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.

Well, if the New York Times can use it...

Things to remember though:

1. You'll need this - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-news-sitemap-generator/ - or similar.

If not (and there's no real reason not to) then think about your URL structure, you must use a non-date like number (minimum 3 digits) in the URL. Thus please take into account your permalink structures to include something like %post_id% or other identifier.

2. To be included in Google news you need at least 3 journalists (I think). As you're a newspaper I don't see that being a problem, but make your staff list easily found on the site.

3. Even as a real news site you may initially be rejected from Google news (I'm sure they do it just to weed out the people that don't really believe they should be there). So if rejected submit again

4. Speed. Cache everything - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

5. Categorization. Make sure you have your site structure down and not just adding things haphazardly.

6. User roles and permissions. If journalists are going to be adding directly, make sure you've set up what they can and can't do.

7. Think hard about going for it. Movable Type is a very good option for news sites as well and is much more secure (this is a fact, I WP, don't jump on me for saying it - http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/06/movable-type-a-history-of-secu.html - Although WP is a bit better now :D). MT is updated far less regularly and is usually much more stable as well. So just consider your options.

Something very similar came up earlier, best to 301 them as E-Dreamz says.

If you put this in your .htaccess file you should have all your pages as www. and the index.html will disappear.

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]

How are you doing your 302 redirect?

If it's htaccess, either just change 302 to 301

So if it looks like this - redirect 302 /oldpage http://example.com/page - just change the number

If it's applied by a rule add R=301

RewriteRule ^oldpage(.*)$ /page [L,R=301]

If it's php

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://example.com/page");
exit();
?>

if it's asp

<%
response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
response.addheader "location", "http://example.com/page"
response.end
%>

Double check those though, end of the day here, getting tired

Safe!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

Everything after the # is ignored (pretty much).

I've been having a think about this one and while I'm not sure, I'm going to say I don't think it wouldn't have an effect on link juice passing. As in if there were 4 links and an empty anchor the juice would be divided by 4 and not 5.

Current W3 anchor use - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.1.3 - allows for various parameters in the <a>tag, however I'm willing to bet (not a huge sum of money though) that the href itself triggers the link part of a link (and am I right saying even js links need href="#" or similar to trigger?).</a>

<a>Plus I think older versions of HTML allowed things other than links within anchors (though I may be making that up) so if the engines have grown around those older versions it makes sense they look for something other than the 'a' in the tag to work.

I can't think of a good way to test though, maybe somebody can clarify my thinking or tell me if I'm wrong.

I agree with you though that it's not wise to put quirky elements like this on a page, especially if there's a lot of dropdowns. How do the navigation links work if there's no href?</a>

1. Doesn't matter too much.

2. Yes - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

3. Yes.

Things to maybe think about though is HTML 5 and the

<header>tag for sections. Read - http://html5doctor.com/the-header-element/ - and - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

At the moment there will be some accessibility issues with screen readers when using multiple

s but that should get better.

Headers aren't a big ranking factor - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-five-least-important-ranking-factors - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6

A vast majority of the web isn't coded correctly and the above points to it not really mattering, however, it's worth thinking about your structure and still only really using one

if you can.

</header>

And you're probably going to hear it again, sorry.

I'm unfamiliar with linkmarket but it sounds like the sort of thing that could actually get you penalised instead of just not doing you favours. I'd be very careful of continuing to use it, but as I say, I don't know enough about it.

The best way to get links if you don't want to actively engage people to get them is to write viral and linkbait content, which is again easier said than done.

The other alternative is to pay someone else to do it for you, but that can get pricey even if you're not using the budget to buy paid links.

I'm afraid building links does involve a lot of leg work.

Could go a lot further wrong than  the SEOmoz beginners guide.

However your question is very broad. Perhaps you have a specific thing you would like to achieve first?

Probably the simplest way 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

This also makes sure the non-www redirects to the www.

If you get stuck, let me know

Well, surely you're now in an excellent position to tell all of us?!

I don't think the issue is whether going from 51 > 92 will help, but more whether you've gone from X seconds to less than 1.5 seconds.

