Nobody can say for sure... but if I look at the anchor text of the links for sites  that are powerful but do zero linkbuilding they have almost no matching anchor text and a ton of links with domain.com as anchor.

I am not disputing the value of keyword anchor text... but just saying that domain.com anchor text might be better than you think with the words in nearby sentences delivering the goods. .

We put up version A and get data on a large number of visitors.

Then  we make a logical change to the position of the elements to produce version B and run that to get data on a large number of visitors.

These changes are not yet tweaking colors or fonts.  They are testing ad positions or navigation formats.

We watch the data for changes in things like ad yields, number of pageviews, time on site, number of sales - whatever metrics are important to you.

If you have a lot of traffic you can determine if a design is tanking in a short amount of time but if you have small amounts of traffic you might need to run split tests or separate tests for days, weeks or months.

After we have tested a few very different designs we then start tweaking ad colors.  This is done by creating a program to change ad colors hourly with a separate channel for each hour.  On one of my sites my first choice of ad background color was ffffee... then after testing many different colors I learned that ffffee had the lowest yield.

We found up to 10x differences in revenue from different formats and up to 2x differences in revenue from different ad colors.

It is much easier to double your income from your current traffic than it is to double your traffic.

Just an opinion...

I don't use these products.  I believe that any link that can be obtained by anybody using any form of automatic submission is not going to be worth much.  I believe that those sites will be stuffed so full of manipulative links to manipulating sites that their value will be zero.  I honestly would worry that having a bunch of these links would put a bad odor on my site.

If they break up that domain they need to have their heads examined.

If you plan to get a website that big indexed you will need to have a few things in order...

First, you will need thousands of deep links that connect to hub pages deep within the site.  These will force spiders down there and make them chew their way out through the unindexed pages.  These must be permanent links.  If you remove them then spiders will stop visiting and google will forget your pages.  For a 10 million page site you will need thousands of links hitting thousands of hub pages.

Second, for a site this big.... are you going to have substantive amounts of unique content?  If your pages are made from a cookie cutter and look like this....

"yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada SEO job in Paris yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada send application to Joseph Blowe, 11 Anystreet, Paris, France yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yadayada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada"

.... then Google will index these pages, then a few weeks to a few months later your entire site might receive a Panda penalty and drop from google.

Finally... all of those links needed to get the site in the index... they need to be Penguin proof.

It is not easy to get a big site in the index.  Google is tired of big cookie cutter sites with no information or yada yada content.  They are quickly toasted these days.

To create www.myurl.com/blog... you will simply upload the wordpress file packet to the /blog folder of your website.  There are lots of informative articles and videos out there that describe this in detail.

Also, there are lots of highly skilled people who will install the software and customize the "look" for you for a small fee.  If you are unfamiliar with this type of work and your blog is an important project, that is what I recommend.

If I owned a company that did plumbing, electrical and air I would call it EgolServices.com and I would have ONE website.

All of the links that any part of that business earned would benefit the entire domain.

And all of the trust that my plumbing staff earned would generate repeat business when the same client needed air.  All of the trust that my electric staff earns would generate repeat business for my plumbers.

Why make clients make separate decisions when you are out there doing good work?

The big air conditioner that you want in the house will probably need a more substantial wiring.   Just call EgolServices and they will take care of it.

I think that this is a nobrainer.  NoBrainer.

I run leaderboard ads above the design, a skyscraper at top left and a rectangle below the first photo in the right column.  All of these are visible above the fold.   My rankings are great in lots of very difficult SERPs.

The important thing is.... These ads to not compete with my content.  My content is clearly visible and perfectly obvious to everyone and anyone who lands on the page.

Also, the ads are not the dumb, irritating, provocative, suggestive stuff that would put off lots of people.

Bottom line... its not HOW MANY.     Instead... it is WHERE and WHAT.

Since you have this site you must be the expert on planning a wedding in Maui?  Is that correct?

If it is then you should be able to prepare the very best guide to planning a wedding there.  It would be a big list of all of the churches, where to get a marriage license, how to hire clergy, where to get gowns, where to get a tux, who are teh photographers, where to get flowers... you get the idea.... this will be the single best one-stop site for anyone who is having a wedding in Maui.

This will be much more than a directory... it will be a guide for how to get things done and an idea source for having a great Maui wedding.  Where to have it outdoors articles, where to have the small ceremony, busy times of year, sunset/sunrise.. .. each of these is an article or a series of articles.   Lots of photos of chapels, outdoor locations, maps, flowers, etc... venues and photographers should cut deals with you for this type of featuring.

