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Yosepgr,

First it's important to not spell important as "impotent", especially after Irving's reference to viagra.

Write something like this:

I noticed your website at {put web address here} was linking to mine several hundred times.  I visited your site to see why you liked my site so much and noticed that it's because your website appears to have been hacked.

You should consider cleaning up all of the links the hackers put in to your website so that you do not get a penalty from Google.  You should also consider taking some safety precautions to prevent this from happening in the future.  Some things you can do is check your site to see where SQL Injections may occur.  You might also put in Captcha validations where your users are able to input information/register for your site.

I hope all goes well with your cleanup.

Typically you can trust that gut feeling that says, if it doesn't sound right, it probably isn't.

My guess is that this firm has a flat rate that they charge and they guarantee x number of links built per month.  I'd shy away from a strategy like that.

I don't feel that you can say all link directories are bad, but I wouldn't spend much, if any, time building links in that manner.  Not sure how much you are paying for their services, but I'd probably take the $200-$400 a month and hire some content creators, a social media manager, or something that has more value.

So is rank, link, and ironically four.

One of my EMD's is outranking my main site for a low competitive keyword without much of a link profile at all.  It's a very simple site only one page, but has very unique content.  It was more of a site to just play with, but for not much work it ranks first for the phrase over about 10 other sites that appear to be optimizing to the keyword.

Build it so that it is easy to navigate for a human. Too many links are confusing for a human. Search engines aren't your target, humans are and if the site works for humans it most likely will be good enough for SEO purposes.

If there are too many, the best way to handle this would be to reduce them.

Seriously though, we need more info.  Can you group them in any way?

My opinion is, why are you building a web page for a search engine?  The search engine is never going to convert into a sale for you.  Focus on making your site for humans.  Humans convert, search engines don't.

However, with all that said, I understand that you have to create a page the search engine will refer humans to you with.  If you are creating pages for search engines to see, create a sitemap so the search engines will find them and crawl them, but create content that is worth my time as a user to read.

I don't know of any case studies, but I remembered reading a couple posts about H1's a couple months back: http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-h1-tags-on-same-page

and another from earlier in the year: http://www.seomoz.org/q/one-h1-tag-dead-long-live-multiple-h1-tags

I'm going to answer this from the perspective of a user searching for a local company.

1.  I HATE when companies do this.  I click in, start reading some content, they even mention the name of my city a couple times.  Then I click "Contact Us" and there is a long distance number, and no local address.  I immediately leave the page because I wanted to deal with a local company.  I feel a frustration for having wasted the last 1-2 minutes of my life.

2.  I have seen very few pages like this have value.  One approach that had value was a company that lists things to do near a city.  The content was different for every city because they listed things within a 10 mile radius.  The key hear was that each page was relevant and unique to my experience.

3.  Whether or not I'd recommend this depends on the company and product.  Floral company - maybe (depends on how they plan to deliver flowers for the customers), cellphone provider - probably (most cell phones are sent in the mail to you anyways even if you deal with a local shop), web design company - no (when people search using local keywords for a web designer, they typical want to meet with the designer).

Be very careful to make sure that when you move your old site to Wordpress that your URL's stay EXACTLY the same and the content does not have a major overhaul.  Also, if images on your website rank well in image search, make sure that the URL structure and location of those images doesn't change.  12 years and ranking well is not something you want to lose.

The question of should you is completely up to you.  Are you going to save money doing this?  Is it enough money to warrant the time spent making the transition?  How often do you need to be changing data?  Do you have the technical know how to make the transition?  Can you hire someone to do it for you?  Will the end result be a better experience for your site's visitors?

These are just some questions to really get you thinking about whether or not it is worth it.

If having them there makes it easier for your visitors to navigate your site, it is not a problem.

Always remember, your visitors are what make you money, NOT the search engines.  Make a good experience for your visitors while paying attention second to search engines and your site will do just fine.

