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P My guess is that it's highly likely they are being linked to arbitrarily by the asian sites. It happens. Often these sites are just spamming out links for their own ends and no one went after them. As to value to an English speaking site, I don't believe if you are looking at it in a wide view perspective that it will assist them much. Best, Robert

Hi, Depending on the nature of the blog and size of your site, I would consider creating the blog as a folder within your site. Having a blog that refers to your business quite a bit is best found under your domain as it provides a great deal of long tail keywords, will provide a lot of internal linking which done right improves usability and most importantly it gives your site breadth and depth,  giving it an air of authority. As for mass uploads and reduced man hours.  Firstly, in my mind the only blogging platform that excels at optimised layout is wordpress. Although you can copy paste content from editors (like word), I would highly recommend you give the relevant parties their own author logins,  teach them all the editing options and style requirements and have them draft everything in wordpress. For added consistency, have an editor (a nominated person) look over it to ensure each article has the same look and feel before publishing. If it is simply pre written documents,  I would suggest copy/pasting them into a plain text editor eg. Notepad and copy/paying them to wordpress.  This will remove the formatting. To save on the man hours, employ someone of oDesk to do the grunt work. Articles uploaded from Word and other word processing applications often paste poorly as they have a number of hidden tags that leave a mess of styles. Dan

As it says on the tin: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-clarifies-url-shortenings-impact-on-seo/29312/

Excellent point on the anchor text.  I reviewed a number of high ranking sites with DA of 95+ that use these links in the footer and they only use the site name in the anchor text. Best, Christopher

If your main domain ranks very well, and your blog on a separate domain and separate IP ranks well (presuming the blog has link juice of it's own), here's what I would consider: 1. How competitive is the niche you are trying to rank ? I am presuming it's finance based of your profile. 2. If you created 2 articles, similar topics and posted 1 on the blog and 1 on the website, which would rank better and why. If the page on your site outranks your blog page, for same/similar keywords, you should consider merging the blog into your main website and do 301 redirects from the blog to your new URL. EG: RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/blog/$1 I hope this helps.

anchor text will never die as long as Google uses links as a major ranking factor in their algorithm. Think extremely varied long tail anchor texts.

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=link+building. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo The above URL's will get you started. Link building is not a simple as submitting a link here and there. Its better to understand the process as a whole and your view on link building will be less daunting. There are many different ways to go about building links and wont bore you here. Just take your time and soak up as much knowledge on the topic as you can. (then come back here and ask more questions! Greg

Hi Keri, I've used Small SEO Tools too, and have found that it doesn't pick up on everything. Copyscape and Duplichecker are the 2 best in my opinion. I think it would be good if SEOmoz have a duplicate content checker for PRO members.

I've seen other people talk about a dip then a bigger rise. I don't know from personal experience though, as I tend to monitor my traffic and conversions rather than rankings. How is your traffic doing?

Philip SEOmoz is a great help for local and in our firm we have a saying we use with every new client. If you only have a little to spend, wait on everything else and let us get local tight for you. We have a local coordinator who stays on top of local and insure we get it right. On moz there are several who have a ton of Local knowledge and as an associate, Miriam, is invaluable. You can also read Mike Blumenthal, etc. for a ton of data. Hope it helps, best to you and your clients.

My most recent client for unnatural links penalty removal is one that was penalized because of reciprocal linking, mostly on links and resource pages. Doing a couple of link exchanges via a links page is not going to get you a penalty.  But, the Webmaster Guidelines say that you can be penalized for doing excessive link exchange "You link to me and I'll link to you".  They don't say what is considered excessive though. Does this mean you have to get rid of your links page completely?  Not necessarily.  But you have to be careful.  Make sure your links are all relevant.  For example, if a real estate site has a resources page that includes links to flower shops, pet shops and casinos, then this is a red flag for a page that is existing just for the purpose of linking out.  Similarly, if you are getting links back from sites that are totally not related to you then this can be a red flag. It is ok to have a resource page (or to be mentioned on one) when it makes sense and when there aren't LOADS of links on the page. A healthy resource page will not be completely made up of reciprocal links but will also include links to government sites and authority sites in your niche. A better option, though, when trying to exchange links is to exchange guest posts.  Be careful to provide and publish only good quality stuff though....something that your readers will appreciate.  If you have your own blog and provide content for your readers then, when you want to exchange links, ask a partner to write an article for your blog and in return you can do the same.  Be careful not to produce patterns.  For example, don't end every single guest post with the same author bio and anchor texted keywords.  If possible, try to get a link back to your site within the body of the post and not in an author bio.  And again, be careful with your anchor text.

Takeshi is right, but I'll chime in that the whole purpose of SEO is to increase traffic to one's website. It follows that if your targeted blog comments produce an increase in traffic, then they have boosted your SEO program. The link Takeshi sent is a fantastic reference. I highly recommend it also.  It is one of my favorite blog posts of all time and I refer to it often. He is right that there are probably some quicker "wins" in terms of tactics (in comparison to blog commenting) on that list. Cheers! Dana

"bunch of URLs which doesn't have even a single inbound link to them, but ranks #1 on Google for so many competitive keywords"  ... competitive keywords ranking at #1 without ANY backlinks?  I find this hard to believe, but I'll be happy to be proven wrong.  Share some?

Even with a good article approved by ezine or hubpage or ehow with backlink in it is bad? I am not saying creating an article,spinning it and submitting it to hundred plus sites.A single article with submission to Top Article directories like Ezine,Hubpages. One article for one Article site.

Hi IrvinI meant something like http://linklicious.me/ Have you used a similar service ? Is it legit? Would it negatively affect my rankings? Thanks. Sherif

If I built  log network for my own personal use(no link selling) would this be a white hat or blackhat thing? The content would be hand written, but the link won't always be relevant to the niche. Can anyone offer some insight?

Thanks for your help Tommy