That big resource alone should get some links but you can probably figure out a way to get the feature photographers, flower shops, bridal shops, etc. linking to this incredible guide.  You can probably also get some interviews with the media to announce your great website.

This will be a huge amount of work... are you up for it?

I think that wordpress does just as well in the SERPs as a page published on any other platform.  I don't think that it has any magic bullets that can't be done on even a hand-built format such as DreamWeaver.

I think that the more important part of SEO is the selection of topics and categories, the composition of title tags, and the linkage structure of the website.  The most important part is getting quality content and pitching in a way that will make your visitors respond.  Although some might not think that is SEO, it can have a greater impact than a lot of off-page work.

Is this caboose that you propose adding to these pages relevant?

If yes, then add it to the main body of the page.  Why attach it down there where nobody will see it?

If no, then why are you slapping it to the bottom of the page.  Delete it.  If it is valuable content then publish on its own page.

Great advice from Ryan... just tossing one more idea out because he mentioned the "beggar asking for handout" concept....

Something that can be very effective is for a small group of competitors entering into a cooperative effort to help one another.  Three or four working together will have an enormous advantage over everyone else.

Maybe you can get a group of people to work on this site with you.?

My understanding is that pagerank flows into every link on a page.  If the page has a nofollow link then the pagerank into that page is lost.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl0MBeKDXLY

These pages are not needed for the visitor either.  One click less if the form is placed under the review/ratings tab that leads to them.

I think that depends who you ask and how they build their blog into their website.

To me, a blog post is a way to publish quick content.... communicate in a couple of sentences or write a short article that can be done in a hour or two.

Real content (at least to me) is something more substantive - 500 to 5000 words accompanied by photos, charts, data.

If you do a little work to integrate your blog posts into your website then blog posts can be a lot more.  They can be incorporated into FAQs,  used in "related content" boxes that display across your site, be integrated with images and snippets into your category pages, and linked to for "more information" on your product pages... then you have more than a blog, you are using it like valuable content.

I never post great articles on a blog.... post them on a dedicated webpage where you have absolute control over formatting, optimization and appearance.  I envision these articles each having a ton of photos with detailed captions.

Post them as pages on your website, announce them on your blog and promote them on your homepage and all across the rest of your site.

If this was my site I would place that form under a tab.

If you get rid of the review/ratings page and the email to friend page that will decrease the size of your site by a lot of pages.  That will give you a more compact site with a much higher content value per page.

If I dumped pages like these from one of my sites I would be hoping to see my rankings slowly climb a little higher.

I can't guarantee that... It is what I would do myself and what I would hope the result would be.

Good luck if you try it.  I think that there is upside here and I think that the downside is about zero.

Complain to overblog.  Complain to them.

I am not kidding.  Let them know that you are not happy.  Look to see if others are complaining.

Most things they mention in the video is quite contradictory to everything SEOmoz teaches about link building.  I think that this is an answer.

I stopped using these types of pages.

In my opinion my long tail traffic suffered and visitor engagement dropped.

Same content before and after...

This was not an extensive text.  Just a few pages.  But I am not using them anymore.  Instead I am going to build bigass pages, which any noob will know how to use... and will appear more content rich to people who visit.

Thanks.

About ten years ago I sold a lot of stuff on Amazon.  Things were going well.  I was the only person selling a nice selection of items.  Then they started to sell the same items - and sold them at such a low price there was no way for me to make a profit.  Impossible. That was just like working really really hard for someone who would become almost an impossible to beat competitor and dominate your SERPs for the next decade.

I believe that the answer depends upon two things....  1) the goal that you have for this content... and ... 2) the quality of content your writer is producing.

A) If your goal is to spread a message then you should syndicate like mad giving the content, publishing the content and promoting the content  to everybody everywhere who is willing to share it or distribute it.

B) If your goal is to get some links then what you do depends upon the quality of your content.

i) if the quality of your content is "best-on-the-web" in your niche then post it on your own website only and promote in channels that do not require you to give the entire content away.  These include stumble upon, reddit, slashdot, digg, twitter, facebook and more.

ii) if the quality of your content is less than "best-on-the-web" then improve it and do the above

iii) if the quality of your content is really bad then the best thing you can do is give it to your competitor to post on his site

I was originally using on-page anchor links like this...

Brass Widgets

In my opinion these are some of the most powerful on-page optimization elements that you can use, ranking just below the title tag in their effectiveness.   Perhaps removing them caused the rankings drop and putting them back caused the rankings recovery?