In webmaster tools if you look at labs > site performance, you should see a graph of your time.

Can also use something like - http://tools.pingdom.com/ - to check how fast a page loads.

I would suggest collecting your own data (especially since you've already made the changes) and evaluating whether it's been worth it or not. You should also monitor things like conversions and bounce rate.

Technically attribution (CC BY) requires the url to be linked, though I've seen it argued it just needs to be displayed.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Think it's more likely a PC 'fault'.

You probably want to list a comma rather than a semi-colon as a separator - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/import-or-export-text-txt-or-csv-files-HP010099725.aspx#BMchange_the_separator_in_all_.csv_text

If you use open office you can choose what you want to use when you first open each file.

Old as the hills (well, couple of years old).

I used it to promote a site's first birthday celebrations on Twitter and Facebook. Got a decent take up on Twitter and a few on Facebook, but I don't see a lot of people using it these days.

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.

Well, it depends how much forcing users to add a description would negatively effect you I suppose. Hard to get something out when there's no data being put in

They must already choose a category (car), can you get them to name the image (ask them to be descriptive 'Red Ferrari on an Italian mountainside') and tag it with items in the wallpaper (red, Ferrarri)?

If so then you can improve your URLs a title tags

URL: site.com/car-wallpapers/red-ferarri-italian-mountainside-3/
Title: Red Ferarri on an Italian Mountainside Car Wallpaper | Computer Desktop Wallpapers

Add the tags on the page with links to tag pages (which I don't always like but would be useful for your users and internal linking).

URL: site.com/car-wallpapers/tag/red
Title: Red Car Wallpapers | Computer Desktop Wallpapers

or

URL: site.com/tag/ferarri
Title: Ferrari Car Wallpapers | Ferarri Computer Desktop Wallpapers

Unfortunately unless you want to do all this yourself you will have to get users to give you more info at time of upload. As I say, no real way to get something out without putting something in

Yup Well, kind of.

There's a couple of things I do with content that I want to share this way

a) Make sure there are links back to my site and
b) Slightly reword it

I'm not talking about spinning the article into 100 different versions, one for each site I'm putting it on (though if you want some names to help you do that... :D), but I try and give the reader a reason to come through to the site proper.

So some sites I post an edited version, some sites I do an editorialised version ie I blog about my blog (yo dawg, I herd you like blogs).

For most value out of them, it's (reasonably) important to actually build the profile of the blog your publishing it on within the community as well, so follow other fishing blogs on each, repost on your tumbler, fill in a full profile, etc

Remember even if some of the places your posting links are nofollowed, having a good social profile is an indicator that you have a legit site (for the time being), so there is value beyond the direct links as well.

However, I wouldn't rely purely on these kind of links to get me ranking.

It's not a protected forum, anybody can sign up for a SEOmoz account and PM members.

However, there have been lots and lots of these.

Been a while since I signed up, maybe the account confirmation procedures could be tightened up and the PM box be given a 'report spam' function?

With Google traffic estimator / keyword Tool you get the data from the SE itself.

Which is all the more reason not to trust it!

if you don't have data for long tail keywords that is probably because the search for those terms is very low as far as volume.

Because Google only now reports on keywords that make them money

There can't / won't be another better source for this kind of data.

Your own analytics are the only thing that will give you a truly accurate data set, however I appreciate that it's not predictive for the most part For future reference as well, once you have top rankings for something always compare it against what you thought you would get and judge for yourself how accurate the tool is.

Anyway, yes, use the tool it's still one of the best resources you have access to.

It depends. What's written into the agreement?

If they've built links on other people's sites then it will probably be too much of a hassle to contact all of them and ask them to remove it, so it will either naturally run out (if it's paid and you're not given the contact details) or remain there for the rest of it's natural life.

Alternatively if they run the sites they've been building links on (and it is the easiest way to guarantee clients will get links on sites) then they may remove them to make way for new clients links. I've certainly seen this happen.

It's important to note that Google doesn't overly care how quickly you get links, but it will certainly notice if you lose a lot quickly! Aa it means you've either bought them and they've expired or something has happened to make people lose trust in your site, either way it's going to raise some flags and possibly have someone look a little bit closer into your link profile.

