I've read conflicting studies about use of Trust badges. Sometimes they're a good idea as it instills a feeling of trust in a nervous/cautious customer but other times it can have a negative effect by scaring off a user who hadn't considered security/privacy to be an issue until you mentioned it! It depends on the level of technical/online shopping experience your customers have.

As Gregory says - test it - get them to give you a month free trial and see if it impacts your conversion.

George

@methodicalweb

Hi Ian,

As already covered, there is no official word on using bold and italics improving your SEO that I know of. I also suspect it might be looked upon favourably by Google, but I think it's only ever going to be a minor factor compared to the keyword density in the article and the positioning of the keyword in page headings (H1-H3) and page title.

Personally I think you would create more of an impact by splitting up the article (if possible) under different headings and into managable paragraphs and sentences and testing it using a tool like Flesch Reading Ease, rather than bolding inline sentences/keywords.

George

Personally I wouldn't rely just on robots.txt, as one accidental, public link to any of the pages (easier than you may think!) will result in Google indexing that subdomain page (it just won't be followed). This means that the page can get "stuck" in Google's index and to resolve it you would need to remove it using WMT (instructions here). If there were a lot of pages accidentally indexed, you would need to remove the robots.txt restriction so Google can crawl it, and put a noindex/nofollow tags on the page so Google drops it from its index.

To cut a long story short, I would do both Steps 1 and 2 outlined by Federico if you want to sleep easy at night :).

George