When I do this type of clean up I always look at analytics to see how much traffic these pages are receiving.  Are they pulling traffic from search, are the receiving traffic from links, do people who enter my site through other pages consume these articles.

Only after that analysis will I delete those posts.  I often find that some of these pages are valuable and I write updates or completely rewrite them.

Once all of that is done then I delete and redirect.  I feel good about deleting these because they cut dead weight from the site.

You have lots of great content?  Post it on your own site.

Maybe you wrote the content suggested here....

http://www.seomoz.org/q/any-suggestions

If you place content like that on your site let me know about it.  I'll bet you get a few links.

I have three sites with wordpress blogs.  if you have them set up correctly and do proper SEO they can perform great.

Tom... that is some of the best that I have seen in a long time.

Thanks!  

If you post great content about concrete pumps on ezine I would be tempted to grab it and post it on my own site.

The problem with that for you is.... that would immediately give me pages that would overnight be ranking in your SERPs - above your site I bet.

Giving your content away feeds existing competitors and creates new ones.

The only content that I would give away is something so horrible I would like to see it on my competitor's site. 

Lots of people will disagree with me.  I am comfortable with that.

I have used designcontest.com to get redesign images for a website.    That allows me to see design ideas from a lot of people and have the good ones tweaked before making a decision.  I have used it about four times so far. Each time I got a design better than what I could have made myself.

If you do this write a really detailed description of what you want and what you don't want.

I use this only for the "look" of the site.  We then write the code in-house because I don't want to trust that to anyone else.

I have used SiteTuners and thought that they were good.  Learned a lot from them.

1. How can I gain on the domain authority front? (more diverse links?)

I believe that the authority of your domain is more determined by who is linking to YOU rather than if you are linking to a few blogs in the sidebar.

2. Should I no-follow the links on their blog so they don't have hundreds of pages with the same links (most internal) on there site

Why not just remove those links from the sidebar of the post and category pages.  They would still display on the blog homepage but not on the many pages inside.  If you have wordpress this can be done by defining an alternative sidebar for those pages.

The previous version of the site and the new version both have approximately 450 pages. My website developer was careful to implement 301 redirects.

Two comments.

1. If the 301s were done correctly and this site does not have a lot of links then it might take weeks for google to find the 450 new pages, get them indexed and forget the 450 old URLs.

2. Maintaining the rankings requires more than redirects.  If the onpage optimization elements (title, h1, etc.) were not maintained or if they were changed then rankings could tank.  I have seen lots of cases where developer puts the same title tag on every page and rankings tank, or developer puts site in frames, or uses javascript links because he thinks they are cool.

One of my competitors had a redesign done and developer noindexed all the the pages.  It took them a couple weeks to figure it out after the site disappeared - but rankings came back immediately after the fix.  So, technical glitch can cause problems too.

Given the quality of site, make small changes over time. Do not go crazy out of fear of dropping.

These are the words of a confident and experienced General.

In one of my retail niches, in late June, I saw what appeared to me as rankings boosts for manufacturers and big brand sites.

Manufacturers moved up (probably because their name is mentioned repeatedly on every retail site), even though small specialty sites have greater product breadth (they sell all of the widgets made by several manufacturers) and they also have greater content depth than all of the manufacturers combined.

Big brands who sell one or two widgets moved up, even though lots of small expert sites have greater content area expertise, staff who are available by email or phone, and sell every widget made by every manufacturer.

My personal analysis is... there is nothing wrong with my site... something is wrong with Google.  Carry on!

What I would do with them depends upon their quality.

If they are best-on-the-web for their topic I would post on my own site and recruit links into them.

If they are less than best-on-the-web for their topic I would improve them.

If they are really bad I would offer them to a competitor.

OK... Good to know.

I think that an "education" section like that would be a great way to earn some social shares, acquire some links and help customers.  I know that as a GG, yours would be superb.   Good to see you getting into the SEO of your site.

As for the Menus, I left of "golf" to save space and figured google can figure our we are golf as that word is used about a gazillion times in our site.

I would try Robert's suggestion.  I would add that word a couple times in the key places that he suggests.  Those are high caliber ammunition....  and cut back a few of the gazillion others.

We spend all of our effort writing articles for our own site.  We never give them away.  Far too valuable to give them away - and as we see here the promise of links is hollow.

....is like hiring an astronaut, handing them a box of toothpicks and some gunpowder and saying you expect them to land on the moon

ha ha ha... that is really funny.

Thanks for the laugh.

I used to have separate pages for "each color" and other product variations.  However, I changed to one larger page for the entire product group and it has worked better in my opinion.

