Is it dangerous to have your H1 tag and your title the exact same thing?  My thought was that it's not be the best use of space, but that it couldn't cause harm.

What do you think?

Adwords really don't have any effect on your site's rankings at all.  The links that come from the ads are nofollowed.

A quick look at your backlink profile shows that you've got a lot of followed footer links containing the anchor text "web design".  This type of tactic used to work at one time but no longer works and in some cases can get you penalized.

The best thing you can do is analyze your Analytics and see when you started to lose traffic for keyword phrases containing "web design".  There's a good chance it happened Apr 24, May 25 or Oct 5 which were Penguin dates.

It's also not a bad idea to check WMT for a manual unnatural links warning just in case.

If this is Penguin, then some people who have had Penguin issues because of footer links like this have been able to recover.  Recovery in general would involve having each of these sites nofollow the link (or potentially change it to something like your url, but this is debatable).

Then, when there is another Penguin refresh you should see some type of recovery.  BUT, if this type of link was your only type of link and you don't have much of a natural link profile then you may not rank after all.  You may need to start doing some things to earn natural links.

If you do have the footer links nofollowed/changed, you won't see any improvement until Google refreshes Penguin again which could be anywhere from today to months from now.

It's just a theory, but I think that Panda was not really an algorithm update but rather a conspiracy.

Google went out of their way to announce that a new algorithm was being rolled out.  The word on the street was that content farms would be affected.  Low quality sites would be affected.  Scrapers would be affected.  So, everyone with decent sites sat back and said, "Ah...this will be good...my rankings will increase."

And then, the word started coming in that some really good sites took a massive hit.  We've got a lot of theories on what could be causing the hit, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious fix.

Many of the key factors that have been suggested causes of a site to look bad in Panda's eyes are present on one of my sites, but this site actually increased in rankings after Panda.

So, this is my theory:  I think that Google made some random changes that made no sense.  They made changes that would cause some scraper sites to go down but they also knew that many decent sites would decline as well.

Why would they do this?  The result is fantastic in Google's eyes.  They have the whole world of web design doing all they can to create the BEST quality site possible.  People are removing duplicate content, reducing ad clutter and generally creating the best site possible.  And this, is the goal of Larry Page and Sergey Brin...to make it so that Google gives the user the BEST possible sites to match their query.

I think that a month or so from now there will be a sudden shift in the algo again and many of those decent sites will have their good rankings back again.  The site owners will think it's because they put hard work into creating good quality, so they will be happy.  And Google will be happy because the web is a better place.

What do you think?

Thanks Rand!  This really makes sense to me.

I've always considered H1 tags a non-entity when it comes to SEO.  I write my H1 tags to add a headline to help the user understand what the page is about.  But my title is really written primarily for search engines (with the idea that it needs to make sense for the reader as well.)

I think almost all of us have considered this strategy.  I know when I first started out I had a main niche and then I bought up a bunch of keyword rich domains and created microsites.  The thing is that these are rarely helpful at all.

A link from a site is only going to add significant value if that site itself is a good one in Google's eyes.  So, a link from a brand new site with no backlinks itself is not going to be worth much.  And, if this microsite is likely to accumulate natural backlinks, you'd get much more value if those backlinks were actually pointing to your main site.

The way I look at it is this - if you create links yourself, then they usually aren't worth much.  One of the main points of Google's evolving algorithm is trying to determine which links are worthy and which are not.  So, you'll find that self-made links are rarely helpful.

I'd put that time and effort into putting content on your main site and then alerting other webmasters of your awesome content.