Sorry Eran, I'll try to address this more specifically:

1. As part of their plan they want to submit our site to a large list of link directories (First red flag),
2. and we're not sure if that's a good option (trust your gut).
3. As far as we know, those directories have been ineffective for a long time now (correct)
4. and we're wondering if there is the chance of getting penalized by google (small chance)
5. When I asked the agency their opinion about that, they gave me the following answer -
6. Updated and optimized by us - We are partnered with these sites and control quality of these sites. (second red flag)
7. Unique Class C IP address - Links from unique Referring Class C IP plays a very important role in SEO. (third red flag, trying to game the system is never good.  You'll eventually get caught.)
8. Powered by high PR backlinks (I love buzzwords)
9. Domain Authority (DA) Score of over 20 (Buzzwords are often code for, "as management, I'm trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about and I hope you can't see through me")
10. These directories are well categorized. (So are grocery stores...so what?)

So they actually control those directories themselves, which we think is even worse (it is). I'm wondering what does the Moz community think about link directory submission (sorry, I'm not the community, just a member of it so I can't speak for all of them) - is there still something to be gained there (not really), is there any risk involved (very little), etc (not really sure what you are looking for specifically here, but hope my answers help.)

Depends on where you publish the article as to whether or not it will be treated as quality.

Obviously links1.html?some-value is a different link than links1.html, but having the canonical will help to clear that up somewhat.  If links1.html is the main target, the link would give you more strength pointed directly at it.

I'm not sure if you are referencing SEO in this post, but here's the breakdown from my experience (Several years in the GIS realm)

KMZ when you have a lot of markers in the map making the file size is large and you know the end user will use a Google product to read it.

KML if you are needing to read the file with a program outside of Google due to incompatibility issues with the KMZ format in other programs.

I would leave the posts as indexed.  This is the true residing place of your content.  Categories are there to help your visitors to find the indexed content.  If you don't index your content, your users will have to click multiple times to discover the content when visiting from a search engine.

I would ask the question, "What makes the most sense to the end user?"  The reason I would ask this question is because I have a strong feeling that this is the same question that search engines are asking and overall trying to achieve.

I suggest following Google, Bing, and Yahoo as an example, they have the same title for each page.  If I search "Christmas Decorations" in each of those engines, the title of the page is just "Christmas Decorations" no matter how deep I go. At the top of each page they let me know which page or which set of results I am looking at.

I'd listen to the first line from Francisco, but disagree about Squidoo.  You can get quality traffic from a quality written squidoo article.

Two links from the same website most likely will not hurt you and should help.  Make sure you are getting authorship credit for those two blog posts.  I think it's pretty obvious that you don't want all your links to come from the same website, but 2-3 is okay.  It says to the search engines, "This site is good enough to receive multiple links on different pages within this high domain site."

As far as what penguin looks like: http://www.flickr.com/photos/37509645@N04/3661744750/

Personally I see a large traffic drop followed by a long, slow decrease or a large traffic drop followed by an increase in traffic.

The reason I see this is because it seems that when it comes to SEO, it's kind of like life.  You cannot site idle.  You're either moving forward or backward.  If the site owner doesn't care about the site, then the slow long drop will occur.  If they care about the site, they will do everything possible to get the site back up and ranking well.

From the testing I have done here are my findings specific to your questions:

1. Age - Not much of a factor.  In fact, I have found that product listings seem to like fresh content.

2. Click Rate - Haven't seen much affect over the 3 sites I run.

3. Overall Quality - BINGO. The quality and quantity of data in your feed is the number 1 thing that I have found truly affects.

4.  Bounce Rate - My bounce rate is pretty low when getting people from product feeds for all my sites, so I can't give feedback if a high bounce rate affects.  I will say that product feed listings is one of the best sources of converting traffic for me though.

5.  Diversity of review sources - This is probably the second biggest factor I have seen combined with #6 Google Checkout reviews.  The more good reviews you have the better your product listings seem to do.

