If you're just changing the title tags, then no, you do not need to setup a 301 redirect. You can leave that URL as it is.

As for hops, I would say that anything more than 3 hops and the search engine is not likely to follow it any further.  Here's an article on the topic, complete with a Matt Cutts video on redirects, as well as specifically addressing the hop issue (it's at the bottom of the article).

It's to be expected that some of your blog posts will have a hook to whatever your selling.  Every single post might be overdoing it slightly, but certainly some would be a good idea.  Not just for sales, but also for SEO.

If one of your blog posts becomes very popular, as in it earns external links and social signals, it will become a strong page on your site. If you link your strong pages to your key landing pages, some of the SEO strength will pass through.  Furthermore, your internal links can use a lot more exact match anchor text than external links, so feel free to link to those pages with the keywords you want to rank for.  Again, don't use exact match every time, but you can use it much more often than with external links.

Hope this helps.

I think if the links are broken and Google has been made aware of such, ie it has recrawled and cached the page (simply add "cache:" in front of the URL for the last cache copy - if the URL itself is broken, check if it is still indexed in Google), then it would know that the link has been broken and shouldn't count it.

If that's the case, I don't think the disavow would have any benefit, unless of course if the link were to return, which could be a possibility.

If the page is cached and that cached version has got the broken version = no worries.

If the URL is broken and the page is no longer indexed = no worries.

If the URL is broken and still indexed = check to see if any other links point to that URL (including the URLs site navigation and/or sitemap, if applicable.  If not, should deindex soon.  If there are links, I'd disavow.

Just my two pennies, hope it helps!

Hi Matthew

You'll probably be interested to see what Matt Cutts has to say about the issue: http://youtu.be/x0-jw_PfwtY

In short, a small number of sites that are related are fine to link to each other and won't flag quality guidelines.  It sounds like your websites fall under this, so you should be fine.

A problem may occur if there is a gratuitous amount of links or websites all passing PageRank.

If you want to be ultra-safe, you can make the links between the sites nofollow - which will you'll out any chance of a penalty due to interlinking.  But I think you'll be fine without this if done sparingly.

Hope this helps.

I don't see any reason why this would be seen as black hat.  On the contrary, I see it as an unintuitive UX idea and you should definitely do it.

The only information your withholding (and you're not even cloaking it) is a price that is dependent on a lot of factors.  You're not hiding any content or links, so there's no worry there.  Even if you were hiding content it wouldn't be a problem, unless it was completely irrelevant and there just to rank the page.

Any affect this could have is that if you're deferring elements to load on the page to improve Time To First Byte, then Google may not read them as they crawl and therefore the content it sees on the page may be depleted, affecting your ability to rank the page.  But for something like deferring a price tag, this isn't relevant at all.

I'd say go for it - think it would be a great idea for user experience.

I'm fairly sure that the Googlebot ignores those

title elements, so I can't imagine this having any positive SEO effect.

The worse case scenario would be that if its got a lot of keywords in the title tag, it could be seen as keyword stuffing and we know that Google can penalise sites for over-optimisation on its content.

However, like I said, I believe the bot ignores these elements.  To be safe, just make sure that each tag is relevant and not overdone or stuffed.  Keep it natural to the reader and there will be no problem.

Parasite hosting is when someone places a webpage on a domain that is not theirs and intends to rank it organically.

You might want to do this if you want to ensure that anyone searching for your brand, for example, reaches a page that you own or created.  For example, you might want to rank a Yelp page, Facebook page or others to control your brand results.

Conversely, others may want to rank for keyword terms by creating a page on a website with a high authority (let's say domain authority), as the page they create will inherit some of the trust and strength of the root domain.  Some people rank those pages in a white hat way, others may choose to aggressively link to those pages - as they don't have to worry about their own site being penalised for it.  You can see there where it becomes a gray area for SEO.

The most extreme example would be people in very spammy health niches, eg viagra, compromising a site and creating a new page to sell their products or promote their shop for a quick rankings boost.  This is just outright black hat SEO and illegal, as it involves hacking into a site to create a page.

So you can see there are different degrees of parasite hosting, each with different levels of ethics. Hope this helps.

Hey there

Not sure if this is the article you read, but Yoast wrote a great article on blocking jquery and CSS and how it might affect your SEO.

The recommendation was not to block them with robots.txt.  This is reiterated by a Google-r at the recent SMX conference has said:

“We recommend making sure Googlebot can access any embedded resource that meaningfully contributes to your site’s visible content or its layout”

I'd recommend that you unlock these.

Hope this helps.