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I've never heard of Google not indexing content inside of an

<aside>tag. Where did you hear that from? The aside tags are to identify related content, as you suggested.</aside>

We built a site with large images and pushed the H1 below as an experiment. We saw no downsides, and because the site was far more user-friendly and good looking (we didn't change any on page SEO really) we noticed visitors were bouncing less, browsing more, and converting almost 40% more.

Go for the user first!

Are these micro sites / facility sites actually good for the user, or just done for SEO purposes? If they aren't created with the user in mind you will probably not be rewarded for them in the long run.

That being said, if the micro sites must stay up you should rel canonical them.

Highly recommend avoiding this tactic then. This is a huge no-no.

The text will still render to search engines and you should be fine. When we have a logo on a site that doesn't require text (except on mobile) we usually display: none; the text on higher resolutions yet Google and others still crawl the link. Our method is slightly different from you since our link is part of an image, as well, however.

That being said, if you are trying to hide text from users all together it seems a little shady / outdated and is a big no-no.

What do you think about having .com and .co both running the same site at the same time, using REL? Seems like a bad idea though.

How long would you ETA a dip in traffic?

I have a site that does pretty well on a .co domain, but would like to switch to over .com (we own the .com already). If we were to transfer .com and 301 redirect all the .co pages over to their .com version, would we suffer at all? What would you guys recommend?

We just removed a few hundred links from a site that had a manual action applied by Google Webmaster Tools. The entire process took about 2 months.

The first month was contacting webmasters, removing bad backlinks, and updating the disavow file. At the end of the first month we submitted the new disavow file and requested a review from Google. We were denied, and did another round of backlink removal / disavow updating that took about two weeks. Still, denied after submitting a new request. For the third review we explained in detail that we have been in contact with webmasters trying to remove bad backlinks to no avail, and resubmitted the same disavow file and Google lifted the penalty and took action on the links in the disavow file. Your experience might be different, but I'd estimate a month or two.

tl;dr; 2 weeks to 2 months minimum, it could take a lot longer! it varies!

4 to 8 weeks seems like ample time to me. Maybe I'm misreading the situation, but doesn't opensiteexplorer's recently discovered links show pages within 24 hours?

Powerful quote regarding Google / Search Engine dependency!

Seems pretty obvious to me. what category are they showing up under?