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Hi Dusan,

I'm in agreement with Alex here - there is plenty of reason why Google would pay little attention to many web directories, but the primary reason today is going to be a lack of good content. After Panda, pages are being held to a higher standard for the quality of their content, and web directories rarely include any original content at all.

For SEO purposes, being linked to from old fashioned directories isn't a bad thing, and could either be of minimal help, or a little bit helpful. However, it's not a link building tactic that you can really rely on anymore.

The PageRank advice is true too: at best, toolbar PR is a good indication as to whether there's something really wrong with your site (i.e. you lose your toolbar PR overnight, or it drops from very high to very low). At worst, it's misleading and outdated, and no indication of how well you can rank.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Joshua,

Shailendra is correct that you should only use the canonical tag for content that is either identical or very, very similar. Unfortunately, the cleanest way to do this from an SEO perspective is still to do a full 301, as this eliminates any confusion Google is going to come up against. I feel that you're running into dangerous grounds by trying to move over slowly. You should also be using the "change of address" option within Webmaster Tools to show Google that the site has moved, when you're ready to flip the switch: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

Hi Marisa,

For 50 - 60 links per page, all containing the word "patches", I'd consider cutting back. You can carry out on-page optimisation of these pages including the word "patches", but for site-wide links, or from the home page, this is going to be quite excessive. If you look at a successful site like Interflora (http://www.interflora.co.uk/), they've been careful not to over-do the internal links for terms along the lines of "[keyword] flowers." There's some relatively aggressive SEO on that page, but nowhere near 50 - 60 links.

A long time ago, Matt Cutts specified that you'd want no more than 100 links per page, but it's generally agreed that a good site can get away with more than that nowadays. The blog post about this is here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru

Hi Matthew,

Although the metrics of the two sites (number of backlinks, etc) are quite similar, domain / site age are going to be playing a part here. The years of indexation are going to put the .co.uk site at a big advantage over the .com. Although exact match domains are not a guarantee of ranking, you do also have an exact-match with the .co.uk, but not with the .com (with "usa" added). Do you have plans to acquire http://www.blindbolt.com/?

Hi Atul,

Tom is right - it depends on the server, but the linked-to post should tell you how to do this. If you are using a Microsoft IIS server, this post can help with those redirects.

Jane