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It would be very unlikely that using "and" instead of "&" throughout your site would confer any advantage and it might confuse your customers, if that's not the way they are used to seeing your name. So stick with the & you use in your branding.

As always when these types of questions come up and you are not sure of the answer, go with whatever is the best user experience and you are likely to be rewarded. (Also, take a look and some big sites like Lord&Taylor and see what they do—they don't give up their branding just because there is "and" in their URL.)

How is the name written in other types of official correspondence—letterhead, signage, etc? The look of the name should be standardized across all sources, but that's a bigger issue than just SEO.

In terms of search, using "and" or "&" in searches will likely give you different (but very similar) results—try searching your company name with each one and see what Google already thinks of the two variants.

Using symbols like "&" can be more eye catching than just letters so that can be a benefit on a crowded search results page, depending on what else is there.

The first question you need to ask is why does your company have 15 websites selling the same things? Would having one site rank and the others just be canonical (or eliminated) be an acceptable solution? If the sites have different audiences you can try gearing the descriptions, keywords, etc. to the particular audience of the site you are working on but doing that 15 times in ways that would be unique enough to each site to allow them all to rank well on the same search isn't possible. If you ask about the business reason for the 15 sites, you may be able to work with the company on a realistic path to their desired outcome.

You don't seem to mention which site you want people to look at?

You should write your description in a way that will make people want to click on your link when they see your description in the search results.

But be aware that Google won't necessarily pick your description to show—it shows what it thinks best matches what the searcher is looking for. If your description is heavy on keywords that are not on the page and does not contain words that reflect the content of the page, it probably won't get shown.

Hi Thomas,
As you can see in the answers in this thread, DA can fluctuate with updates and the latest update was April 26. Do you track competitors' sites? That might tell you whether they saw similar changes. One inbound link from a low DA site won't do this. Unless there are other things going on that you didn't mention, this isn't worth worrying about.

I did just this type of thing a little over a year ago and organic traffic is up over 300% now. We made the change mainly to improve the structure of the website(s), with more logical organization and better internal linking. We did do the move all at once (thousands of pages) but it took a lot of behind-the scenes planning to be ready for that.

First came the decisions about what sections and categories made sense for our site. (Using the URL structure to guide users around the site makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for and interlinking between related posts as appropriate is also good—and this helps a lot with search engines.)

Then came the organization of posts into their new categories. To make things easier, we kept the individual path names the same (so www.siteA.com/old-category/old-post-string became www.siteC.com/new category/old-post-string) and uploaded them into their new categories when the time came.

We also used this time to do a limited content review (posts with the most traffic) and we updated a lot of these. We made the choice to keep most of our old posts, even though in our market they can get outdated quickly, to conserve any links we may have acquired. (The main site that we were directing to the new site was pretty old and had picked up a lot of links over time.)

We could have done a more complete content review before the changeover, but in part we wanted to see how these posts did under the new structure—we did get renewed life out of some of them, and we further updated and optimized those.

In conjunction with the export of the old sites to the new one, we made sure to 301 redirect all of the old posts to their counterparts on the new site. For the posts we chose not to bring over, we 301 redirected them to a related post in the same category.

We still occasionally come across things that need to be fixed—old posts that need redirecting/updating or 404 errors that need to be tracked down (one big issue we found was a lot of old pages had old links with hard paths to the old website root domains, causing a bunch of nasty internal not found errors—not good!) but overall we are happy with the change. (Up 308%!)

What we do is add explanatory content to the tag pages that are for key concepts for our website and link to them from a "glossary" page—people who are new to some of these terms can go there for definitions. We also link to the relevant glossary page in posts where the term comes up, helping to create good internal linking.

Other tag pages can be noindexed or just ignored—the Moz report is just for your reference.

Matt Cutts says not to use nofollow on internal links. He says that causes pagerank to evaporate and that Google has made changes so that pagerank sculpting doesn't really work. He is pretty definite about this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SAPUx4Beh8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

Rand did a good Whiteboard Friday about this earlier this year.