My memory is actually very bad.... but subjects like concrete pumps and expanded aggregate get my attention.

**....but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products.  Is this true? **

If you start selling a few products you are going to need inventory, shopping cart, credit card processing, PCI certification, secure server, phone support, shipping containers, I could go on for a while longer...

If you want to start selling a few products because you want to get into retail then that is the right reason but if you are going this because somebody says it is good for your SEO, it might not work how they expected.

I have content websites with small stores and small retail websites with content libraries.   I can tell you that the content and not the retail drives the rankings and traffic.

This does not influence my opinion about anything.

1. Google does not calculate DA

2. I have first-hand experience that merging a subdomain into a folder on a domain can have a kickass effect on your rankings.

Consider posting excellent content in a dedicated area of the merchants site..... great articles such as...

"How to select a mountain bike tire for sand, mud, rocky, road or leaf litter surfaces"

"How to change a mountain bike tire in 60 seconds"

A sporting goods site could have hundreds of these articles that answer common customer questions and demonstrate expertise and credibility.  They also sell products such as the tools needed to change that tire.

Mountain bike blogs will link to these articles individually or as a collection if you have done a great job.  Ask them to write one for you and they will link to it bragging (and you get free content).

These will be articles with lots of photos, quotes from experienced riders, short video and more.   They can attract links from mountain bike clubs, manufacturers, bloggers and more.

Sometimes I have wonderful images that are relevant to the topic of an article and become part of the article's content.

I have been posting them below the

but above the content of the article.  These images are big and beautiful and I am certain that people like them.

But, I honestly have the same question that you have.  Is this pushing text content down "TOO FAR FOR GOOGLE"?   I honestly think that my visitors enjoy these images... but they don't determine the rankings of my pages in search.

salivating

I don't know the answer to your question but if you made a page like that and called it "window shopping" it might be kickass for generating sales.

We never give content away.  Never have, and never will.

If you have great content promote it heavily on your own site.  Submit it to sites such as slashdot, stumble, digg, reddit as appropriate.  Make it very easy for visitors to tweet, like and share.  Other than that I don't market my content, instead I spend that time to produce more.

Links accumulate slowly at first but then once you start getting a little traffic the links arrive a bit faster.

That's my experience.

I am confident that the images make a great impression on visitors.  Just, would some assessment done by Google, for example, Panda see them as non-content above the fold.

You never know what google is doing.

You have probably done these but I will ask just in case....

Is your redirect working properly?    You can test it at.. http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php and determine if you have search engine friendly 301.

Is your redirect handling all possible versions of your domain... like www.example.com and example.com?

Is your new domain properly parked on the old domain?

Submit a description of your article to sites such as reddit, stumbleupon, slashdot, digg... there you keep the article on your site and the visitors to reddit or these other sites rate its popularity.

Also, you can contact other websites or bloggers who already link out to great content in your topic area.  If your content is really good then they will want to share your site with their visitors.

Selling on the web is a highly competitive game.  I am a tiny company and big companies crush little companies like me every day.  All they have to do to get into my space is to toss some new products onto their site and upload those pages and they could be kicking mylittleass by Monday morning.  Anybody between you and the heavy weight champion of the world could be showing up in my space within hours.

Kicking mylittleass is the profit growth that my competitor's shareholders are demanding.

So, if I do something like implement a new design and go to a new platform and tweak my UI and a few other things without getting some input from someone who knows more than I do, about different things than I do, and who is watching some of the other methods being used by other people that are getting success then I have really done nothing to improve my competitive position.

I can go into work next week, implement these new things, whistle while I work, sip coffee, stay comfy and think that I am being competitive or I can get a smart person to tell me where I am loafing, kick me in the pants and push me into kicking my biz up a notch.

Every dollar that I have made has been taken from somebody else.  Every single dollar.   That's how it works on the web.  So, if you are not reaching for their throat when they are reaching for yours then you might see your revenue fall by 50% by the end of the month.

Just saying that I get second, and sometimes third opinions on smaller moves than you are talking about for a company that is not that much bigger.   I am writing a check to a consultant almost every month.

I think that it is a lot better to get periodic input than it is to get input only at major changes and that is an awful lot better than to think... "I am a nobody and it really isn't worth paying somebody to tell me how I can kick it up a notch... and I don't want to hear them telling me "you are screwing up here".... "do this differently"....  "you are slacking here"....   If I have that attitude, I'll be a nobody for sure.

The heavyweight champ has a coach.  I think I could use one too.