Double check what's been agreed, find out who owns the sites the links have been built on and speak with the agency before you do it. If they're reputable I doubt they'll try and screw you over.

You 100% sure on that? ,':|

I'm not saying you're wrong but it's not something I've tested, just wondering if you had some info on it?

If nothing else having those seals on your site have been shown to improve customer conversion, so depending on the type of site it might still be worth having.

Can you tell when the pages you got links on were last cached?

You can do this manually by searching for the url and clicking the 'cached' link beside the URL.

If they've not been cached then they're unlikely to show up at all in any of those tools (and after a couple of months it would be a pretty poor page if it hadn't been).

If it has been cached then it's a bit up in the air as to when it'll show up in WMT (or the other checkers) and even then if it's passing it's full value straight away.

If it's not cached then I would point a link at it from somewhere (not necessarily your site) just to send the spiders along to it and get it counted again.

Possibly months, but more likely (if they're good quality links on high-ish profile sites and not buried in a directory somewhere) it'll be at least a month.

The last index update was August 23rd (check on the OSE homepage to see), so I would expect another update around the end of September or thereabouts.

This has always been the case to a degree.

If you put the tilde in before a keyword Google will show you other words it thinks mean the same thing by highlighting them in the SERPs.

For example, searching for '~poker' also highlights "POKE", "card games" and "hold 'em" as synonyms on the first page.

You can use Google Sets - http://labs.google.com/sets - to also find related keywords that you are targeting.

Again for example, putting in poker, casino, gambling and horse racing also gives: bingo, blackjack, roulette, bet, football, craps, baccarat, keno, video poker and more!

Finally searching for a keyword and scrolling to the bottom of the SERPs gives you a "Searches related to KEYWORD" section, which you can also use to see what you may rank for.

As for how to use this info, well...

Firstly you can start by adding a few of the related keywords into your copy (I like to do this at the start of writing copy, but no reason you can't edit it later). You don't want to get rid of all instances of your primary keyword, but once it's on the page 3 or 4 times already there's no harm in substituting synonyms where appropriate.

Secondly you can use these related keywords to build new content. This has advantages of allowing potentially a second listing, a higher listing for the synonym and by interlinking the pages improving your main keyword's importance with onpage SEO.

I'll have a think if there's anything else that could be significantly improved by having this info, but it should be enough to get you going

"Welcome to SEO, the industry where everything's made up and the points don't matter!"

Realistically there's no 'international standard' as everybody does their keyword research slightly differently.

If you're looking for a step by step I recommend starting with the SEOmoz guide - http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-5-keyword-research - there are a list of tools in there that most of us use.

10 steps to advanced keyword research - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research

And an alternative approach (though still similar) from Lisa Barone - http://www.searchengineguide.com/lisa-barone/five-steps-to-effective-keywor.php

Read these, combine and compare and you should be able to come up with something that is workable for you.

Well, no more so than normal links, but certainly no less assuming that the search engines don't detect that they're paid for.

So if the link would be useful without being paid for then it'll be useful even if you have to pay for it, only difference is that paying for links is against the guidelines and getting caught would get you in trouble

You've made it upside down

Roger sees the first * and then goes "okay :(" and goes away.

Simply change it to:

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Having multiple

tags isn't an issue. Sometimes having multiple

tags is normal for a page and here's Matt Cutts weighing in on it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

Also

tags aren't a strong ranking factor, check out these links for more info - 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 LINK - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bing-vs-google-prominence-of-ranking-elements

Your

and your title should be editable independantly, though often they may be the same anyway.

Your titles should definitely be different across all of your pages as the <title>tag is still a strong ranking factor. Having multiple pages with the same <title> is not advised.</p></title>

Not black hat, but on the other hand, perhaps not worth it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

But if you go for it, then eyepaq has a lot of good advice.

Well, it has been claimed that the spam team has been asleep at the wheel a little bit recently (but then again I hear SEO is dead these days as well) but I'm sure I saw something where Matt Cutts said they're going to be putting more man hours back into fighting spam and if they should have learned anything then I would guess part of their time should be looking for new ways their SERPS are being abused.