6.  Company location in Google Local - Sorry can't give feedback here.  Location doesn't matter in my niches.

Lastly, I just want to add that you want to make sure that you have data in every field possible.  SKU and other product numbers are very big ones as they help you to rank with the big box boys on products that have several sellers.  Provide something to your customers that they can't, and you'll find it helps a lot.

I think the solution to this in your case is to place microdata around your reviews (see schema.org).  The search engines are smart enough to recognize the perceived "keyword stuffing" as reviews when you markup your code content.  Not only will it help with avoiding a keyword stuffing penalty, your rankings may begin to show up with enhanced listings in the SERPs increasing CTR.

I just read a discussion that was originally posted by Steve Ollington on May 22, 2011 where he states that many people are asking the wrong types of questions on this forum.  He said that he wonders if he will see a shift from people asking questions on "how to rank" to questions dealing with "how to work out the best KPIs" (Key Performance Indicators - yes I had to google it).

I was once told we learn more by asking questions about a topic than by just listening.  I've also been told that sometimes the right question to ask is, "What questions should I be asking?"  So here is my question, what types of questions should I be asking to be better at SEO?  Perhaps these are some of them:

1. Is it possible to be good at SEO when it is not a full-time job? It is very tempting to look for easy answers when you only have limited time.
2. What are considered KPI's?  Are they different for every industry?
3. How do you know what is junk information vs what is truly good SEO advice?  Is it just simply trial and error?  It seems to me that if people find truly good SEO information, they aren't going to be sharing it so easily.  It's the whole, "You get what you pay for".

Maybe some of you can tell me more of the questions I should be asking.

First thing to do is truly determine if you really need to remove those links, and second is to determine what your brand is.  Start by reading this post by Marie Haynes earlier this week: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too

If NLP California is your brand and what people call you, most likely there is no problem having links to your site with anchor text NLP California.

I'm looking for some second opinions on this one.  In talking with another SEO, he is of the opinion that if my company name is two words like Crazy Man, I should write some news release that have my brand combined as Crazyman because it is a variant of the brand name.  He claims that Google does not look at my brand as Crazy Man, but as one word and in Google's mind Crazyman as one word is my brand.

What do you all think?

It is important you keep in mind the terms relevancy verses optimized.  A page can be relevant to a topic (main keyword) without being optimized for that keyword.  When this is the case, you can focus on a long-tail keyword for a sub-page and have relevancy for the main keyword.   You would then want to link to the main page with the main keyword from the sub-page.

In this case I would say that what you learned in your class is true, keep AT LEAST 50% of the pages RELEVANT to the main keyword, but not optimized to the main keyword.

The end grading factor though is, what works for your site?  A lot of SEO is trial and error based upon bsaic principles.  Sometimes you just have to try what your gut tells you to do and watch and see if that works, if not try the next idea.

#3 is the most obvious choice to implement.

All joking aside, I use to run a web design business and the majority of links I had were footer, site wide links.  I still have my site up even though I do very little anymore and haven't focused on any SEO for the site in a long, long time.  After the Penguin/Panda hype, I jumped from page 2 to top 3 consistently for keywords I was once targeting.

I don't know if it was just that my competitors had spammy link profiles or what, but for me in this case site wide footer links seemed to be all I needed.  Take it for what you will.

Do you have a Pro Plus or higher account?  You can only rebrand the top of reports with your own logo if you have a PRO Plus or higher membership.

Your suggestion of 301's on the old to the new is the best if it's doable.

The first thing to remember is that Google will treat the subdomain as a completely different website.  So if you want Google to view your subdomain as it's own site, yes it will bring benefit.  If you are looking for your website to have relevance to the keyword on the domain.com site, then create some content that is relevant to the keyword and put it in a page on the domain - domain.com/page.

What exactly are you trying to do with your video?  Are you trying to get people to understand a product?  Are you trying to drive traffic to your website?  If yes to either of these, uploading to YouTube is not going to hurt you.  Embedding the link from YouTube on your homepage most likely will not hurt you.  It may not help in the sense of having unique content, but it will help keep people on the home page longer.

