Mike, 
Thanks for this, I personally found it helpful. I like the idea of the Google News Plugin and will test it out on a small site.
Good info,

Robert

If you understand that the requirement for the three or more digits is around insuring that there is a unique page for each individual article. So if you look at: www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review, It appears to me that the second 360 is still associated with reviews of games associated with XBox 360. The fifa-12-review appears to be a soccer game (I have never played on one of those things I am an intelligent worker and not involved in any type of warfare even modern).

So, the second where you have review 234 does work because  the three digit number appears to give a unique numeric identifier to that article. (Note if a 4 digit number it cannot start with 199 or 200).

In the event there is something that would prevent you from using this convention, you can always create a news Sitemap. Google Support News Sitemap.

Hope this helps, best,

Edit: missed seo question: It has a positive effect on SEO as it is following Google's convention. (One question is whether or not having a news sitemap would give more credence/weight as a news site versus the unique identifier???) My guess is it would.

It is better than the profession not getting old... The profession, for me, is one in which you are continually learning, by virtue of that you never get old...

Best to you, LMK if I can help.

Michelleh

I find your question quite interesting. My thought would be (as I have never done keyword research based on images) that you would still rely on the Adwords Keyword tool. I took aspirin and searched on it plus picture, pictures, image, images and aspirins with same. Aspirin picture was most searched upon.

I searched without personalization in Google images and then did same in Google search. The same image came up first. I don't know that allows for any conclusions as to keywords for the images, but it would appear on a minute test that one would use the same keywords for images as for regular and then the same keyword tools.

Not sure if it helps, but I would love to know what brought this up and to see other answers.
Best

Robert

We deal with a few law firms and I can understand all your concerns. Understand that some of these need to be answered by the partners though. (If I am paying an associate, I do not want them advertising themselves as per se I want them working for the firm. Now on to your questions:

Social Media - For most, I would say be careful with them mixing their personal facebook, etc with their professional. I recommend what you have there with links from the home page. I would not recommend having associates with links to their personal from the firm site.

YouTube: Post it to the firm and give attribution to the individual attorney. Again, you need to get the partners in on this discussion. The associates are working for the firm and unless the partners want the other, you are in the middle of an issue at some point.

Here is where you can make everyone win though: Google Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local: Do an owner verified for the firm and for each attorney in the firm. Then do as much as you can with the citation sites as well. This will be good for all.

Hope it helps you out.

Gosh guys way to heat up the seemingly boring I like it.

Everyone makes interesting points. Alan, as always knows the code back and forth. Ben makes a good point as well (moderation, nothing wrong with that in SEO). I would have to say that when it comes to 301 redirects, as an agency that does a few site redesigns, client purchases of sites, etc. we do a few redirects. We also have clients who end up with multiple sites for one reason or another and we convince them to "merge." Here is what I know of 301 redirects. The common belief is that you lose up to 10% of the juice with a 301. My experience has been that it is not even close. When 301's are done appropriately (url to url in .htaccess say for apache) we do not see more than a 1 to 2% loss. That is from experience and not theory.

That said, I like what Alan says regarding Matt Cutts...If it was his $$ on the line. Understand that Matt has to be Googles non committal answerer of things SEO. How many times do you here him say Google absolutely does this and you should absolutely do that?

Using the one keyword _ versus the two keyword - , for me it would come down to if my _ were ranking really well and making me money, there would have to be some component of that ranking that is based on the keyword. Therefore, in spite of what I know about a 301, I would not change it. If it is there and not making me $$ I am going to go with a best practice in my opinion of hyphen vs. Underscore and make the 301.

you guys are fun, hope I added something.

Best to all,

Sharna

MozRank is based on a lot of factors, but the key will be links for your new site. With OSE, the crawls take place roughly every four weeks and the last crawl was roughly a week ago. The next will be in about 3 weeks. 
Along with that, due to the depth of the web and resources (moz is cool, but Google is HUGE), OSE is looking at roughly the top 25% of links. So, if you have a link from another site that is relatively low in links of value, it will likely not show. You must continue to get links.
Make sure you have submitted sitemap to Google and Bing as well and give it a bit of time.

Best

Authority, You just named the issue. Changed from US to Europe. I am assuming the site is in English, what country are you targeting?

If US, and you changed to Europe, you would have had to go into GWMT and change language settings to EN-US. As a .com is not a ccTLD, and a server residing in Europe will be presumed to be targeting there, if you are not set up with GWMT as EN-US, your rankings will drop for a US search.

So, now, no matter what you are targeting, go into GWMT and go to site config, settings, language and choose the correct language config. Even if you are US and you are hosted in US, I urge you to insure this is done.

LMK

Authority

This may be implied or I may be missing something, but as to your links and 301's, if you are saying you did a single 301 of http://www.website.com to http://www.website.com/index.php then your rankings drop is because of that. For each url with links, you need to do the redirect of .com/url-a, url-b, etc. to .com/url-a/index.php, .com/url-b to .com/url-b/index.php, and so forth. This should be done in the .htaccess file. You will not transfer link juice by tranferring domain to domain, etc. You must do it url to url.

Hope it helps.

Amosnet,

Where the image resides as a static file does not matter. Whether served by the CDN or your site, any image still needs to have good alt text associated with it (describe the image as opposed to 33 keywords). The CDN will probably offer some benefit (especially if you have a lot of JS or images, etc.) as it should increase page load speed. I do not know how much value is allotted, but I do know once you start going over about 5 sec. it begins to affect adwords. We try to keep all or ours to about 2 to 3 sec. max.

Best