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You raise an excellent point, I had completely forgotten that. EGOL has the right of it, Matt Cutts said it evaporates and aside from that we don't really know. I've seen nothing since that gives us any more information and I think given how things have changed you'd have a lot of trouble running an experiment to find out.

I should have been more careful when I spoke

Nofollow is something I honestly don't worry about in my day to day linking practices, to me it's just a way of indicating that my linking is not a personal endorsement of the site I am linking to.

While my first and fourth paragraphs above may be null and void, the rest I believe remains true.

One thing I forgot to add above (my poor memory is a theme here) is that the site receiving the nofollowed link still gets the traffic from the link and maybe some lesser residual link benefits. There is a reason that nofollows still feature in the SEOmoz analytics.

It doesn't evaporate, it just reduces the flow considerably from one site to another, allowing the linking site to retain some of it's "juice".

It's also a way to indicate a sponsored link, keeping your site in line with Google's spam guidelines.

Or you can use it to link to a site you want to talk about but don't want to be that associated with.

There are very good reasons to use nofollow, but  it's important to keep your linking natural, so don't take this information and decide to nofollow everything to preserve PR.

I would also encourage you to worry a lot less about Page Rank in general, but that's a battle for another time.

EDIT: read next reply and my follow up for revisions and my errors.

The wordpress "Redirection" plugin by John Godley has always been great for 301's if you are unfamiliar with setting them up.

I thought it was a nice public slap on the wrist without severely damaging a brand that probably should be on page one. It got the message out loud and clear and I would imagine that the papers are going to be much more careful.

You're right with regard to the error, but it's not the first time that the Chrome marketing team may have made an error with how they went about their business. To someone with a traditional marketing background I'm sure it seemed very innocuous, which was largely the problem with interflora anyway I suppose.

If it's as explicit as "if I send you something I require a link back" I can see that it completely breaches guidelines, but if it's sent out without that requirement, for genuine review I think you're in much murkier territory.

Should they be denied the option of linking because they received the product?

I'm just interested in the discussion, I know there are plenty of product review bloggers out there (across the whole white\grey\black spectrum) who are now wondering where they stand. From what limited contact I've had with them, many of the more hobbiest bloggers had little or no idea about nofollow anyway.

Much of the PC games industry is fuelled by review copies, and there are some truly sinful strongarm tactics going on for positive reviews over and above any links. Is cracking down on stuff like this even enforcable?

I realise the main blame fell on the newspapers for what was essentially cash for links, but a separate part of the PR push was sending flowers to bloggers who then blogged about it.

I can see that this could be construed by Google to be a breach of their t&cs, but equally it could be a legitimate action by the blogger if they are giving an honest viewpoint.

Is the Google Chrome "satchel" ad being unintentionally misleading?

If it's all down to the intention that's a worryingly grey area to be stuck in, what do you think?

Provided what I read was true, interflora were aware prior to the penalty that they were in trouble and were taking steps to remedy the situation by getting the links removed. It could be that their recovery is part of a settlement of sorts, they are a big brand, they took quick action, and this sort of recovery is hardly unprecedented (BMW recovered in 4 days after their penalty via Nick Wilsdon (credit where it's due)).

They apparently still haven't recovered for Valentines or Mother's day, which may be the penalty that lasts, but google got their message out about advertorials quite effectively and that is probably what they were after.

In addition I would imagine that Google's Chrome marketing ad from a while back was an argument in interflora's favour. It actually features items being sent to reviewers to review and it's hardly a huge step to see interflora's blogger flower deliveries as the same thing.

The problem isn't really an SEO problem it's a communication problem, you need to explain the problems to your client and try to make them aware of the impact it will have on their business.

With regard to your sitemap question so long as the page is still present and accessible you should be fine (provided the information on it is kept up to date). It will lose some authority by not being visible elsewhere but it should regain that quite quickly once it is re-instated.

If you have 400 links on a page it might be time to start consolidating some of the categories into broader terms, or removing the links when they fall out of season. Don't remove the page just move the links to a less prominent location.

I would tend to avoid the 301 redirection in this case because it isn't an actual permanent redirect.

Leave the page up, make sure the content isn't misleading or confusing (no old offers, clear mentions of what year you are referring to). Point any internal links to the current relevant special offer, and cycle that process as the seasons change.