Definitely host it on the company website, unless you're doing something risqué with the blog.

Your blog is going to be collecting links, you will probably want to be using it as a hub for other social activity and it's much easier to convert people by directing them around the site than it is to get them to go there in the first place.

Using Blogger or WordPress.com limits a lot of what you can do, plus you're then accumulating links into a domain you don't control.

As for using the blog to point links to your main site, well that's not usually the best strategy either - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

If your set up absolutely prevents you from doing it on the site then go for a self-hosted blog.

All things being equal it would make no difference to ranking, even dot infos should have the same chance.

In reality though a number of factors could have a knock on effect, people automatically type dot com (or hit ctrl+enter like me), people looking for local results may trust a ccTLD more, dot infos are cheap and riddled with more spam sites than other TLDs, so on and so forth.

So, were it in a bubble, no; but there are secondary marketing factors to consider.

link farm - I do not think this means what you think this means

The 100 link thing is a bit out of date - here and here - but it's good that it makes you stop and think about what you're doing.

As dignan99 said you need to think about your internal link structure. There are a few pages on SEOmoz that should help - 1 2 3 - indeed you should be very able to work out what to do from those.

Basically having a whole bunch of links isn't a huge problem, but there may be a better way if you sit down and think about it

I can provide you with a little anecdote but I think internal linking is a reasonably large factor, especially from the home page.

So I have a page, 3 levels deep, absolute tail end of my site and exists exclusively to catch the keyword it's targeting; doesn't provide any information you can't get elsewhere on the site, doesn't have any exclusive offers, just another page on the site.

So I build a few links into this page, nothing exciting; articles, links from my blog posts, manage to find a couple of websites about the topic, but after 3 months, nothing, top 50 ranking (from 120 or so) but not that great. However one day I get a conversion from it, so I decide I'm going to give it a little push and link to it with the main keyword from the homepage.

Boom! Next day, 7th.

The homepage itself isn't that powerful, very low page rank, very few links coming in and there's already about 100 links on it between the nav and the other editorial style links. It's not that the page I linked to wasn't being crawled or indexed but putting a link in from the homepage instantly boosted it.

2 months later the page still fluctuates within the top 10, but I have been building more links into it.

So, flush with this new success I decide to test it on another, very similar, site. Same sort of page, same sort of keyword, same sort of site structure. Difference this time is that I'm not building links to the page in question.

Keyword isn't top hundred so I put the link in from the home page.

Boom! Top 80.

Alright, not as good but a definite twitch. I figure that it's not quite the magic bullet I thought it was (and realistically I can't link to every page from my home page anyway) and haven't really revisited what would happen if I did build links to that page (and a few more to the homepage).

So, anecdotally, internal linking from recent pages and small time link building doesn't do much. Linking from the homepage is a big signal that a page is important. Without external links your internal linking (on a small / low DA website) isn't going to rank you.

I'm going to say it's closer to 20/80 though.

If you put a base64 obfuscated link in the footer of your WordPress then I'll hunt you down and gut you like a fish ಠ_ಠ

The problem with those footer links is that they look spammy to both users and to search engines. Your theme could end up on all manner of sites with links to things they're irrelevant too, even if you try and skin the theme to be relevant.

Ultimately it's no longer a good way of building links, not least of all because people have such a huge choice of themes now even exceptional ones don't find many homes. Plus, even if you make a condition of using the theme, a lot of people are going to remove them.

As Riggz said it would only really not look bad if you were a design company, but it's been abused so much in the past I would think that they're almost entirely discounted by search engines.

It's quite time consuming to find good quality writers, also a bit more expensive.

If you can be bothered to weed through tonnes of useless writers you'll be able to exploit people starting out on Digital Point

Along the lines of the oDesk of this world I'd suggest - http://www.studentgems.com/ - pretty good for pretty cheap.

If you're looking for proper quality writers you could start scanning Linked In for journalists of industry magazines and such like.

But the real quality writers I've either poached (found articles in the same niche I've liked and approached them) or made through contacts in the industry. Never a substitute for networking

Yup, in theory.

