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Yeah, should be fine.

Anyone big enough is generally fine. I've nothing against hostgator, rackspace, ukfast, etc. I'd only really stay away from GoDaddy hosting.

I use - http://www.5quidhost.co.uk/ - for a lot of sites.

I believe these guys are pretty good and run by a bunch of goons from the SA forums - http://www.lithiumhosting.com/

Yeah, sorry, would get rid of the 1-to-1s (can't think of a work around just now).

See if you can find out why they can't do it. If it is something like MX records then change those and put the 301 in normally.

You could also put a meta refresh in to take customers to the new page; no real SEO value though.

User-agent: * 
Disallow: /call_backrequest.php*

Should work

However if the 'rid' parameter is only used here you might want this instead

Disallow: /*?rid

If 'rid' is used elsewhere that you want indexed, then don't do that.

You could also exclude the 'rid' parameter in WMT - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

I'd take it out of ITs hands.

Can't think of a reason why they can't 301 it, it but you can forward it (no masking) at registrar level.

If they need to keep the MX records or something they can do that there as well.

You know what, I tell people to ignore PR so often, I completely glossed over the server issues!

Yes, should definitely change host, though any shared hosting runs the risk of having less than desirable neighbours.

Esaky, can you be sure your site is clean?

Site is not currently listed as dodgy - http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=www.animhut.com%2F - which is good.

Worth checking for exploits anyway. Some advice here (pdf) - http://docs.apwg.org/reports/APWG_WTD_HackedWebsite.pdf

Does it matter?

If you're ranking better and getting better traffic then why worry about your PR?

Unless you're selling links, in which case you've maybe found your problem.

TBPR is not important on its own for ranking. Don't worry about it and focus on getting more traffic instead.

Not tested and I'm very sleepy this Friday afternoon, but the below should fix it.

NB, this will also redirect any subdomains.

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^neatstuff.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.neatstuff.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.neat-stuff.com/$1 [R=301,L]

EDIT

As per JP above, this is a solution using .htaccess. If you're on a Windows server you'll need to use IIS. The below might help

<match url="(.*)"></match>    
<add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^neatstuff.com$"></add> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.neat-stuff.com/{R:1}}" redirecttype="Permanent"></action>

But again, I'm sleepy, so test things first

Aye, all right. Message me what you're after.

If it's massive I might have to pass, but if not I can export it all and send it over no problem.

Hi Ken,

While staff do browse these forums, it's mostly a peer-to-peer Q&A site.

To get a response from SEOmoz directly please contact help@seomoz.org or submit a ticket here - http://www.seomoz.org/help

I don't think it exists really, but I reckon we can piece things together

2000 - 2003 :- Practically monthly updates, pretty much shooting in the dark to remember what it was the changes as I don't think anybody really understood things as fully nor monitored as closely.

Feb 2003 :- First 'named' update, Boston.

April 2003 :- Cassandra

May 2003 :- Dominic

June 2003 :- Esmerelda

November 2003 :- FLORIDA! Boom, this was the first one that made SEO what it is today. It started ranking sites in a way that nobody could fully work out. It blasted the spammers (although many quality pages were also effected if they were using the same over-optimisation/ stuffing techniques) and started the link race game that we have today.

January 2004 :- Austin. Hammered some more sites in a Florida type fashion. Seemed to introduce the QDF factor.

February 2004 :- Brandy.

February 2005 :- Allegra.

September 2005 :- Something funny happens here

October 2005 : - JAGGER! First step in the fight back against the new link currency. Recipricol links devalued, link farms devalued, paid links (where detected) penalised and/or devalued. Sandbox changes to make it harder to rank for new sites.

October 2005 :- Jagger 2. Domain age seems to play a bigger part of the algorithm.

October 2005 :- Jagger 3. Refinements to the first 2.

December 2005 to March 2006 :- BIG DADDY! Algorithm change to evaluate link trust. Non-thematic links, lots of recipricol links, lots of links on a page, lots of links from low quality sites all

August 2006 :- Lots of little things.

