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I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML?

I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.

No, Open Site Explorer does not. I have tons of links that appear in Google Webmaster Tools but not in OSE.

Matt Cutts on press releases, as quoted by SearchEngineLand:

http://tinyurl.com/63pabf6

Interesting bit:

Matt clarified that the links in the press releases themselves don’t count for PageRank value, but if a journalist reads the release and then writes about the site, any links in that news article will then count.

FWIW, I had a similar problem, in that one of my internal pages had 1,500 total links -- of which approx 1,425 were internal and had exactly the same three-word exact-match anchor text.

The page was ranking top 5 pre-Penguin for the keyword. Post Penguin, it sunk like a stone. A very heavy stone. As in, not in top #100. I've changed the links but still haven't recovered 10 months on.

Bizarrely, the page still ranks ok for other keywords, which makes me suspect some kind of manual keyword-specific penalty.

Related-ish question:

I have a site-wide banner on a website with a theme related to mine with the alt tag containing an exact-match keyword.

It's on 2,500 pages. Post-Penguin, am I inviting trouble? Should I play it safe and have it on, say, just a handful of pages -- or even just the homepage?

Thanks for the response. However, second question:

I've not received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Should I still clean up links I don't like the look of with Link Disavow? Or should I go with Google and do nothing?

Your response is, strictly speaking, the right one.

But I've seen people in my industry "black hat" their way to the top spots and stay there for years.

It's difficult telling people to play it by the book when lower rankings equal lower revenue equals people's livelihoods at stake. Just my two pennies' worth.

I'm in real estate. I've seen sites get to No1 (and stay there) with some of the spammiest link profiles imaginable -- low-rent directories, blog comments, paid links from obvious link-brokers, you name it. It's frustrating, to say the least.

One of my rivals in a competitive field (real estate) has done this deliberately and extensively -- it accounts for about 2/3 of his inbound links. Result: he's now #1.

How strong a ranking factor is keywords in source URL - ie, how easy is it to beat with other ranking factors?

As mentioned below, I'm in a similar position:

My understanding is that User/XML site maps are an issue only if you're not getting all your pages crawled.

Also, if there were an issue about anchor-heavy inbound text, would there not be a message in Google Webmaster Tools?

I'm in a similar boat -- interested to find out how it panned out for you.

An SEO newbie. I took a sabbatical from my site for 10 months for personal reasons & I'm  now coming back to it for the first time and facing a number of issues that I'd appreciate some advice on.

1)  In the past week, my rankings for my main keywords have suddenly plummeted from ~#7 - #8 to about #25. The only thing I've done in that time is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and clean up a spammy-looking keyword-stuffed section at the foot of my homepage. (It read: Red keyword | blue keyword | green keyword | yellow keyword ... 20 times). I've kept the  links (to internal pages of my site) but removed keywords.

I've no social presence whatsoever. No Twitter, Facebook, Digg, G+, Google Places, nothing -- but I can't imagine this is behind the sudden drop.

2)  Last year my rankings start to fall in late April. But for the first two months or so the drop was only from #1 to #2 - #3. I put it down to Penguin as my backlink profile is not ideal.

• About 5 years ago some SEO got me a mass of sitewide blog footer links with exact-match anchors -- some of which still remain. (Some domains have 750-plus links pointing back to my site).

• I've a sitewide banner (2,500 pages) on a site with a related theme to mine.

• I've loads of links from article directory sites (from when I knew no better).

* Question: In Google Webmaster Tools I have not (yet?) received an unnatural links warning. Should I still clean up the links with the Link Disavow tool?

"... an image link with no alt tag is useless to search engines..." according to a Nov 2007 seomoz blog post. Is this still the case in 2011?

I ask because I'm about to obtain a banner link on a high-traffic site (chiefly for the clickthrough value) but I notice the site uses neither "title" nor "alt" tags.

I need to 301-redirect about 25 product pages because I'm having a content management system installed in part of the site.

What's the definitive answer on this -- is some link authority lost along a 301 link? These page rank superbly & are high-traffic, so I can't afford to take unnecessary risks.

I pose this question as an SEO newbie: I know I'm meant to handpick which directories I submit to and go for quality rather than quantity.

Problem: the site that's keeping me off top spot has got there by getting links from 500+ directories -- low-rent ones, at that.

Why does this tactic still work in 2011?

Hi

My site and a rival site are bothl UK based. If I search google.co.uk for a keyword I'm above him, yet if I search the australian results, he's on top.

How come? I'd really like to put this right and grind his face into the dirt -- if only as revenge for repeatedly stealing my web content.

Thanks

http://www.google.com/search?q=bank&gl=au

http://www.google.com/search?q=bank&gl=uk

as explained here

works for me

I do a search and get absolutely nothing. Diddly squat. This may be one for your hosting company...

Question:

At the moment the alt tag on my logo (which appears on all my 4,000+ pages) simply reads "home". Would it be spammy to change it on all 4,000 pages to, eg, "home of cheap red widgets", assuming cheap red widgets was my target keyword?

I don't know if I follow you right -- but simply put: if you remove 32 of the 40 outbound links currently on your homepage, the remaining 8 will each pass on more "link juice" to their destination pages.

Whether those destination pages as a result then go up in the SERPS would then obviously depend on a range of other factors (such as the innate strength of your homepage, your competitors, etc)

All y'all SEO clever men be saying that paid directories (and fo' sho unpaid ones) ain't worth diddly.So how come when I open a can of Open Site Explorer on the a** of my (breathin'-down-my-neck) rivals, their (meant to be worthless) directories be passin' them lots and lots of link love? Riddle me that, people.

I'm no expert but my tuppeny's worth:

Re: the meta "description" tag, it's because if it's ridiculously long it gets truncated on a Google Serps page with ellipsis (...) There is one school of thought that actually favours this on the grounds that it supposedly encourages "curiousity value" click through, eg "This website shows you how to make $1million just by...[ABRUPT STOP]

Re: Title tag, a similar argument applies, although (& I stand to be corrected) the rule of thumb is anything over about 80 chars begins to look spammy, as does repeating any one word in the title tag more than twice.