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Google and the other search engines have pretty good systems in place to detect and protect against clickfraud.  They have billions of dollars invested into the reliability of their ad programs.  I wouldn't be overly concerned but you should definitely use analytics tools to monitor your data.  If you suspect clickfraud, definitely let the correct representatives know and they will investigate.. Google in particular has been very good at making reps more available to endusers even with lower adspend.

Click Fraud is much less of an issue today than it was a decade ago.  These companies have too much too lose if the reliability of the ad system were compromised.  They need to serve relevant ads to relevant searchers otherwise advertisers wont pay and the system would break.

Agree with EGOL.  if you can create some amazing linkbait content - think viral, creative, or awesome infographic you could in theory leverage this to a short burts of traffic, inbound links etc.  depending on the site and content you could leverage on digg, reddit, stumpleupon, etc. the problem with these social sites is that you typically have to be an active member to start leveraging links and information for real value.

are you talking about versions of sites to see how old that particular website is or the domain?

obviously whois information is great for domains

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

there is also a way to see old versions of websites here:

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

AUguides.com would probably be the best one of of the available you've listed.  i'd avoid anything with two letters together a la venueexplorer.com  that being said the trends right now are for short unique bit.ly bizzy.com etc.  you might go back to the drawing board but I dont see anything wrong with AUguides.com  if you brand it correctly you could have something special .

I agree with chris.. could provide specific examples.. It would help to find the cause of the problem.  Also, are you keeping the old pages and new pages accessible or have you removed the old pages?

Seeing as youtube is a google property they can do what they want  additionally, google has been known to change title tags in their SERPs from time to time and lately they've been doing it more.  here is some more information directly from google -

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=679eb9f272a5a3bf&hl=en

I would say any traffic is good traffic as long as it is the correct traffic.  If someone is searching for something irrelevant and finding your website, then you should probably add a nofollow tag to tell the search engines not to look at the landing pages.  If it is relevant I dont see why you would want to remove it.  You might have a link to the specific landing pages under a "specials" section or whatever your value prop is that you're using on the landing pages.

I wouldn't say that seomoz has a literal direct effect on helping your pagerank.  It does however provide valuable tools to analyze what you're doing right and wrong in terms of SEO strategies, link building etc.   SEOmoz also has this forum and public and private questions to help point you in the right direction for your optimization.  Additionally, you get a followed linkback after you have 200 MozPoints, but that shouldnt be the only reason to use the website.  Your best bet would be to start with the research tools and find out what you're doing and then ask questions from there.  You'll see increased results in no time.

The company I work for did a complete text and layout overhaul in October of last year and it was a brutal undertaking.  We were transitioning from ASP.net to PHP and implementing a new CMS.  This meant we had to do the entire site at once.  There were a few hiccups, but we found the complete overhaul to be fairly seamless.. some things to keep in mind are making sure the 301 URLs are working correctly, launch the website during low traffic times (weekend)  to work out any unforeseen kinks, and request feedback from your visitors to see what they like / dislike for future changes.

First,

I want to say thank you to the support i've been getting from everyone in this community over the last few months.  Im glad to be a part of something that isnt full of flammers and haters... and happy late 4th of july...

I implemented canonical tags on a clients website (job board with tons of job postings) and the pagerank has almost immediately rebounded from 2.3 - 4.6.  it was a little higher pre-panda, but im happy with the rebound.

has anyone had experience on how long it usually takes for the keyword rankings to rebound after changes are made?

google recached the site this morning, but im still waiting to see traffic bumps.

Thanks!

I agree with Steven on everything he said. Google has been putting a lot of emphasis on making sure SEO's are utilizing GWT as a resource for usability and correct data.  I'd use that as your primary source.

good point on the PO Box.  UPS store offers address with suite numbers as opposed to PO boxes, but as I said it isn't necessarily "Best practices"

Landing pages are always effective - especially for localized geo marketing.  If you want to do a physical address, you could always do a PO box or a UPS store box that will provide an "Address" location.  I am not sure if that is necessarily "ethical" but if you are offering the products in those cities, I don't think you'll encounter too much grief.  I wouldnt add the PO box or UPS Store address to google places, but you could create a landing page that would have a little more content on it.

