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The site I'm currently developing is far different than any other project I've every worked on in that search traffic is likely to represent only a very small percentage of the total traffic.  Because of this, I want to make sure I optimize the site for the people clicking from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc more so than the BIG G.

I can't for the life of me think of a reason to have a home page other than for SEO purposes.  I'd much rather throw the user directly into the experience than have him be distracted by a home page.  At the same time, I'd like to salvage any search engine traffic that I can.

My plan is to 301 redirect chucklebot.com/ to /funny-memes/SOME_RANDOM_IMAGE and then put the content of the current home page at /about.  Does that kill any possibility of the site ranking well?  Or can the subpages (eg /meme-generator) still rank well if they are properly optimized?

Thanks!

In addition to my main website, I want to create two new sites for the upcoming football and basketball seasons.  By starting now, I'm thinking I have enough time to get them ranked decently.

I have purchased www.collegefootballpredictions.net for the upcoming football seasons.  The intent here is two fold.  First, I'd like to rank in the top 3 for "College Football Predictions." Second, and this is why I'm thinking that Google won't hate me for the approach, is that someone looking for that search term is much more likely to convert on a landing page geared for them then on my main website.

If the goal of a separate website is truly to compliment the main website, then is it considered white hat?

I'm thinking that, as long as my intentions are pure, they should go on the same IP.  Placing them on separate IPs could be a good way of letting the big G know that I'm trying to cheat the system and get away with it.

It's unlikely that your keywords will give away some huge secret, but at the very least it will make the job a tad easier on your competitors.  And because the tag has zero benefit, why would you want to even give a small advantage to your competitors?

Search engines stopped using the keywords tag a long time ago, presumably because it was being abused by just about every single webmaster in the world.

So, if you still use it, you're getting zero SEO benefit plus you're saying to your competitors "Hey guys, here are the keywords that I'm trying to rank for.  I just thought I'd let you know in case you want to compete with me for those ranking spots."  Not a good idea.

It's a forum I built myself.  I could easily make the "topic" the name of a category instead, I had just never thought of that approach.

Sorry, I should have added that the word "topic" is the actual word that's being used.  It's not a placeholder for the name of a topic.  So it has no keyword value.

Does that change your answer?

For getting forum threads ranked, which is best and why?

• site.com**/topic/**thread-title-goes-here
• site.com**/t/**thread-title-goes-here
• site.com**/**thread-title-goes-here

I'd take comfort in knowing that SEOmoz uses the middle version, except that "q" is more meaningful to a human than "t".  The last option seems like the best bet overall, except that users could potentially steal urls that I may want to use in the future.

My old structure was site.com/forum/topic/TOPIC_ID-thread-title-goes-here so obviously any of those would be a vast improvement, but I might as well make the best choice now so I only have to change once.

Let's say I have a thread located at mysite.com/how-to-do-xyz and that thread has 75 posts.  Let's further assume that the average post is well written and about 3-4 sentences long.  For SEO purposes, do you think it would make sense to display all posts on a single page, or spread them out over 3-4 pages?

Assuming I set it up for a single page, does this have any negative impact on the rare thread that is 500+ posts long?

I had always thought about doing it on a single page, but then designed my forum the multi page way because that's what everyone else does.  Yet, I see that SEOmoz does it the single page way, so maybe there is some validity to that.

Thanks much.

Yesterday my homepage had a PageRank of 4 according to the Google toolbar (which I know isn't accurate, but bare with me) and the majority of my other pages were PR2.  Today every page on my site is PR N/A, or PR -1.  I also used a couple of free page rank checkers to make sure it wasn't just my browser.

The only link I have ever purchased is on botw.org.  I submitted my site to 6 free directories about two weeks ago, but only to the highly recommended ones, and with different anchor text at each.

I have no messages in my Google Webmaster Tools account, nor do I have any significant crawl errors.

My SERPs and resulting traffic have not (yet) been affected.

Any ideas what's going on? I did start a Google AdWords campaign about 10 days ago that ran for 3 days and then got suspended due to the nature of my website. Could that be it?

Yes, both freelancers had an average rating of 9.9/10 after 200+ reviews.

Search engines stopped using the keywords tag a long time ago, presumably because it was being abused by just about every single webmaster in the world.

So, if you still use it, you're getting zero SEO benefit plus you're saying to your competitors "Hey guys, here are the keywords that I'm trying to rank for.  I just thought I'd let you know in case you want to compete with me for those ranking spots."  Not a good idea.

Wow, I had no idea about the link priority subject.  Thanks for the article.   I toned down the keywords a bit, but will have to look at that aspect separately.

You are right, I was being overaggressive.  I was focusing on just about every combination of words that I'd like to rank for rather than the 2-3 most important.  I will revisit my strategy.

Thanks!

I've used freelancer.com for link building on two prior projects.  I was horrendously disappointed both times.  Not only were the links of garbage quality, but the content that was created to surround the links was borderline unreadable and flat out incorrect.

On this project I'm staying away from freelance link building (though I may use that site still for other things).  If I get the budget I might pay an SEO firm here in the states or somewhere in the UK, but I won't trust something so important to people who don't even take 30 seconds to research your business.  If not, I'll spend a few hours a week doing it myself.  It's not much but it's better than the alternative.

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