Questions[seo](server)

An SEO consultant has asked (demanded) credentials to the web environment so he can do ... Whatever it is that they do.

I'm new to the company but an experienced Systems Engineer. I've just now been brought into this situation, but my reaction to giving him credentials is a pretty solid "No" unless he can provide a compelling reason, which is yet forthcoming. Before I was brought into this, he had been provided an archive of the relevant files, but he said that this was insufficient.

The (admittedly) little that I know about SEO tells me that he should be able to get everything that he wants should be able to be gathered from view source or a copy of the files, and we would implement his changes in a production deploy after review.

I have a handful of (content unrelated) sites with decent PRs and I'm considering hosting them all on the same server. I've heard that if you do this, internal linking between two seperate domains on that server may be seen as less "valid" by Google in PageRank terms (since you obviously own both of the sites as they share an IP address).

Anyone have any experience in this? I'd love to save some hosting cash by consolidating, but not at the expense of losing the ability to link my sites together powerfully.

I am setting up a website for a client that I will be hosting and maintaining, and I am trying to determine what will be the most pain free setup. My thought is to do the following:

1. Set up the clients domain at client.mydomain.com
2. Have the client update their DNS records for *.client.com to CNAME client.mydomain.com

From a practical perspective, this feels best for me because then I don't have to maintain access to their DNS control panel especially if they want to do other things with it. Furthermore, if I decide I need to move the website to a different host, I can do it seamlessly without their even knowing just by updating where client.mydomain.com points.

This being said, my concern is that I will affect the SEO for client.com. If I impact SEO at all, I will just go with the A-Record route and call it good, but if there is no impact, the CNAME route seems nicer to me.

Thoughts?

(As an aside, I do have Google Maps included in this app, and the API key is yelling at me when I hit the app from a different tld... client.mydomain.com and client.com. Is there a way to ask for a single google API key that can work with CNAME'd domains? I can work this out in code, but didn't know if there was a simpler solution.)

I used the technique explained here for IIS (http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php), but this appears to result in an infinite loop when applied to "/index.htm" and redirected to "/". Is there another way to do this in IIS so that it doesn't loop infinitely?

This page is static HTML, so I can't implement an ASP or ASP.net solution. Any ideas?

I need to return a 503 status code from one of my sites while it's down for maintenance, in the time-honoured SE_firendly fashion. I can't seem to work out how to do this without invoking external scripts, which I'd rather avoid.

Is there an apache directive which will allow me to return an arbitrary HTTP status code without resorting to hacks like invoking a php script which sets the status header?