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Anchor Text usage seems to be a strong factor in the first version of Penguin. If you're using too many and the press releases get widely picked up, then yes, I'd say you are vulnerable to be being caught up with Penguin.
When I do press releases, I tend to link with Domain.com, www.domain.com or just "domain" ..when referencing the homepage. For internal pages i use naked urls ..which are just links that use the URL as anchor text -> http://www.domain.com/internal-page.
Neither ranks better than the other. Wordpress produces HTML pages and can even produce .html permalinks. Google treats them the same.
The benefit of using Wordpress (or any CMS) is that it makes it easier to manage the content and structure of the website. Some say Google has preference for Wordpress but that's only because out of the box with even the default theme, it meets many basic seo requirements. That ..and about 15% of all websites use it.
It really does not matter. But if given the choice, I would go with either the .net or .org. And keep an eye on the .com in case it drops.
Or better yet, I'd try to pick a brandable domain where I can register all the TLDs to secure it. Having all the keywords in your domain isn't worth much these days. Once users start to associate your unique name to "super domain", the benefits will be multi-fold.
I would avoid the .info and the OPT1 for the same reason. Marketers abuse them.
"Do the subdomains of a network contribute any increased value to the Root Domain?"
Short answer, yes.
Google published this today actually.
You know they are bad ? Try to get as many as possible removed. And THEN Disavow the rest. I stress the importance of actually getting some removed. I don't think you'll be successful in just disavowing all those thousands of links alone.
So yeah, those links may have been helping the site to rank before ..but that's not going to happen again. You need to get rid of them, while also attracting new links at the same time.
I don't think you should do it by screen size.
If you're using Wordpress, then install W3 Total Cache.
Among MANY other essential things, it will allow you redirect visitors based on user-agent to EITHER:
1. another theme that's better suited to particular sets of users (for example, one wordpress theme for mobile, and one for tablets, one specially for iOS devices, etc).
2. or set it to "pass through" so you can handle mobile management with another plugin like "Mobile Smart", which i use.
3. or set it redirect to m.domain.com which is what you want.
If you do the 301 redirect, it probably will not hurt you.
But why though ? You already have links pointing to that version of the URL. It seems unnecessary that you are wanting to change now ?
I actually discovered today one benefit of running www. If you ever decide that you want to serve cookie-less files on a sub-domain, having a no-www creates problems.
This is not something you want to leave up to automation. You need human input to decide whether a link is bad. Disavowing innocent links will do more harm than good.
So you have to go through your link profile and focus on the domains that link to you the most, then move onto the ones that link to you with non-branded anchor text.
They won't. It seems DMCA requests are handled differently for those sites and not counted the same way.
...and even if you were counted, you have to remember this isn't a "penalty". I don't understand why SEL is calling it a penalty when the official announcement says it'll be one of the 200+ signals.
So I think it's an algo factor. Just like Site Speed is a factor. Slow sites still rank today because there's 200+ other factors also being considered.
Years worth of free material here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4
Most of it is all about earning your links and position in SERPs.
As for the Q1.
The majority of items in that list should be avoided. With things like Guest Posts, Press Releases and Directory submissions, it's very easy to go overboard. Personally,
I avoid "guest posting" on poor sites, or sites that don't have traffic, or sites which seem to only publish guest posts.
With press releases, your goal isn't to get a link from prweb.com or prnewswire. Those links are worthless. Yes you read right. Your goal is to raise awareness and get people to take action on the content of your release. That rules out all the free or cheap press release sites since humans don't read them.
There are less than a dozen general directories that are worth submitting to. Definitely avoid anything that even smells like mass submission. In addition to those few like Yahoo, DMOZ, maybe business.com, botw.org ..look at smaller, specialized niche directories.
Avoid article directories, period. There were a bad idea from the start, they're even worse now.
Infographics ? I'd try not to overdo it. Definitely avoid trying to get anchor text in there.
Yes you are correct.
Tell your client to run far. That SEO has no clue, and is completely wrong. Maybe he's thinking that out of box Wordpress doesn't have Title or Meta Tag management ? That's solvable with Wordpress SEO. [highly recommended]
Wordpress outputs HTML.
The "Not Selected" isn't cumulative. The "Ever Crawled" is though.
I have a large Wordpress content site. It was hit by Panda on a very same day that my "not selected" multiplied by 8. I don't think it was a coincidence, and I didn't make any large changes to the site besides the regular addition of about 10 posts per week.
I've been able to effect a downward movement on the not selected count by removing/redirecting things like "replytocom" variable URLs in the comments section;reworking print and email versions of each article, etc. It very slow though, only reducing by an average of 100 per week.
Needless to say, I think the not selected metric means quite alot.
Sites that lift content from today's article directories are not sites worth getting a link from.
If you want to distribute content, find sites and building relationships with people who are willing to accept your content directly.
You're not gonna get any message in WMT.
My honest advice ? The content is poor, bare minimum if you will. You made a poor choice in selecting a prefixed exact match domain. Your backlinks don't help matters much either.
The domain is done. Cut your losses, use the money you made while it lasted to start a website that truly offers value. Hint: real value doesn't mean 'copyscape passed'.
Well I think you should focus less on making it seem "more natural", and actually allow it to be natural. Once you do that, there's no mixing and measuring anchor text as if you're a chemist. No worrying about ratios to dilute and all that nonsense.
But that's just me.
I don't think Rand has ever said that going greyhat or blackhat doesn't work, or isn't alive. The real question is ..for how long ? Those doing Greyhat/Blackhat usually understand the risks and are content to reap the short-term rewards for as long as they can. When they lose, they are start over OR they switch to the next thing that works. There will always be that "next thing" that works for now.
What I think Rand endorses ..is a strategy where you're not chasing the algo or trying to artificially create popularity. It takes longer, is harder ..but almost always is better way to go.
I'd say, yes. nav links and their anchor text would be considered if it's first in the HTML of the document ...even if that nav link is a child or grandchild.
It's really just speculation about what Google counts and I would not worry about it. Their systems are now smart enough to weigh links that appear in nav and bodycontent appropriately. Their systems try to mimic what real users want, so just do what's best for users and you'll be rewarded.
First, you cannot prevent link juice from being distributed or spent by nofollowing a link. The link juice still flows, it just doesn't go anywhere ..it just evaporates.
Second, nofollow is like saying you don't trust this page or you can't vouch for it. Why would you tell Google that you don't trust your own pages ? For that reason, I never use nofollow on internal links.
Third, I don't think you even need to worry about those pages getting juice. It's natural. It might be even a quality signal in Google's algos if they can see that you have a contact page, or privacy policy, or details like an address or telephone number on the about page. Bad sites tend to not have those things.
Advantage? It reduces unnecessary overhead and it's one of many little tweaks you can make to ensure your site is the fastest it can be.
If you have wordpress setup on www.domain.com, then all your static files (images, css, js) are served along with cookies set on the domain.
So the basic solution is the create a subdomain of your main domain (or register a whole new domain just for it) and server your static files from that domain.
I use W3 Total Cache configured to serve all static files from a subdomain which is on Amazon Cloudfront. W3 automatically rewrites all your theme and images path to the new subdomain. It's really easy to setup.
Check these out:
http://www.allthingsdemocrat.com/w3-total-cache-cookieless-subdomain-godaddy-shared-hosting/
http://www.riyaz.net/blogging/setup-own-cdn/890/
In addition to that, I had make tweaks to my Google analytics script to ensure it doesn't set cookies on my cookieless sub-domain.