No. No correlation with SEO.

However the same way you block your temp or admin folder, there is no need in letting any bot crawling your cgi-bin folder.

Cgi-bin folder holds executable file - you don't want external sources to see it anyway - it's "very" private from security reasons. You need more then knowing what's inside the folder to do harm but keeping it hidden is the wise call. Better safe then sorry.

So basically you got the answer as it dosen't harm or help as far as rankings BUT there is a way to use it either in your advantage or disadvantage.

It can also give away your main keywords to competitors - and that's not good.

For high competitive websites (where competitors are following movements and trying to figure things out )  I am using the keywords metatags to channel competitors in a different directions by putting there other keywords (still somehow related) and not the keywords that particular page is targeting.

Case study:

I have an account and soon after placing some "stupid" keywords in the keyword tag we've notice on page changes in a major competitor for those keywords that are not really good (conversion, volume etc) but probably on the idea that if the #1 is doing it it must be important

Does Bing support rel="canonical" HTTP Headers?

** No.

Bing posted: "This tag will be interpreted as a hint by Live Search, not as a command. We'll evaluate this in the context of all the other information we know about the website and try and make the best determination<a> of the canonical URL</a>. This will help us handle any potential implementation errors or abuse of this tag."

Hi,

Yes the footer links are sitewide.

** Then I am sure those are not all 100% relevant for every page and you are spliting the Page Rank juice / equity / votes to all of the pages linked for all pages.

I would suggest to keep in the footer:

• links that user can actually click on and links to releveant pages vs the pages they are placed on

• links that are not in the page (menu, body, side bars etc)

Yes all the links (apart from the corporate links are duplicated in the menubar under the page header.

** They it will make sense to keep there only the ones that are really important not all of them. And again, like stated above, you are spliting the votes to all links per page no matter what if the links are duplicated or not. More then that the anchor text of the footer links won't matter anyway as only the first one is taken in consideration and since the other are above those will be considered.

Hi,

For sure you won't get a penalty for having too many links in the footer. More then that you don't have that many anyway.

Is this footer site wide ? ( on all pages of the site ). A good idea is to have a more heavy footer on the home page only and have a more dedicated version on the inner pages.

Are those link also available in the body of the page / pages since you do have some clicks on those but GA shows the links CTR overall not per individual links so that means maybe the users are not actually clicking on the links in the fotter if those are also available in the header, body side bars etc.

If yes, that will "harm" you in the way that you split all internal link equity to all links per page including those in the footer - so as far as structure is not really a good idea as I am sure some pages that are linked from your pages - all around - including the footer are more important then others but you are actually diluting those "votes" by having that many links per page all around.

Again, the bottom line is that there is no way you will get a penalty but:

• google might not follow all links if you don't have enough authority

• some of your important pages won't get the needed "attention" due to the fact that you are linking to that many pages from all pages of your site.

if the articles are good - then there just might be value to the user . Depending on the niche / industry those old articles could be very important.

Google dosen't like those as you probably have a lot of impression but no clicks (so mainly no traffic) or maybe the "score" is bad (bounce rate - not Google analytics bounce rate, but Google's bounce rate - if they bounce to serps that is).

Since you got hit by panda, in my opinion, I see two options:

1. No index those old pages. The users can still get tho those by navigation, site search etc but google won't see them. Google is fine with having content (old, poor, thin etc) if it's not in the index. I work with a site that has several million pages and 80% is no index - everything is fine now (they also got hit by Panda).

2. Merge those pages into rich, cool, fresh topic pages (see new york time topic pages sample - search for it - I think there is also an seomoz post - a whiteboard friday about it). This is a good approach and if you manage to merge those old pages with some new content you will be fine. Topic pages are great as an anti panda tool !

If you merge the pages into topic pages do that based on a simple flow:

1. identify a group of pages that covers the same topic.

2. identify the page that has the highest authority of all.

3. Change this page into the topic page - keep the url.

4. Merge the other into this page (based on your new topic page structure and flow)

5. 301 redirect the others to this one

6. build a separat xml sitemaps with all those pages and load it up to WMT. Monitor it.

7. Build some links to some of those landing pages, get some minimum social signals to those - to a few (depending on the number). Build an index typoe of page with those topic pages or some of them (user friendly one/ ones) and use those as target to build some links to send the 'love'.

Hope it helps - just some ideas.