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Spiders from search engiines "crawl" the web by following a link from one page to another.  Using a rel=nofollow HTML attribute on a link tells the search engine not to follw the link and crawl the page that the link points to.

Search engine rankings by sites like Google are based on the premise that the best content has the most links to it (this is a super over-simplification, I know).   "nofollow" links aren't counted by Google when they assign value to the page being linked to.

Most often sites use "nofollow" to block links from user generated content that might be used to manipulate search engines.  An example of this might be a blog that nofollows all the links in it's comments so that spammers don't show up and flood the comment section with links to sites they'd like to rank higher in google.

A quick little tip, whatever SEO plugin you choose, make sure you choose one you like and want to continue to use. If you write a bunch of meta descriptions in one plugin and decide to switch you'll need to figure out how to migrate your existing descriptions or you'll lose them.  This is not so much an issue for categories as it is for posts and WordPress ages.

There was a really good Whiteboard Friday on this topic.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Rand discusses the tradeoff of the approaches you mention above.  Be sure to also read the comments.  Some commenters mentioned they had really good results using  geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools.

Personally, I would avoid this strategy.  If the site selling the dofollow comments is caught by Google then Google could determine that you bought a link and penalize you.

Can you find any sites in your industry that remove the nofollow tag from comment of users who participate a lot on their blog?  I'd focus my efforts on such sites.

Not that I'd necessarily  recommend this, but you could always report your competitors to Google if they are indeed buying links.  Before you do this I'd make sure that you were playing by Google's SEO rules.

I always thought Google's policy towards the Yahoo Directory was strange.  However, perhaps it teaches us that if the directory charges for something other then placement (i.e. pay us and we'll expedite adding your listing to our directory) then the paid link is "legitimate".

Lots of times I'll Thumbs Up a question, blog post or response not only if I think it's high quality but if I think I'd like to revisit it in the future.  Essentially, I want to use a the SEO Moz  Thumbs Up as a bookmark.

Is there any way to see all the SEO Moz content that I have given a "Thumbs Up" to?

I know I can review all the questions I've asked or answered in the "My Q&A" page.  Perhaps, I'm just missing a "Thumbs Up" page somewhere on my profile?

Google Analytics can track outbound clicks with using their Event Tracking Mechanism.  However, you'd need to add javascript to each HTML tag.

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55527

I recomment using jQuery to add the javascript.

You can do something like

jQuery('a[href^="http://"]').not('[href*="yourdomain.com"]').each(function(){

jQuery(this).click(function(){
      recordOutboundClick(this, 'Outbound Links', thedomainhere);
    });

});

If you are not technical this Google Analytics add on can help

http://code.google.com/p/gaddons/

Some of those headers might help you serve your page faster.  They might  save you and your users some bandwidth.

I guess if you think that page load time is super important (most say it's a small factor) then you could argue those are important for SEO but genrally speaking Marcus is right.

Interesting theory!  I just checked us on in trends.  It says we got whacked too.  Still I'm seeing pretty good traffic to our site.  I wonder if those graphs are not as bad as they look.

This WordPress plugin might work out-of-the-box for you

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like/

Just download, unzip it and put it in your wordpress plugins folder.  Once you've done that login to the wordpress admin area and locate the "plugins" menu on the left side bar.  Click on the word "Plugins".  You'll be taken to a the "Plugins" dashboard page.  Once you are there use the search box in the top right corner to find and activate your plugin.

I know you don't want to deal with PHP but if you have to here's how you'd do it.  It's pretty easy.

You'll  need to add some markup to the header (i.e. inside the "" tag) of your posts.

The old way was just to just use a "link rel" tag in your header.  I believe it still works but is deprecated.

The new way is to use Facebooks open graph tags.  See the "og:image" attribute in this document.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

Here's an example of the new markup:

property="og:image" content="http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/bb2.jpg"/>

You can test out your new markup using this tool.

http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2011%2F05%2F11%2Fsergey-bring-google-role%2F

This article might be able to help a little.  It does not use SEO Moz campaigns to track keyword performance but does discuss how you can crawl search results from google for a to group keywords and then pair those results with data from Open Site Explorer.  You would not necessarily be interested in the second part.  Perhaps the spreadsheets discussed in these articles can help?

• http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/competitive-analysis-in-under-60-seconds-using-google-docs-12649
• http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/
• http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2011/04/linkscape-google-spreadsheets.htm

The first article references the second and third article.  The second article talks about how to use spreadsheets to scrape sites (include google SERP).  The third article mentions automatically grabbing data once a mont or so.  Seems like you could get a solution for what you are looking for with these three articles.

You don't have to create anything to start planning out your URL structure.  Lots of times when building something I think about the keywords and then just start laying out the URLs that I think will suport those keywords from a search and overall usability perspective.  I'll do this even before I start mocking things up.