An excerpt from the talk:

So let's say you've got blog.yoursite.com or you've got www.yoursite.com/blog. Now engines may indeed consider content that's on this separate subdomain to be the same as the content that's on here, and so all of the links, all of the user and usage data signals, all of the ranking signals as an entirety that point here may benefit this site as well as benefiting this subdomain. The keyword there is "may."

Another:

Bottom line is it's really dangerous to put content on a subdomain still. I believe John and I believe Matt when they say that Google has made strides in this direction. The problem is they're not good enough or perfect enough to rely on that factor, and so I'd really urge everyone to keep your content on one single sub and root domain, preferably in subfolders. That's how you're going to maximize your potential SEO benefit. This is one of those technical SEO things that just hasn't changed for many years now.

Noodp= No Open Directory Project
Noydir= No Yahoo Directory

These are used if your website is listed in one of these directories with information you do not want used in the results pages. This might be the case if you have old, outdated listings that no longer apply. They tell robots not to use information from these sources, and they are optional.

A good idea is to keep track of a couple of your competitors' domain rankings, so you can see how you are doing relative to them.

Another quote from the link that keszi provided:
"It's best to use Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) as comparative metrics when doing research in the search results and determining which sites/pages may have more powerful/important link profiles than others."

So if you see that your site went down and your competitors' went down as well, you'll know not to be too concerned.

You cannot change it. Google does not allow Moz and other sites to use their data this way, so that is why Moz uses Bing. To get Google data, you need to sign up for Google Adwords and use their tool. (You do not have to be actively using Adwords, just signed up.)

The best way to fix this is with a rel=canonical URL. Tag each page with the lower-case version. (I had this same problem.)

Here is a nice article on the subject: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-recommends-using-xml-sitemaps-rssatom-feeds-optimal-crawling/118364/

"Google explains the differences between the formats by saying that XML sitemaps describe a whole set of URLs within a site, while RSS/Atom feeds only describe the most recent changes. As a result of XML sitemaps containing more information, they are typically larger than RSS/Atom feeds. XML sitemaps are also downloaded less frequently.

As a website owner, which format should you use if you want your website to be crawled to the best of Google’s ability. Google recommends using both, explaining how the formats compliment each other."

In theory, a nofollow link should not transfer authority. However, I recently read an article by Christopher Cemper of LinkResearchTools that kind of argues otherwise. (He mainly talks about nofollow links passing negative signals.) I don't think it is possible to assign a number to this—it's one of those things Google likes to keep to itself.

In any case, relevant links from high-quality sites are a good thing, whether they are nofollow or not.

SEMRush will do this. In their interface under Organic Research is Positions, which shows which keywords you rank in the top 20 for organically. Unfortunately it is a paid tool, but for free you can see how many keywords you rank for and what the first ten are.

Here is a good Moz article on the subject: http://moz.com/learn/seo/anchor-text . It includes examples.

"Key Points:

• If many links point to a page with the right keywords in their anchor text, that page has a very good chance of ranking well. Real examples of this include the search engine result pages for the queries, "click here" and "leave." Many of the Google results for these queries rank solely due to the anchor text of inbound links.
• People have a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain name or the title of the page. This is an advantage to SEOs who include keywords they want to rank for in these two elements.
• Too many inbound links to a page with the exact same keyword-rich anchor text may cause Google to scrutinize that site’s link profile more closely; using manipulative methods to acquire keyword–rich anchor text is not recommended."

[The emphasis is mine.]

And for outbound links: http://moz.com/learn/seo/external-link

"Optimal Format

Use descriptive keywords in anchor text that reflect the same topic or keywords the target page is trying to target. It's not necessary to use the same keyword text every time—in fact, doing so can trigger spam detectors. Instead, strive for a variety of anchor text that enhances context and usability for your users—and for search engines, as well."