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I would suggest to stay away from any host that uses the word "Unlimited". There's nothing called Unlimited.

Cheap Hosting Plans with Unlimited Space, Unlimited Bandwidth are crap. Once your website starts getting popular, it will use CPU time and when that happens, they will shut down the accounts.

I am a fan of ASO - ASmallOrange.com

The best bet is to have an alternate strategy in place to build content and authoritative links. There's always that little bit of risk of drop in rankings in scenarios like these, which is going to happen one day anyway. The question is what to do till then.

I would look at starting to add more content, strengthen the pages as well as working on the overall domain authority with brand links and citations etc.

Do you have one version of the pages that you'd prefer for your "Natural Search" / SEO users/visitors to see ? Let's say you have the same page, v1 and v2. And you want v1 to be seen by users coming from Google. In v2, add a canonical tag to pointing to v1. This way Google will crawl both sets of pages but only show v1 in the SERPS. Does that work ?

That's good to know. It sounds like that's probably the best way. I also use Screaming Frog (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) to try and crawl sites and with dedicated 2Gigs of ram, it's able to crawl around 50k pages. If your site is structured in sub-folders, you might be able to break it into parts and then crawl. But then if not, the SEOMOZ Enterprise looks like the way to go.

I agree with all the great responses here. Just make sure when you do your keyword research on the Google Keyword Tool or Elsewhere, Choose Exact Match to get a good read on the data.

Keyword	Competition	Local Monthly Searches
	<a class="sOL">[san antonio wedding photographers]</a>	High	480
	<a class="sOL">[san antonio wedding photographer]</a>	High	320

Another Vote and Thumbs-up for Textbroker.. I think they also recently launched a service where in you can ensure a local/UK based writers. Like with TextBroker US, it's only US based writers.

I agree one hundred percent with Irving and Joseph. I would also ask you how your site is ranking and how old is the site and these URLs. You loose the age aspect of the URLs when you change them. You do gain the advantage and that's what you have to measure, the risk vs reward. Also, do you have inbound links / deep links to these pages ? And I am pretty sure you have the 301s in mind, I thought I'll mention, just in case.

I hope this helps.

Do you have weekly/monthly reports automatically generated ? If yes, you could download them from your email if you still have them. If not, you could also click on any particular keyword in your campaign and see historical rankings data for that keyword. I hope that helps.

I have been attending Pubcon for almost a decade now. I have missed only 1 or 2 in the last 9 years.

This year, I was considering to go to Mozcon and SMX Advanced, but the dates did not work out for me. Next year I am not missing either of these conferences.

For this year, if I was to attend one of the following, which one do folks recommend (I would love to know the 1st hand experiences, comparisons):

http://www.pubcon.com/
http://www.blueglass.com/conferences/x/
http://sesconference.com/chicago/
http://searchmarketingexpo.com/east/
http://na.ad-tech.com/ny/

I agree with Mat. I think it's just depends how much of an effort it is. Think of it like this, what if these links were not created by you...but a competition trying to beat you. Could you do anything then ? Not much. So if you think from that context, time and resources (and money) is better spent on building better content and links vs trying to remove links.

I have seen that happen sometimes. There could be multiple reasons. Here are the questions I would suggest you look into to get a better read on the reasoning behind it:

1. Is there any other content on the 2 websites that is independent and not duplicated between the 2 sites ?
2. Are the 2 sites interlinking to each other ? (I am guessing not.)
3. Are the 2 sites on the same IP ? (I am guessing not.)
4. Are both the domains/sites pretty established, authority, with tons of unique backlinks from industry sites ?

I am sure answers to the above questions would lead you to a better read on the original question. If not, let me know what the answers are and if you'd like to share the URLs, I would love to look at them.

When you get blogroll links (from a blog), you are getting a link from every page of that blog and the value of those links have reduced a lot over the years. This was a different story 6-7 years ago. Also, a blog might be talking about various topics and therefore multiple pages, multiple categories, and your link will not always be relevant.

In case of a blog post / guest post link, it's totally on-topic. I would also strong suggest to be very careful and not over-do a particular kind of link building. Diversify your link profile. Also, do not do/over-do anchor text links. Mix and match. Think like a natural link profile, it's usually very difficult to control and get anchor text links, but do your best and not always do SEO friendly links. All links are good and help build domain authority.

So build authority...as in brand building. Not SEO....link building.

