I do hope Ryan gets "Good Answer" and/or "Endorsed Answer" for this... hint, hint

Getting great links is the way to go, but that can be easier said than done. Primarily you want to attract natural links through the promoting content, but you can build links too. Have a look at these tools: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php and http://www.seomoz.org/link-finder

Thanks. I think I can see where the main problems are... you have quite a few ads and loads, and loads of outgoing links with very little unique content. The majority of the content you have there is fed in through affiliate programs and so will exist in many other places too.

I would suggest that you separate a lot of what you have on the homepage into different categories and landing pages, at the same time as adding some static and unique content on each.

After doing that, fill out a re-inclusion request with Google.

Usually when people think they've been penalized it turns out they haven't and there's just some other issue but I think you most likely have been penalized in this case.

Can you tell us the domain?

Even though inline uses less code than usual, I'd still say always go for an external file so there is less code to crawl though for your content. The cleaner the code, the better. Inline is still more code than just a linked external stylesheet.

*Edit: Oh and CSS every time over JavaScript

I would recommend you visit conceptfeedback.com

There's a free and paid service. Paid is relatively inexpensive for what you get, but if you give some reviews yourself then you can get reviews in return from others, some of which are design and UX experts who provide comprehensive stuff. Well worth it I think

Wow that's a big, bold move! I don't know how to answer it but if I were you I'd wait until you get a few, nice and comprehensive answers on here before doing anything to drastic. Either that or use a private Q&A question to SEOmoz staff if you have any points spare to do so. With such a large change, you want to ensure you're doing it right.

I'll be interested to see the answers you get for this.

I wouldn't worry about the PR. It won't be due to content changes anyway, since PR is based on incoming links only and has nothing to do with what you have on-page. We've gone from PR 4 to PR 5 with the update but I don't care as I practically ignore PR now anyway... can't wait for them to hopefully get rid of it. It's one tiny metric which isn't a true reflection of what they have anyway. So much more that matters.

At the moment you have a direct link from the homepage to the quickbooks hosting page with anchor text in the footer. Above that, you have some body content about quickbooks hosting (still on the homepage), put a link in there to the quickbooks hosting page. Body content links are better than footer links by far.

Also it seems that you've had the following URL's for that page:

/quickbooks-hosting.html
/host-quickbooks.html
/hosted-quickbooks.html

Were/are these all the same page just with URL changes? Have you put 301's in for them so that both older URL's point to the new one?

Haha brilliant! I'm totally with you on that. And since Matt doesn't tend to divulge much (and half of what he does is cryptic) that would put Rand as source number one, or I should say Rand & co... all the staff and associates, etc... on here are pretty much a fountain of knowledge. I'd be screwed if I  didn't have SEOmoz to learn things from.

Righty, I've been on a mission to clarify... it seems there's a lot of conflicting views on it. I mean I know there's conflicting views on pretty much everything but these views all seem to be from very good sources, so now I don't know what to think... I'm on the fence!

There's some discussion in here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4176006.htm

Along with this: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/backlink-age-seo-factor/9943/

It's a difficult one, but it doesn't appear to be in the ranking factor survey, which is a shame as it would be interesting to see what level of agreement there is.

Anyway, Rand's is more recent than Ann's so I guess it would make best sense to follow his

Thank you for pointing it out, I would have been none the wiser otherwise!

Ah, okay. I've heard it said a few times and assumed it to be correct but clearly I should have questioned it. Thanks, I've learnt something new from that

I'm pretty sure that links don't have to actually refer any traffic to pass value. You'll probably find that the majority of links that aren't on new/fresh content sites such as news sites, etc... don't refer much anyway. We know for example that the age of a link counts, and an older link can be worth more. When you think of some of those static sites out there that never change but still have good authority (especially for their niche) but don't get tonnes of traffic due to their industry, demographic, speciality, etc... They can pass some great link value even though some of those links will simply never get clicked.

If Google were to assign higher value to links that got clicked more, we'd only ever see sites at the top of the serps that had links from news sites, other sites that might well be most relevant would be held down.

Take a website or page about something obscure, an interest that somebody might have in an uncommon area of archaeology or something. Now let's say the site has great authority in its obscure niche, but of course gets very little traffic due to its obscurity. That site linking to another similar site would be excellent in terms of link value for the similar site.

Usage data might come into it beyond us clicking from the serps, and going into it with us clicking through as referrals too, but I wouldn't think it would have that much effect.