Alan, thank you for this response. I was completely off base thinking of the noarchive tag and that is what my response was geared towards. Your response is dead on, and I agree, adding the noarchive tag should be fine but it may send a weak signal to Google your site may be hiding something.

Alan, I just want to make sure we are talking about the same thing here. I believe the original question refers to cache as it appears on Google search results pages. Based on your responses it seems as if you are referring to web page cache on the site's web server. Am I mistaken?

I am not aware of any negative SEO impact to adding the no-cache meta tag. The answer provided in the Q&A link you shared seems accurate and complete.

The Google page which discusses using no-cache clearly states "The page will still be crawled and indexed by Google, but users will not see a Cached link in the search results."

With the above understood, I would also ask the same question from the Q&A response....why would you want to no cache your page? The only valid reasons I can think of are for a page being developed or otherwise under constant change. We don't know all aspects of Google's algorithm but I would take a non-cached page as less trustworthy then a cached page.

I agree. The name of your subdomain being "staging" didn't register at all with me until Matt brought it up. I was offering a generic response to the subdomain question whereas I believe Matt focused on how to handle a staging site. Interesting viewpoint.

Correct.

Toren, I would not recommend that solution. There is nothing to prevent Googlebot from crawling your site via almost any IP. If you found 100 IPs used by the crawler and blocked them all, there is nothing to stop the crawler from using IP #101 next month. Once the subdomain's content is located and indexed, it will be a headache fixing the issue.

The best solution is always going to be a noindex meta tag on the pages you do not wish to be indexed. If that method is too much work or otherwise undesirable, you can use the robots.txt solution. There is no circumstance I can imagine where you would modify your htaccess file to block googlebot.

Hi Matt.

Perhaps I misunderstood the question but I believe Toren only wishes to prevent the subdomain from being indexed. If you restrict subdomain access by IP it would prevent visitors from accessing the content which I don't believe is the goal.

What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?

Place a robots.txt file in the root of the subdomain.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This method will block the subdomain while leaving your primary domain unaffected.

The disadvantage to keeping a canonical tag on a page which does not require it would be, as a rule, you want to present your web page with the least amount of code possible. Unnecessary code causes extra confusion and adds to the processing time of web pages.

I use the canonical tag on all pages, but not everyone agrees. If you would like further support, SEOmoz uses the tag on all pages as well. If you use any CMS, ecommerce software, forum software or any system which generates pages dynamically then I would highly recommend a canonical tag on every page. At times a system will generate pages which you might not be aware of, but a crawler will find.

Sometimes a page will offer a print version, the ability to sort on ascending/descending, and numerous other changes. You might think you only have one version of your page but have many versions which you do not realize exist. A proper canonical tag ensures the correct version of your URL is always offered for indexing, and you avoid duplicate content issues. With that said, if you have a basic html/css/php site and you are 100% confident in your programmer, then it is not necessary.

EDIT: In your case, it seems the canonical tags are performing a necessary function. From your home page I clicked on your featured item and I landed on the following URL:

http://www.nathosp.com/product/r1212_c

You have the identical page offered under another URL: http://www.nathosp.com/product/r1212_c/hotel_towels.

If you were to remove the canonical, you would have duplicate content issues on your site.

Google's algorithm is not known to us so we are left to guess. There could be some case studies but even so, the algorithm changes around 500 times per year so it is impossible to know for sure.

My best guess is, all forms of attention grabbing on a page such as bold and italics are put in a bucket which share the weighting bonus. If you have only a couple words on a page appear in bold, then all the weight would apply to those couple words. If you present the entire page in bold, then all terms would be treated equally.

My normal recommendation would be to use bold for the most important words, or the most relevant ones. If you feel the design of the page improves by using bold text on the first couple of sentences, consider changing the text color instead. I have seen some creative results in this regard but don't have any examples to share.

I agree with William and Malachi as well.

WordPress is the world's number one CMS. It is free, offers the most extensions and support, is easy to use and you are familiar with the software. If you ever need work done on your site, there are plenty of experienced developers who can help.

I have reviewed about a dozen CMS solutions and have never heard of Sitefinity. It may be a great solution but even if it was, your selection of themes, extensions, updates, etc. will never be close to what WP offers. If your current developer left you for whatever reason, your list of experienced developers who can work with you would be severely limited.

My solution would be stick with WP unless you are provided with an exceptionally compelling reason to move. If that is offered, also be sure to understand what WP offers that Sitefinity does not. The main reason I would use another CMS rather then WP is because WP is best for blogs and simple sites. If you require more features, my preference is for Joomla.

Is this not effectively cloaking?

Not at all. You are offering a very legitimate choice to users and you offer the same choice to bots. The option is clearly designed to maximize the user experience, not to manipulate search rankings.

Googlebot has the ability to choose an option even thought it normally will not. Googlebot even has the ability to complete simple online forms entering a name, address, phone number, yes/no options, etc. I am confident it will understand your design. It is not all that different in concept to sites which offer content in various languages based on a manual choice.

[What are the] SEO benefits of linking logo to homepage?

It depends on the site. Take a look at: www.vzw.com. Notice their logo in the main navigation bar? This site does not offer a "home" button. The logo link is the only link to the home page.

As you navigate the site, if that logo did not exist, there would not be a reasonable way for users to return to the home page. Users would have to either use the sitemap link in the footer and select the home page, or use the Back button. From a functionality perspective, the linking logo is huge in this example.

Another consideration is the flow of PageRank. The home page is often the most important page of your site. It should normally be linked to from every page of your site. Again using the verizonwireless.com site example, if that logo link did not exist the PR of the site would be highly disrupted. It is of huge importance.

If you consider an average site with a "Home" navigation option, the importance is greatly diminished in comparison. The logo would simply represent a secondary link to the home page.