Changing the video every 1-2 months can help if you have a lot of repeat visitors.  Repeat visitors like fresh new content.

In case you aren't sure what EMD means - Exact Match Domain.

I've seen a few other real estate type sites take a hit similar to what you are describing.  I attribute it to the amount of duplicate content across several real estate sites.  I'd focus on creating unique content/promotions on YOUR site aside from the listings.

I would say you are on the right track, especially keeping all your citations in mind.

I do wonder why you are wanting to change your address from reading St. to Street spelled out?  The US post office standards say to keep it abbreviated.

Ask yourself, "If I was on this page wanting to use it, what would make the most sense to me as a user?"  If the answer to that question is, "Yes, it would make sense to put OH Job in the link," then put it in there.  If the answer is no, do not put it in there.  You want your website to service the needs of your users, not the search engines.

Basically it goes like this, if the keywords you are wanting to rank a certain page for, don't naturally fit within that page, you shouldn't be trying to rank for those keywords.  Otherwise you are "spamming" the web.  Your users will land on the page, find that it doesn't fulfill their needs, and leave if the keywords don't fit there.

If the keywords do fit on the page, you shouldn't have much trouble ranking for a low comp phrase.

You won't see ALL of the link juice transferred from the other pages to this new one.  301 redirects are not as strong as an actual link to the page.

I hope I understand what you are asking and that you are looking to do this yourself at a low-cost, not looking for a company to do it for you.  If I am understanding you correctly, I'd start with Google Analytics and their Expirements to improve goal conversions.

It's found under the "Content" tab on the left of your analytics profile.

I keep hearing this term "over optimization" and people assuming they have received an over optimization penalty.  I also hear people say, "You need to optimize every page on your site."

So at what point does a site become "over optimized?"  Are there any good reads around here that explain this better?

I'm a little confused as to what you are afraid of losing?  From your description it sounds like you are saying you are going to make the pages that are receiving organic traffic more easily accessible from your main navigation?

However, I'm also thinking that you are saying you are considering replacing the landing pages with sub-content pages that can be drilled down in to?

Please help me understand a little more clearly.

I personally would go with #1.  Definitely not #4, you never want special characters in the URL.  The reason I say number 1 is because it separates the 1 from the 2 in your 1/2.  #2 could be confused for a 12ct diamond earring, WOW.  #3 I typically avoid underscores in all URLs.

To sum up my choice is #1.  Looks cleanest and when you optimize your page with the 1/2 ct wording, Google is smart enough to see that.  Overall, it won't probably make a huge difference in the end.

You are correct with your statement about not wanting to duplicate the article.  The question you should be asking yourself is not "What's in it for me?", but "What's in it for my user?"  If it makes sense to put your blog out on blogger for your customer base then do it.  If it doesn't, don't.

The question I have for you is are you hosting your wordpress blog within your site or is it hosted our on WP?  If it's hosted out on WP, I recommend that you bring it within your current site (i.e. www.currentsite.com/blog).  This way your customers don't leave your domain to read your blog posts.

It is always a good thing to ask direct questions about what you are trying to learn.  Otherwise, you will get very generic answers like, "Search Google" or "continue to read the forums here."

Jeremy brings up a good point.  Perhaps you changed title tags on your site through a sitewide SEO tool, but Google had indexed them before you made changes.  If that's the case, you may just need to wait for Google to crawl your site again and update the title tags.

If you have webmaster tools, you might check to see the last date Google crawled the site.

I wouldn't worry too much about DMOZ.  I have seen where one of my sites was de-listed and another of my sites was listed and the de-listed site lost no rankings and the listed site gained no rankings.  These sites were competing for the same keyword.

In that case I'd just make a generic "404 Oops Page" and not worry about 301's on the low quality pages.  Spend your time on more worthwhile efforts creating great content.