Patrick McKenzie who the man responsible for http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ has a separate domain for each season. It's overkill at this scale, but the overall process is pretty much what I described above, the pages never go away, the 'internal' links to them are simply switched out to whichever is relevant.

Is the site aimed locally or globally? The only reason I ask is because it will affect the keywords you are trying to hit, and that's really what you need to bear in mind, the main keywords should be in the URL, and the rest can likely be cut.

Also how attached are you to /local-info/ it's not particularly descriptive, and if you could change it to /italy-info/ or simply /restaurants/ that cuts an entire level off the string.

I'm in the UK and if I was searching for the content you've described I'd probably just type "restaurants in central milan", Americans would probably use something more like "restaurants in milan italy" which would indicate URLs along the lines of:

www.example.com/restaurants/italy/milan/

www.example.com/restaurants/italy/milan-central

Neither would really think about putting Northern Italy nor Lombardia because they are much broader. You could still account for those just by adding them on the same level despite the hierarchical discrepancy.

www.example.com/restaurants/italy/lombardia/

www.example.com/restaurants/italy/northern-italy/

If you're catering to Italians you could just cut things down to:

www.example.com/restaurants/lombardia/milano/

They aren't going to specify Italy or Northern Italy as part of their searches.

So basically think about what your audience will search for and include those items in the URL, it doesn't have to make absolute hierarchical sense so long as it makes sense to your customers.

In terms of pure SEO Meta Descriptions will have no effect on your rankings. But they are potentially your first chance of presenting your content to users convincing them to come to your site, so in that respect they are important. Search engines will use page content as a meta description if there isn't one and that can be fine, but it isn't always what you want.

Titles are a little more tricky, if you have keywords beyond those 70 characters they are unlikely to be "read" by the spiders, and that is less than ideal, so it's important to try to say what you need within that 70 character limit.

You will be doubling your workload, essentially starting a brand new website from scratch in the same niche. I feel I need to make that very clear.

You asked about efficiency and that's pretty much the core of what I'm talking about, subdomains are inefficient.

Niche subdirectories are by far the better option.

I hope Lewis doesn't mind my replying. You've sort of hit the nail on the head, a nofollow link looks exactly like that first bob marley link yes. That rel="nofollow" is the key.

It's not totally useless though, it does have substantially less value, but a search engine will still follow the link, it just doesn't apply the same metrics and credit it would to a normal link.

A nofollow from a reputable source is worth having, even if it's not ideal.

The link from Ziggy Marley is a nice follow link and should be very helpful.

Tom

The wordpress "Redirection" plugin by John Godley has always been great for 301's if you are unfamiliar with setting them up.

Dejan is right, a 301 for a complete site can take a while so that may well be the problem.

It could also be an effect of switching from .com to .co.uk, you are intentionally targetting the local audience over the international. That may well be what's important but it will mean you get less traffic from overseas, it might be worth taking a look at your analytics and seeing if that might be the reason.

I feel bad because someone posted this yesterday and I have no idea who it was:

http://www.vervesearch.com/blog/seo/how-to-optimise-for-google-products/

I will have to go back and find out. Credit where it's due and all.

Edit: It was of course Mr Rand Fishkin on Twitter @randfish.

You want the anchor text to be your keywords, simple as that. Failing that Zion Rootswear is nice because it could help indicate that it's a brand. Using the url as anchor text is close to being your last option.

Hope that helps.

I can't give you anything definite, but I do the fuzzy seo wordpress plugin on one of our sites, and that pulls the keywords out of the referrer for use on the site. You can find it here:

http://seoforums.org

I'm not a coder by any means but it looks like the guts of the program is in the .inc file once you've installed the plugin.

Wish I could help more but it's all I've got.

EDIT: If anyone is using wordpress it's quite a nice plugin definitely worth taking a look at.

It's worth looking at the Webinar video on Sitemaps for this one. It's just a month old so it's completely up to date.

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/getting-value-from-xml-sitemaps

Sitemaps aren't just a case listing every page on your site anymore, they require a bit of thought and attention.

If you use just used robots.txt to block the byrating directory that would probably be simplest. SEOmoz will still flag the pages up as errors but this is an intentional use to reduce duplicate content.