No fluctuations on my end at all on any of the sites i work with.

Has anyone had issues with the creative control google is maintaining with the Plus 1 button.  I have a client who is very strict on their design structure and wants to make the google button appear in style with their theme.  Has anyone encountered this or knows a moderately easy solution besides hacking away?

THanks!

What type of tracking.  Views after downloads, or just downloads / views on the website?

PRweb is a decent tool, the problem is that it aggregates the news, but you dont get any real value from the Press Releases on the major outlets.  Do an actual search on the sites you are submitted to from PRweb and you wont find your releases in the results.   This is a big complaing about PRweb.  I recommend checking out businesswire.com for press releases. It is more expensive but offers real SEO benefits.  I used PRweb for a year and a half here at my company and recently switched and saw immediate dividends.

I worked for about 3 years in the mid 2000's on an ecommerce site with great SEO strengths.  Enough can't be said about choosing the right ecommerce platform.  There are quite a few to choose from, and choosing the wrong platform can create an uphill battle for SEO from the start.  The platform we used was X-cart.. it was amazing and had a lot of features and add-ons that made SEO a breeze... the draw back is that it's very expensive.  Magento IMO is a fantastic alternative to X-cart and fixes a lot of legacy issues that have crept up over time.  If I were you, I would avoid zencart and oscommerce, but once again that is just my opinion.

As for straight up SEO tips

• organize URLs to display categories and products correctly.
• enable caching to speed up website load times
• dont forget the alt tags
• avoid dupe content issues (best advice would be to never copy and paste descriptions on anything, always rewrite)
• enable reviews
• send product feeds to amazon, google, etc.

a few other tips on usability

• imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.  Fortune 500 companies have amazing budgets to figure out how to sell products,  check out their pages for inspiration.
• look at popular ecommerce sites online, see what they do right.  amazon, tigerdirect, victorias secret, etc. You'll find that simple is often the best way
• make the buying decision easy.  depending on your product, make the price and purchase button green.  that may be my best tip for you.. we saw about 15% higher conversions just by changing those two things.
• respond and interact with your customers ASAP a la woot.com

hope this helps.

I actually have similar questions about this.  The company I work for hosts a blog that is also syndicated across 4 to 5 other websites.  The other sites have bigger reach on the web and our blog isn't getting much direct traffic out of this.  I have a feeling adding the author tags to our content will eventually pay off to show that the content is being originated on our site and then syndicated.  I am interested / excited to see other ways this will be used.  I think its a great fix for the scraping issue and will hopefully prevent needing panda updates X.X

I just wanted to chime in on the meta tag discussion.  For the most part, I incorporate some meta keywords in my landing pages as well - also for organization and interpretation as to what the page details.  Google (matt cutts) has specifically stated they don't follow meta tags in ranking - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Additionally,  your competitors will get a great idea of the keywords you're targeting if you include that information in your meta data.  While it isn't a "Secret" what you're trying to accomplish.. you may inadvertently give them part of your recipe - especially for longtail keywords

I just wanted to chime in on the meta tag discussion.  For the most part, I incorporate some meta keywords in my landing pages as well - also for organization and interpretation as to what the page details.  Google (matt cutts) has specifically stated they don't follow meta tags in ranking - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Additionally,  your competitors will get a great idea of the keywords you're targeting if you include that information in your meta data.  While it isn't a "Secret" what you're trying to accomplish.. you may inadvertently give them part of your recipe - especially for longtail keywords

Thanks for the help guys! I made the recommendation on the 301 / job closed.  we'll see how it plays out.

a buddy of mine is running a niche job board and is having issues with expiring URLs. we ruled it out cuz a 301 is meant to be used when the content has moved to another page, or the page was replaced. We were thinking that we'd be just stacking duplicate content on old urls that would never be 'replaced'. Rather they have been removed and will never come back. So 410 is appropriate but maybe we overlooked something.  any ideas?