I think it's because you do not have enough domain strength, domain authority / backlinks etc. I see that the site / domain was registered in March. I would continue to work on content as well as some links/citations and don't do everything / every link with your keyword "EMV Cards". Do variants.

Ron 1. Is it a considerably high number of links ? 2. Are these sites related ? 3. Are they all similar kinds of links ? If not, how can they control them so easily ? If there are any visible patterns of artificial links and if they are not related, you could essentially keep a cleaner profile by removing the links completely. Did you also remove a un-natural links warning ? If yes, then definitely consider removing the links. If not, and the links are good quality, you could maybe tweak them to brand, brand + anchor and so on...just not too many exact match anchor text links. Just do a complete audit of your link profile and act accordingly. I hope this helps.

I second that opinion about Everett's webinar Nathan. It was awesome. Thumbs Up to you Everett.

I raised the same issue with help@seomoz.org a few days ago and they did mention it was a glitch that they knew about. I started one of my crawls again and that still did not do it, although a random one in between did get completed. I hope this helps.

Marty, thanks for mentioning Screaming Frog. I actually love it. I usually have it running pretty much every day, doing something or the other. It however does not give an easy way to identify the outgoing links for the website I am crawling. Is there a specific setting I am unaware of ?

You can also consider using Xenu's Link Sleuth, which can then crawl a website and provide you a list of any/all external links. This tool will essentially provide a complete list of outbound links from a website, not just from one page.

Honestly, I would not do either one, unless my business can take the risk. If it can, then a 301 is better here, but then with a substantial risk. Not recommended.

Depending upon the authority and backlinks to your domain, I would guess it would take anywhere between 2 weeks to 2 months for those pages to go away.

I would not worry about it. You have done your part...relax and concentrate on other areas of improvement/work and give it some time and you should be all set

Technically, yes you could do it. However, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. In most cases, you will see that the domain expired, went to redemption, got deleted and then nobody else has bought it...yet. In these cases, usually the power of the domain is lost to a great extent, although not 100%. It's tricky.

2. Consider #1, since all the value is not lost, you could do this, but then are you planning to do this for 1-2 domains or 100-200 domains ? Where do you draw the line. Because technically, the question then becomes of 301'ing that old/expired/reregistered domain to your website. If you do it 1-2 times, it might be okay, but then if this becomes your primary link building technique or a big (un-natural) percentage of your backlinks, it will be nothing but trouble. I hope this helps.

It's important that you don't have a noindex or nofollow in your homepage. That's like blocking your site.

Be default, it's allowed / open. No need to allow it...you can do it, but it's not required in any way. However, as I said first, make sure you are not blocking the bots from indexing you. As soon as the block goes away, you are automatically allowing the bots to crawl and index you.

You can try and sending the whois emails on each of those domains a polite or a C&D kind of a letter/email and see if they respond. If you have 500 such links, maybe 50 will get down and then respond to the request with the results that you tried and some of them were taken down, the rest they are not responding and there's nothing you can do about it.

It looks like your homepage is not cached in Google. A lot of the category pages I checked were not cached as well. However your article/post pages are cached. Did you install any new wordpress plugin lately that might have messed up ? It does not look like related to your server being down. Do you see any errors/warning in the Webmaster Console ? I would suggest you install a XML sitemap Plugin, Generate the Sitemap and submit it via the Webmaster Console unless you are already doing so.

If the 301's are in place, I would not worry. The bigger question is, why did you change them in the 1st place ? Was there strong reasoning to change them ? If yes, is that reasoning still valid ?

Sometimes not being consistent helps. Just my 2c. I would look at if there were other reasons. Are your off-page factors pretty well competitive. Did you get a unnatural links warning ? If after all those answers, you still think it's the page titles, change them on a handful of pages and see if you see any movement at all in the SERPS before investing a lot of time, effort and resources in this.

That is not through the campaign, it's through the Crawl Test Tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Yes, those links will still pass most of the juice. Matt Cutts has said in one of his videos that doing a 301 redirect passes almost all of the link juice, a very tiny bit is lost, which is not a concern. No need to worry

I would just canonical it to the right URL and for every other URL that might be generated in multiple ways. You should definitely not do a robots.txt block.

It should be a noindex. You don't want them to appear, right ? In that case, it's best to do a noindex. However, since you have already done a robots.txt disallow, the bots won't be able to read the pages any more (most of the bots). So your solution will work, it's more like a brute force method, but will work.

The right way is to do a noindex.