November 2006 :- Lots of minus position penalties for unnatural looking link profiles.

June 2007 :- Buffy. Not a real update apparently but there was one earlier that month which I think added some ridiculous penalties of up to -950!

April 2008 :- Dewey. Massive changes depending on what data centre you went through and changed SERPs multiple time each day. Google may have also given a cheeky little boost to their own intellectual property... Also think it was this one that started to stink up the UK search results with loads of foreign sites (not as xenophobic as it sounds, lol).

August 2008 :- Devalued exact anchor text links?

March 2009 :- VINCE! Also known as the brand update. Google gave a significant boost for sites that had a 'brand' (under the guise of 'trust'). Ultimately this moved the playing field to give the advantage to bigger sites with bigger budgets. Requires SEOs to improve visibility across sites to show that they're not a fly-by-night organisation. [Thanks Gianluca]

January 2010 :- Caffeine. Fresher results, more verticals, real time. Algorithm itself doesn't seem to change much. More of a sys admin change than anything.

May 2010 :- MAY DAY. Smacked some thin affiliates and pages with no content (auto-generated pages without products specifically).

December 2010 :- Started taking into account poor reviews and penalising those merchants. Black hats get to work reviewing their competitors. Perhaps the start of a bigger sentiment change with them also using Facebook and Twitter (though if that were the case I'd expect to never see Virgin Media in the search results :D).

January 2011 :- Content farms that scrape content take a hit. Harbinger of Panda.

March to April 2011 :- PANDA! Hammers (some) content farms.

All right, I'm probably missing lots of big ones, but if other people want to contribute I'm sure we can do something with this

The guys above are pretty much right, but to try and explain:

Domain authority, if you don't already know is really just an indicator of the total number of links and unique domains linking to your site (as opposed to just a single page). The more domains the better and works very similarly to PR.

Here's a Whiteboard Friday on Domain Authority and Trust - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-trust-authority - (about 7:45 fo DA)

And here's the Whiteboard Friday on how that's used in the SEOmoz tools - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics - (part 2, round about the 8 minute mark, but worth watching it all).

Now, your question about whether linking out to pages effects DA we need to think about how PR works (as it's kinda the same) and as shown in the first video it doesn't matter how you interlink at the page level, but more the domain level. So links coming into your domain, on any page, determine your DA (to simplify it). And as such linking to low PA pages shouldn't have any effect.

Also linking out to other domains shouldn't effect your DA either and if I had to try and prove that I would probably turn to this YOUmoz piece from Hamlet batista - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/training-the-random-surfer-two-important-adjustments-to-the-early-pagerank-model - which is not as easy to digest, but if we assume DA works like PR then there's be little to no benefit in cutting those links out.

If you are worried about how you link then you may get some advantage from is streamlining the pages by consolidating them. Have a read of this and see if it helps - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

Also, the best way to improve your site's DA is to build links from more domains wherever possible into these pages with low PA.

I'm going to publish this and have a read in case I need to edit or have wandered off topic, but hopefully it's useful for you

Ah, the wonderful world of gambling SEO

Unfortunately not going to give you all my secrets on here but I'll give you a few pointers (I'm nice that way).

Get more social. Brand signals and getting people to talk about you is a moderate indicator that you're not completely rogue.

Off the back of that I'd make some more, non-promo led content. Looking at your site (y mi español no es muy buena) all your content seems to be promo driven. Get some content up people want to share and link to.

As an affiliate, you really need to offer 'more' to your user base. Give them tools to track their play or have exclusive offers or set up something like a shop they can earn points for based on their play. Ultimately there are 1000 affiliate sites they could use why are they going to recommend yours (and by recommend I mean talk about and link to).

Gambling SEO requires a creativity based almost entirely on what you can do to get people talking as (as you've discovered) people consider all links you try and acquire or share yourself as spam. You need people's friends or other people they trust (influencers) to be talking about your site.

Lowercase, every time.

