I disagree, the new page is the most important one so I would do everything I can that one gets indexed as fast as possible including making sure the sitemap with the new page gets to Google. Only 1 page on a Web site won't get you in trouble probably for duplicate content.

Are you able to share the website that we're talking about?

Always create links in your press release itself, that was way back one of the most valuable lessons I learned. Second is that usually you could also add some links in the boilerplate with information on the spokes person/ company or CEO.

In the end it wouldn't matter that much but I would also prefer using dashes as well.

Stupid question probably, but you're looking in the right place in the interface?

Also seen a couple of times that it wasn't updating for a couple of hours and only recording a subset of data from certain regions.

What you could do is set up a filter in your functions.php file to change the URL based on the homepage but that's a bit too much maybe ;-). Next to that I think it's due to the fact that some web servers set up the trailing slash by default.

Affiliate marketing should always be a yes if done properly. I don't have any experience with Admedia but as long as you're on top of your affiliate marketing and working closely with the publishers you both will be happy in the end.

Hi Ted, to be honest we do this and I don't see any big issues why we wouldn't do it. The placeholder image will probably get some more credits than usual. But the images we lazy load are loaded via JS and as Google says it can understand JS they should be able to get how we use it (too much assumptions I know, but I have more things to worry about ;-)).

Hi Marcus, Your proposed idea is good: 404 in case there are no houses for sales and a 200 if there are.