We are seeing the same on the Australian Google and we are a start up (3 months old) by we are still climbing in rank, so it has no adverse effect on us.

That was a good catch Alan and Ryan, I just looked at the Alt and Title and did not even notice the example used them in an anchor. Doh! I would only ever use them in images. Since I develop on the Microsoft platfrom using it anywhere other than img flags a syntax error.

Quite the opposite, these are very desirable if used for their intended purpose.

The Alt tag is for accessability handling, so it helps people with visual disabilities to understand the content of a picture.

The Title tag is used to provide tooltip information to the user when they hover over the image.

Both these enhance the user experience as thus are looked on favourably by Google.

BUT, it's an important but - seo's in the past would stuff these tags with useless spammy content. e.g. You have a automotive business so the alt tag:

'car gmh fast cars sports cars red cars porsche' that is bad.

'Our new sporty red porsche makes an easy ride through the windy roads of Denmark' - good

The title tag could say 'Porsche 911 2005 touring the roads of Denmark'

It's all about adding value to the site for the user not manipulating the search engines. So, use alt tag to describe the item in detail and the title to provide extra details. Do not have the same text in both as they have different purposes.

Hope that sheads enough light on the subject.

If you are doing this at the the DNS level (i.e. CNAME) you actually want an A Record to point all the domain names to the one IP Address. You would then need to do a ReWrite to handle the 301 redirects. You would also need to ensure you verify all the domains in Google Webmaster Tools and set the prefered domain to www.mainsite.com (note you we need to use settings -> prefered domain in site configuration). I would also add a canonical meta tag to the head of each page.

Since you have the .au is you site Australia wide or international. If it is Australia wide you should have the .com.au as the main web address.

From a developer's point of view: If you do not already have the new system in place, I would suggest a MVC move rather than aspx on the dotnet platform and put a cfm handler in place to map the pages at the controller level. Goggle will not know know there has been a change and you site will perform much faster. Microsoft is tending to move away from the aspx to the more structured mvc version anyway.

Yes it does according to Google tech spec http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/50/admin_crawl/Introduction.html

which specifically states if follows html links in pdf 'It follows HTML links in PDF files, Word documents, and Shockwave documents'. Google's own api docs carry more weight than a comment in a forum_._ If they are licencing this out as an application it would suggest that the same technology is available in the main engine as does Dunamis's comment about a listing in a pdf document being found in search results.

You can test for youself by publishing a pdf with a link to a info page that does not show up in any other links. Include the pdf in your sitemap but not the test page and check if it shows in googles index site:yoursite.com the next time it crawls.

This also gives some insight in an interview with Matt Cutts - http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

Eric Enge:  What about PDF files?

Matt Cutts: We absolutely do process PDF files.  I am not going to talk about whether links in PDF files pass PageRank.  But, a good way to think about PDFs is that they are kind of like Flash in that they aren't a file format that's inherent and native to the web, but they can be very useful.  In the same way that we try to find useful content within a Flash file, we try to find the useful content within a PDF file.  At the same time, users don't always like being sent to a PDF. If you can make your content in a Web-Native format, such as pure HTML, that's often a little more useful to users than just a pure PDF file.

Have a look at this article http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067225/Google-Does-PDF-Other-Changes it explains some of the doc library search for pdf files and Google's statement here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-words.html.

We host some sites on GoDaddy but find as far as SEO goes, it is very limited. If you are looking to rank for a long tail keyphrase it may get you somewhere, but the tools of SEOMoz are far more tuned. The onpage in the campaigns here give much more detail than the seo reports on GoDaddy and they are instant. So, you can make some changes and test your onpage with out waiting for 12-24 hours for GoDaddy's email. I have found their 'website protection' is useful for detecting quirks that pose security issues.

When you look at the wording you get an idea of what they are offering 'to improve search ratings'. So if you are on page 50 and they get you to page 48, they have improved your ratings. No-one will find you, but your rating has improved. If you want good rank, work with a good SEO to get your site where you want it, and be patient.

We are seeing the same on the Australian Google and we are a start up (3 months old) by we are still climbing in rank, so it has no adverse effect on us.

Have a look at this article http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067225/Google-Does-PDF-Other-Changes it explains some of the doc library search for pdf files and Google's statement here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-words.html.

Yes it does according to Google tech spec http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/50/admin_crawl/Introduction.html

which specifically states if follows html links in pdf 'It follows HTML links in PDF files, Word documents, and Shockwave documents'. Google's own api docs carry more weight than a comment in a forum_._ If they are licencing this out as an application it would suggest that the same technology is available in the main engine as does Dunamis's comment about a listing in a pdf document being found in search results.

You can test for youself by publishing a pdf with a link to a info page that does not show up in any other links. Include the pdf in your sitemap but not the test page and check if it shows in googles index site:yoursite.com the next time it crawls.

This also gives some insight in an interview with Matt Cutts - http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

Eric Enge:  What about PDF files?

Matt Cutts: We absolutely do process PDF files.  I am not going to talk about whether links in PDF files pass PageRank.  But, a good way to think about PDFs is that they are kind of like Flash in that they aren't a file format that's inherent and native to the web, but they can be very useful.  In the same way that we try to find useful content within a Flash file, we try to find the useful content within a PDF file.  At the same time, users don't always like being sent to a PDF. If you can make your content in a Web-Native format, such as pure HTML, that's often a little more useful to users than just a pure PDF file.

We host some sites on GoDaddy but find as far as SEO goes, it is very limited. If you are looking to rank for a long tail keyphrase it may get you somewhere, but the tools of SEOMoz are far more tuned. The onpage in the campaigns here give much more detail than the seo reports on GoDaddy and they are instant. So, you can make some changes and test your onpage with out waiting for 12-24 hours for GoDaddy's email. I have found their 'website protection' is useful for detecting quirks that pose security issues.

When you look at the wording you get an idea of what they are offering 'to improve search ratings'. So if you are on page 50 and they get you to page 48, they have improved your ratings. No-one will find you, but your rating has improved. If you want good rank, work with a good SEO to get your site where you want it, and be patient.

From a developer's point of view: If you do not already have the new system in place, I would suggest a MVC move rather than aspx on the dotnet platform and put a cfm handler in place to map the pages at the controller level. Goggle will not know know there has been a change and you site will perform much faster. Microsoft is tending to move away from the aspx to the more structured mvc version anyway.

Quite the opposite, these are very desirable if used for their intended purpose.

The Alt tag is for accessability handling, so it helps people with visual disabilities to understand the content of a picture.

The Title tag is used to provide tooltip information to the user when they hover over the image.

Both these enhance the user experience as thus are looked on favourably by Google.

BUT, it's an important but - seo's in the past would stuff these tags with useless spammy content. e.g. You have a automotive business so the alt tag:

'car gmh fast cars sports cars red cars porsche' that is bad.

'Our new sporty red porsche makes an easy ride through the windy roads of Denmark' - good

The title tag could say 'Porsche 911 2005 touring the roads of Denmark'

It's all about adding value to the site for the user not manipulating the search engines. So, use alt tag to describe the item in detail and the title to provide extra details. Do not have the same text in both as they have different purposes.

Hope that sheads enough light on the subject.