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Would it be better if I used rel="canonical" href="http://www.voices.com" /> ?

It looks like our CMS may not be configured correctly as there is an empty section in the rel="canonical"

rel="canonical" href="{page_uri}" />

Will having the above meta tag be harmful to our SEO?

Is a recovery from Penguin immediate once Google recognized that you've fixed the problem or is it a slow and steady recovery?

I think we may have fixed our issue which is why we're seeing an immediate spike in traffic from Google organic search results.  Our daily traffic was up more than 100% in a single day.

Is this a recovery?  At which speed have other sites you manage recovered?

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Strangely enough, I once owned Presonus audio equipment so I felt I thought I should chime in.  In my experience, people certainly type in specific version numbers for products.

Consider software downloads.  If you're looking for a particular build of FireFox, you'd search for that.

Another example would be digital cameras or product number of parts for home electronics.  Both are items that I've typed into Google.

My guess is that Google is compiling data from both type-ins as well as "known" product numbers from page titles, links and more likely product feeds.

While I'm certainly not engaged in any form of blackhat techniques, we were severely affected by Penguin.  Needless to say, we suffered a 50% drop on April 24 and have not risen back since.  For that reason, yes, I do have link paranoia - good term

I'm thinking of making another post on the subject (YouMoz) because I've finally figured out what happened.  I'm hoping this next update will catch my fix.

For the record, they are not spammy but rather topical sites and directories related to Ghosts or New Age stuff.  Again, we have nothing to do with these topics.

Seems like the consensus is just leave them.  There are about two dozen out of 2000 links I manually reviewed in a spreadsheet.

In doing research of our backlink profile, I've found a couple dozen of links from off-topic websites linking to us.  You see, our domain is Voices.com and tends to scoop up links from unrelated sites that are clearly trying to link to another site such as evp-voices.com or areavoices.com or dozens of others.

What would you do?  Ask the webmaster to remove them because they are completely unrelated?  Or would you keep them if you believed they aren't causing any harm?

Our membership based website is using a 303 redirect to handle the redirection of users back to the login page when those users try to access a page behind the logged in firewall.

Said another way, if a user is not yet logged in, we redirect them to the login page using a 303 redirection.

Unfortunately, Googlebot get this redirection too and after a recent audit, we're thinking this isn't the best way to handle this.

For pages which require a user to login first, should we:

A) index and 303 redirect to the login page (what we are currently doing)

B) index and 302 redirect to the login page

C) noindex those pages

D) Remove any special treatment and let Google figure it out.

Thanks in advance for your help!

David

While I'm certainly not engaged in any form of blackhat techniques, we were severely affected by Penguin.  Needless to say, we suffered a 50% drop on April 24 and have not risen back since.  For that reason, yes, I do have link paranoia - good term

I'm thinking of making another post on the subject (YouMoz) because I've finally figured out what happened.  I'm hoping this next update will catch my fix.

For the record, they are not spammy but rather topical sites and directories related to Ghosts or New Age stuff.  Again, we have nothing to do with these topics.

Seems like the consensus is just leave them.  There are about two dozen out of 2000 links I manually reviewed in a spreadsheet.

Strangely enough, I once owned Presonus audio equipment so I felt I thought I should chime in.  In my experience, people certainly type in specific version numbers for products.

Consider software downloads.  If you're looking for a particular build of FireFox, you'd search for that.

Another example would be digital cameras or product number of parts for home electronics.  Both are items that I've typed into Google.

My guess is that Google is compiling data from both type-ins as well as "known" product numbers from page titles, links and more likely product feeds.