Probably the simplest way to redirect the non-www to the www is to put this in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For reference the .htaccess file goes in the root of your domain via whatever file transfer program you use and of course replace example.com with your domain

If you get stuck, let me know

CRO = Conversion Rate Optimization.

I only asked as you were looking for link click metrics, which suggested you were looking to get users moving round your site more.

Users visiting specific pages doesn't mean that Google is going to index more of your pages. It's kind of 2 separate tests you want to run.

Your absolute best bet to see what pages Google is visiting is to check your server logs and see what Google is looking at. I appreciate it's confusing looking through them though and it still doesn't show what's being indexed.

I think I understand what you mean by the sitemaps now, treating a subfolder as a different site in WMT and seeing how many pages they index from the sitemap?

Could work...

Eh, normally when I want to see what pages are functionally indexed I would check in analytics to see what pages have actually brought a visitor through search. Anything that's not is effectively not indexed, though I appreciate that's not strictly true.

If a particular section has an increase in the number of landing pages bringing traffic then more pages are being indexed.

I appreciate it's onpage changes your testing but building links into pages further down the site structure should also prod search engines to crawl more pages.

It's not an easy task all in really. I guess sitemaps in WMT, functional indexing and long nights sifting through server logs is my best offer. Sorry it's not quite a solution but something to think about.

Well, all three!

Plus Chicago cheeseburgers, Chicago cheese burgers, best cheeseburgers in chicago and a whole bunch more

A variety of "location + keyword" anchor text is a must, getting links from other Chicago sites (both about Chicago and I want to say that sites hosted in Chicago, though I don't know how granular Google takes that and it's not a must), set up a business location in Google local and get reviews (protip: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local)

Danny did the basics of local seo on this whiteboard Friday - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-basics-of-local-seo-whiteboard-friday

But by asking here, how will you know who is giving you the right advice on which advice to follow! [brain asplode]

I think you should just use advice here as starting points and verify yourself that what they're saying is, as best as you can tell, correct.

Using sites linked in profiles isn't necessarily a sign that they know what the're doing (my linked sites aren't sites I work on, though I should really update them with decent ones) but even if they were awesome I have on occasion given 'bad' advice, or at least been lazy with my analysis of the problem, so assuming you took that into account it's still not guaranteed to be good advice every time.

There's obviously the good answers and endorsements on their Q&A profile, but then again, not everybody uses the Q&A much or can just blanket answer every question and pick up a number of Good Answers.

Links to 'official' answers are often the best knowledge the industry as a whole has, beyond experimenting themselves (you may or may not be surprised at what Google would like you to think they can do versus what they can actually do).

So, realistically, you can't. You can just see what looks right and verify to the best of your abilities. Ultimately anything you do is going to come down on your head, so, test or find something 'official' that backs up what's said.

A few things to think about.

If done right I don't think this will effect your rankings much, if at all. You're certainly not the only site that does this and although I've never done something similar with a php header redirect, georouting of visitors based on IP is something I do all the time (and could be something you might want to look into? - http://www.maxmind.com/)

Your concerns here should be how is Google getting around your site? Is your homepage just a location select screen which it then has to crawl individually (a la paradisepoker[dot]com) or is there a default site they'll see and only later find a link to the location versions? If I (or specifically Google) don't accept cookies what can I see?

People linking into your site will be splitting the value a bit, even if you use the canonical tag. What version of the site do you get links to and is that ranking better than the location variations? Would you be better not using the canonical tag but targeting links into each with location qualifiers to keywords?

As I say, if it's done right I don't think you'll be hurting yourself, but would need to look into it a bit more to say for definite.

Latest SEOmoz correlation data showed that h1 use is not a significant ranking factor (or at least not as a significant ranking factor) as once thought. I'll try and dig that up for you.

UPDATE - Here's the links I was thinking of - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements - and - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made - BONUS - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bing-vs-google-prominence-of-ranking-elements

Matt Cutts has done a video on this as well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

Basically use the where it makes sense, I try to avoid it in the logo of the page and have just one h1 text header, but there have been times when a couple more may have made sense.