I mean that's how it's supposed to be used, so if it was set up correctly that should be right

You can also tell Google to ignore parameters in Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling but only do this if you're confident it won't mess anything up. Canonical should be fine.

WARNING: You're going to be taking this on the chin, as I didn't like it. I'll try to be as constructive as possible.

I'm not a video expert, but what the hey

I will semi-live post my experience:

Hmm, what's going on here, why's there no sound?
6 minutes?! I'm never going to get this time back
Oh sound. Hmm, Symphony no.5. We'll see.
Ugh, is all the font Arial?
So you guys renovate houses or provide storage for redoing houses. Pretty cool examples.
Wait a minute, I don't believe these are actual examples ಠ_ಠ
Bored now.
Super bored now.
Skip, skip.
You really don't know what I'm thinking.
I still have no idea what you're trying to sell me.
Okay. Products. Let's see.
Flashing by too quickly.
EPILIPTIC FIT
Topical Charlie Sheen reference. I'll give you that.
1 minute of credits?!

I'm not a big fan.

Firstly, I'm not going to watch a 6 minute advert. Realistically you've got 20 seconds to pitch me your product or hook to get me to continue watching. If you hook me I'll watch for up to 2 minutes if it's consistantly entertaining. Not having sound at the very start has immediately got me looking elsewhere or thinking about clicking back.

As for having to convince people it's safe to buy online, if you're pitching to that market they're not going to be persuaded by a video with a talking dog. Identify who you're targeting and maybe split the video up into different parts tailored to each.

Apart from the Charlie Sheen reference I didn't find it entertaining enough to carry me through the first 90 seconds, let alone the remaining four and a half minutes. You'll need something a little more wild to tap into the psyche of a frequent web user like myself and your secure message and charity message lost my attention even more.

Change the font, it's boring.

Make sure your logo's are proportioned correctly and not squashed.

Less of the dog, MUCH less text, less assuming you know what I'm thinking.

The save the Earth thing didn't work for me as you never went into any green credentials or how you're 'doing your bit'. I'm left with the impression that was just some nonsense you threw in there.

You need to focus a lot more on what you sell as it's unclear.

Ultimately I'd go back to the drawing board and come up with a (or several) shorter video(s).

Show the problems your products fix or why they're cool, couple it with something 'zany' and then get it in front of people who need to know about it and hope they share.

Building links to your links is a fairly legitimate tactic, however only once you've almost exhausted the links you can get. It really is almost end game stuff.

As you'll be building links for people in related fields, you'll almost certainly be better off putting those links into your own site from other sources, as a rich linking domain profile is a big authority metric.

If you have a lot of low quality links, it could be that you'll not see any movement in the SERPs, you should focus on building quality links or creating quality content rather than start doing SEO for other people's sites

Yes.

In your permalink settings just add .html (or whatever) to the end of your permalink settings so %postname%.html and that will work... for posts.

To add it to pages you can either use this plugin - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html-on-pages/ - bearing in mind it's rarely updated, hack wp_rewrite in wp-includes/rewrite.php

add_action('init', 'change_page_permalink', -1); function change_page_permalink() { global $wp_rewrite; if ( strstr($wp_rewrite->get_page_permastruct(), '.html') != '.html' ) $wp_rewrite->page_structure = $wp_rewrite->page_structure . '.html'; }

bearing in mind you'll have to do this every time you update

or add it in your .htaccess

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.[a-zA-Z0-9]{2,3,4} RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

I'm not taking any responsibility for messing up that last one

Do all the pages need to be https or just some of them? I'm not a huge fan of working with all https sites, but appreciate sometimes it's necessary.

Some things you may want to look at - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/solving-duplicate-content-issues-with-http-and-https

As with any redirect you're losing some juice, but if it needs to be done it should just be the same as a normal redirect. This should be safe:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I never see many top sites using https exclusively, even paypal has it's http version in the SERPs (though redirects you to the https immediately) because nobody links to the https version. Well, not nobody, but you get what I mean, nobody immediately thinks to put that 's' in there so there's lots of links to the http version.

Both are fine to use though.