With all the information you have provided, it's always worth a shot to file a reconsideration with Google, but then the most you'd expect back is an automated reply within 1-4 weeks. After that, when your website starts showing up, if it starts showing up (which is further dependent on whether there was any manual penalty). If it was just algorithmic loss of rankings, then the reconsideration won't do anything. If I were you, and I have tried all of the above options, then obviously the last resort is a new domain, but then I don't think I would do a 301 from the old penalized domain to the new domain.

Yes, I have seen sites with no prior impact getting impacted as well as old-sites that were impacted previously getting an almost immediate traffic and rankings shift. Happens all the time, and the impact whether positive or negative grows as the update rolls out worldwide.

You might also want to try the Crawl Test tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test
This tool crawls up-to 3000 pages for any website and I think for PRO you are allowed 2 crawls every day.

P.S. At the time of writing this reply, I see my crawls from yesterday and day before are still pending, so there might be something going on with the Roger bot.

It's your index file, I would suggest you leave it as is. Nothing to worry. You are good.

It's just your sitemap index file which is showing pending. All it needs to do is addup the values of your other sitemaps (which are referenced in the index file) and show the total stats next to it.

Other then that, you are good. No need to worry.

Is it an internal blog ? What I mean to ask is if the blog is something like blog.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog or is it yourblog.com linking to yourdomain.com ? Is it hosted on the same IP as your main website ? What you are blogging, is it unique, quality/fresh content ? If yes, I wouldn't worry too much about anchor text links as long as you are not pushing for the same keyword link from each and every post.

So if article1 is talking about Red widgets and linking to the Red widgets page and then article2 is talking about Blue Widgets and linking to the Blue Widgets, it's fine.

Just make sure you have other natural links coming to your website/blog from other places as well...specially the kinds that build themselves (people loving your content and linking to you).

I hope this helps.

How long has it been pending ? Can you post a screenshot of what exactly it says / looks ?

Let me try and give it a shot...it might be my 1st SEOMoz article. Good idea...Cheers Jesse.

Claudio, I would recommend doing a separate images only sitemap in the right format. See these links for more details:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-images-to-your-sitemaps.html

Akhil, at any given point, there's only 1 of those 3 URLs of the images that would appear on the site. I would therefore only choose 1, the one that is primary / most important to you.

Jesse, yes, I would recommend doing this for any site with a considerable number of images. If you want your images to be found, it won't hurt to do an image sitemap. Definitely recommended. Google webmaster console then gives you a good read on how many of the images you submitted are already indexed as well as a count of the pages those images are on, that are indexed.

I know it's easier said then done, but is there something you can do to make it interesting ? Think some sort of interesting infographics or something that could make it interesting enough to be shared. That reminds me of another seomoz user, who's active here and also written about it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-small-success-story-inspired-by-seomoz-and-its-contributors

I agree with Ade. Just test it on a small scale and see what the results look like. I would suggest you try a couple different options.

1. Keywords Currently in Positions 2-5

2. Keywords Currently in Positions 6-10

3. Keywords Currently on Page 2

Find 5 in each category, make the changes and watch and see where the most impact was and make sure you are not directly impacting the test with any other items of influence (as much as you can control) to get an accurate read on the test.

Do you have an Image Sitemap created and submitted in your webmaster console ? If not, I would suggest you do that. Other then that, if I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about this being an issue at the moment. Google is smart enough to understand this as a CDN situation. As I said above, doing an Images XML sitemap should be all you need to do in this regard. I hope this helps.

That's right Keri and in that case my 2nd recommendation of an iframe might work better. What do you think ?

I would strongly suggest Yoast (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/)

It is clearly marketing copy that is there to help the consumer. It's like the logo, navigation and other aspects of the page which are duplicate on every page. So it should not matter. What concerns me in this situation is the location. One thing that comes to mind as a possible solution is: 1. Can you serve this as an image instead of text ? 2. Or can you serve it in an iframe ? Using one of these techniques, you would be able to get rid of any of the SEO impacts of this being duplicate on every product page. I hope this helps.

Yes, I would do so right away. DA and relatedness of a site is much more important then pagerank. You "could" use PR as a top level measure, but I would not suggest using PR as the only measure. You are definitely looking at the right information and I would change the strategy right away.

I hope this helps.

I agree with Irving completely. I would also like to add:

1. Do your frequently link out the way you did for this website ? Do you link out to other websites that are useful to your website visitors ?

2. Similarly, the website that is linking to you with those 2 links, does every post on their website/blog have 1-2 outgoing links ? If not, then you are good.

Does that make sense ?