I agree with Steve but wanted to add a bit.

You don't see your true PR. Google updates PR internally on a frequent (?daily) basis, but we do not see it. They update the toolbar that we see 3 or 4 times each year.

The PR number you see is truncated. Your prior PR may have been 40 and showed as 4. Your PR may now be 39 and show as 3. So a 1 point drop may be extremely minor.

Some details from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Jup5R1MGY

@Panu, I believe you might be missing the relevancy of the Panda affected sites' links and their impact on PR. Most of the sites negatively affected by Panda have links to other sites. The value of those links are now devalued, so the PR of the pages receiving those links would also be impacted.

When I find conflicting expert opinions, I sort them out by date and source. For sources, I place Matt Cutts first, Rand second, then everyone else falls further down the line.

There are others in the SEO world who share Rand's level of experience and expertise, but there is something about seeing him bounce up and down on WBF videos, along with his intonations that just make viewers want to believe him.

I agree with Lindsay's reasoning but am not clear on her statement on this subject: "If your website's print pages include a link back to the original page, you can use the meta robots 'noindex' tag here too. The page stays out of the index and any link value will be passed back to the original, canonical, web version of the page."

If you add the "noindex" tag to the print page, search engines will disregard the page which SHOULD leave them with only the canonical version of the page. You are requiring the search engine to do some guessing which is what we want to avoid. By using the canonical tag, we are expressly telling the search engine the correct version of the page to index.

From the above quote, it sounds like Lindsay is suggesting to use both "noindex" and the canonical tag. The focus of her article is there are superior methods of canonicalizing web pages without using the canonical tag, so it leaves me unclear on the logic.

I use the canonical tag presently in these situations. I would love to ask Lindsay for additional clarification on the reasoning for the "noindex" tag in this instance. The last blog comment was a question asked in May which was never responded to, so it seems like she doesn't visit the site too often.

Duplicate links on a page are fine. As EGOL shared, you only want to offer a duplicate link when it makes sense and offers a benefit to users.

The SEO community all seems to agree only the first link is counted with respect to Google, but I have been unable to locate an authority such as Matt Cutts who provides a response confirming this information.

Use the SEOmoz crawl report.

Let Roger loose on your site, then when the report is available, filter the excel file on the broken link field. Then check the "referrer" field for each broken link. The referrer field will show the page where the broken link was discovered.

You can then use the SEOmoz bar to highlight the links on a page. Sometimes a link isn't obvious as it is hidden. In those cases you can always right-click on the page and choose View Page Source from the options, then search for the link.

Using a properly configured CDN will not have any negative effects on SEO. It can have positive effects on your rankings by offering faster page loads.

With Google's current system, you would not see a SEO benefit per se. If your current site is deemed slow by Google, you could have your current speed penalty lifted.

Moving to a CDN will surely provide a better user experience. Google is constantly adjusting it's algorithms in chase of the best user experience, so this is a chance for you to get ahead of the game. It is reasonable to think in the future Google may consider site speed as a ranking factor.

Two other suggestions regarding setting up a CDN:

• you need to be very conscious of your cache settings. You could make a change on your site and users will not see the change if you do not ensure that change is propagated throughout your CDN

• try to include all files which would benefit from a CDN. I have seen some sites just add their videos and image files to the CDN. Custom Javascript, CSS files and so forth can all benefit from CDN. PageSpeed and YSlow are two great tools for optimizing page loading times.

I have no concerns with your having 149 links on a page. If you wish your pages to be listed, they need to be viewed as unique pages. To make that determination Google can view the entire page as a whole.

One suggestion is to create a blank page with your normal sidebars, header and footer. Look at your SEOmoz Analysis tool Page Elements tab. Determine how much HTML text is present. Now go back to your page and see how much your page content has grown.

There are no magic numbers to shoot for, but you should be conscious of your results. At the moment I see minimal content which is a concern. I also see that minimal content buried in a large amount of other text from your sidebars/header/footer which is duplicated throughout your site.

I checked Google.uk for "Car Air Freshner" which seems to be the keyword focus of your page. I didn't see your listing in the top 50 results. My suggestions would be:

• change your title to just "Car Air Freshner" or "Car Air Freshner | Rockshore"

• if you can, try to use friendly URLs.

• find a way to add quality content to your page.

If you enter that page into Google, it appears. That page is indexed in Google. It may not rank as well as you like, but it is indexed.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=gsih&xhr=t&q=http://www.rockshore.uk.com/air-fresheners-201-c.asp&cp=52&pf=p&sclient=psy&site=&source=hp&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=http://www.rockshore.uk.com/air-fresheners-201-c.asp&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=27b93cf21cbb40b9&biw=1600&bih=733

Taking a closer look at the page, it is clear why it will not rank well. There is very little unique content. Your sidebars are full of links and content which are consistent throughout your site. If you count the number of words in your sidebars, header and footer, then add to it the unique content you will find that ?85% of your content is duplicated with a small amount of unique content in between. These are not quality pages.

Hashtags can be used for multiple purposes in URLs but the only one I have personal experience with is their tracking ability. Two examples of services which can track URLs via hashtags are TYNT and AddThis.

You add a code snippet to your site in much the same way that you add Google Analytics. From that point forward, all of your URLs will have a unique hash tag added. Anytime someone copies and pastes your URL, it will contain a this tag.

When a user clicks on the link, you can identify the specific source via TYNT or AddThis. The service is free and they offer nice reporting options. Tynt is more experienced in this area, but AddThis offers other social sharing tools (facebook, twitter, google+1, etc) as well.

I used to use TYNT until AddThis added the feature, which is when I switched to AddThis.

Yes

Feel free to try it. Take this post for example. Copy the URL, then add a hashtag and some characters after it. You will return to this exact same post. The hashtag offers a tracking ability but otherwise does not impact the actual URL.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-do-search-engines-treat-urls-that-end-in-hashtags#sgdgfsdf

Google truncates the URL at the hashmark. Using your example they treat the URL as www.domain.com/abc

While every search engine is their own private company and can do as they wish, it seems reasonable that most, if not all, follow Google's process.

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to see your sitemap, along with the count of URLs in the sitemap and Google's index.

You can also download your sitemap from Google WMT. I am not aware of any data Google offers to help identify which URLs are not indexed. It sounds like this is the information Michelle is seeking.

If you just needed to know the # of URLs for each subdirectory, you could submit a sitemap for each one and then Google will show the URLs in Index for each given sitemap.

"We know for example that the age of a link counts, and an older link can be worth more."

Steve, my understanding is that a link's age has no direct bearing on a link's value. Can you possibly elaborate on why you feel otherwise?

My understanding comes from a few sources. One example would be: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/age-of-site-and-old-links-whiteboard-friday