup and control.

You are doing guest blogging for the links? Then just 1 will do it to get you penalized. Forget about guest blogging for links, instead, create great content and promote it trying to get a natural link.

If you are doing guest blogging, don't do it for the links. If in one article you write it happens you have an excellent article to link to in one of your properties then link to it. But do NOT write so you can insert a link.

That could be a problem, yes. static.domain.com is another domain that www.domain.com and therefore the sitemap should be in www.domain.com for URLs on www.domain.com.

I've seen image sitemaps in www.domain.com where all the images are on a subdomain, like static.domain.com and that wasn't an issue, but personally I'd suggest you put the sitemap in the www.domain.com.

Every time you make a redirect, 301, some of the pagerank is diluted. So following your example, from going from A to C you should redirect both A and B to C, not A -> B -> C as you double the loss.

Redirects are just fine, and in my opinion, they should say for as long as the pages being redirected still get organic traffic (backlinks, search, etc.). The moment you see no more traffic, and the links pointing to that redirected page fixed (point to the new page) you can safely remove the redirection. For as on the amount of redirects, it won't be a problem if you have lots of them, unless you do multiple redirects from A to G going from one page to the other until reaching the final, working version.

If that's not your scenario and A redirects directly to G, then you are fine. Monitor traffic on A and see if at some point you can remove the redirection, otherwise just leave is there (I personally have redirects that have been there for over 3 years as the pages are still getting organic traffic (mainly from links).

Hope that helps! And a happy new year to you too!

That should be an easy fix for your programmer. If your internal links point to pages with uppercase letters in them, then have the canonical tags with the uppercase. Almost always, uppercase and lowercase loads the same content as the rewrite rules use the URL to look on the products using a DB that does not distinguish uppercase & lowercase automatically (in MySQL, you can force the query to do so, but that will be actually more difficult to just change the way the programmed made the canonical tags). You should also redirect the pages that are duplicate to the original ones, if they have uppercase letters (the original) then the lowercase version should redirect to the uppercase one (once the canonical tags are properly set).

From MY OWN PERSONAL point of view, I always preferred lowercase URLs... if that's the case there's a little more coding to do, but you will end up with all URLs in lowercase (for some reason almost all CMS automatically convert uppercase letters to lowercase in a page URL, like Wordpress does).

Hope that helps!

It won't make your site look spammy if the content you are publishing isn't spam. CC images require you to link back to the original source, you can even use a nofollow attribute on those links.

But still, as the images are not yours, you won't benefit from image search, as Google will list the original image posted by the author instead of yours.

There are royalty free stock photos that you can use and they aren't that expensive if you are on a subscription. Like Fotolia offers a subscription for 5 images at $25 per mo. But you can download a lower resolution one, which will deduct half a credit and then you can download 10 images. Most likely, you don't need the one that's worth 1 entire credit as the 1/2 credit one is large enough.

PS: Here's a post from Ann Smarty about how to use CC images from flickr: http://www.seosmarty.com/flickr-creative-commons/

Hope that helps!

No, you won't get penalized for redirecting the PDFs to HTML versions of them. In fact, Google will like it.

Here's a video that may help you out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDzq-94lcWQ