From your design you could put all mowers by one company on the same page and then have tabs to separate the content.  Implement the tabs in javascript so that they just enhance some good solid HTML lists or divs.   That would create one page for each mower brand.  Are you hoping to SEO well for "mowers" or "toro mowers"?  Perhaps you are already planning on doing this?

In regards to the anchor text, can you just link to "Toro Mowers" and then have people click the tab they want.  Othewise perhaps you could do something link "Toro Mowers - Home",  "Toro Mowers - Commercial".  At least that gets the keywords at the front of the anchor text.

The structure of your site will be important for SEO but start by finding the list of keywords to target.  Consider keyword competition and search volume when making the list.  Come up with one page for each of those keywords. Then try to come up with an overall URL structure where you can SEO all those pages well.  Finally, don't worry about SEO on each and every page you create.  You are going to have some pages that add to the overall experience of your site that might not target keywords.

You are smart to think about creating only the pages that you have good content for.  I wouldn't force myself to create any other pages.

Here's 7 "directories" (using that term pretty loosely) where you could try to get listed.

1. Dmoz

2. Yahoo! Directory

3. GetListed (for businesses)

4. NetworkedBlogs (for blogs)

5. Crunchbase (if you've got a start up)

6. Technorati (for blogs...kind of outdated)

7. Wikipedia Categories (Rand discussed this in the most recent SeoMoz seminar).

Search engines can't really tell the difference between types of pages.

Do you want your tag pages to rank in search results?  If so you could add a description.  The All In One SEO plugin I mentioned could help with this.  However, as I alluded to before, it's tough to get lots of tag pages to rank well in google.  I wouldn't worry too much about adding meta descriptions for them.

If possible you can list pages that have similar URLs on your 404 page.  Some CMSs can help you do this.  WordPress certainly comes to mind.

Hey Domaon,

This happened to me once and I was furious.  I would contact the publisher and show them this article.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Basically it explains that the site gains no additional PR to it's other links by  nofollowing your links.   Who knows maybe they'll chance their stance on nofollowing links to use submitted articles.

That said there are good reasons why a link can have a nofollow attached to it.  However, if you contributed an article to an ezine that selectively publishes user submitted content you deserve a "dofollow" link.

One quick aside: categories in WordPress are easier to SEO then tags.  Wordpress collects category descriptions.  Plugins like All In One SEO Pack can use this info to write a meta description for you.  Wordpress doens't collect descriptions for tags so plugins can' use this info to write out a meta description for your tag pages.

Sites that work hard at Web Accessibility often reap large SEO benefits.

If you think about it, search engine crawlers have a pretty limited view of any give web page.  They can't see the images.  They work mostly by indexing text strings and ignoring large components of any web pages presentation.

There's a ton of simple tips for accessibility that help with SEO.  For instance, add captions to your images and create navigational components out of HTML lists.

Google's SEO Guide touches on Accessibility

The W3C has Accessibility Guidelines for HTML which is also worth reading.

Be sure to view Rand's recent webinar The Future of Link Building.

You can also try the Juicy LInk Finder tool from SEOMoz though I've had trouble getting it to work recently.

http://www.seomoz.org/link-finder

First off, congrats on your success!  I think it's smart that you are getting people to pay more for timely responses.

In regards on where to go next with all these unanswered questions I'd be asking myself:

1. How large is the pool of experts who could answer these questions?  How many of them do I expect to participate on my site?
2. Will allowing others to answer questions in my forums for free cannibalize my Q&A business?
3. How likely will I be to monetize users who expect to get answers for free?
4. Is there a chance that my paid Q&A site will in the future get lots of competition from a free competitor?

If you don't want to go with a  forum solution for unpaid questions (and you feel like the pool of experts question answers you could attract to your site is large enough) consider a question marketplace where other experts get paid to answer questions and you take a cut of each transaction.

If you feel like the population of true experts is relatively small and you don't expect to get competition in the future from a competitor who answers questions for free I'd keep all the unpaid questions online along with your price for answering them within 15 minutes.  I'd then make sure I marketed the heck out of myself as a true expect.  Under these circumstances I don't think your site would seem spammy for leaving up free questions (and acquiring some SEO benefit from them).   If your one of the few true experts online and you are filling a need then people will be willing to pay.

Short Answer: If you change your category slugs in WordPress, you will potentially lose links

Long Answer...

WordPress is pretty decent at taking a URL from a request that it doesn't have a match for and trying to match it to a post or category even when the category slug has changed slightly.

Google is also pretty decent at figuring out that your content hasn't changed but has a new home.

That said, I never rely on WordPress + Google to do the right thing in this case.  I always end up writing rewrite rules in my .htaccess file that performs a 301 redirect.  If people just link to the first page of each category then do

RewriteRule ^category/foo/?$ /category/bar/ [R=permanent, L]

You can see the mod_rewrite documentation for more info.

Of course check the number of inbound links you've received before doing any of this to make sure that it's worth the effort.