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Great point Ann. Obviously a lot depends on the motive when it comes to link building and in the real world you can't just measure your return on investment by the number of links... I suspect that building connections between your own guest posts also increases the chances that people will want to find out more about what you have to say than if they just read one post somewhere. Pitty you can't see the path people have travelled to arrive on your site beyond the immediate referrer.

Interesting. I was under the impression that a "like" now counted for at least some of the value of a link. Not true?

Do realize one thing Alessio.  Asking a question like that here in a website/SEO authority site where nobody wants to ruin their reputation, you'll probably never get someone to say: _F*ck yah!  Go and do as much Black Hat as you can!  It' works!  _ You know, over the years, I've seen a lot of people jumping into the arena of SEO and asking questions similar to yours.  I did.  When I first got into the business, a guy who I considered someone who's VERY ethical and incredibly White Hat taught me a strategy that probably might be considered Gray or at least spammy in terms of today's standards. Frankly, we found a bit of a jump due to blog commenting in our initial days and we rank quite high because of it, but some would argue that's spammy as well.  At the same time, writing comments on blogs that add to the conversation are supposedly a "contribution" vs. spam.  At the same time, I don't know if I would be or would have been commenting as much to blogs as I did in the past. I had a conversation with a very highly respected SEO who speaks at some of the largest conferences in the world and also is one of the top people in a company SEOMoz absolutely loves, but we agreed that some of the "old strategies" work and are still applied.  Do we do them 100% of the time?  No.  But will we say we don't do them?  I'll let you figure that one out. I recommend to clients all the time to do link building in the most white hat, natural ways possible, but guess what?  They rarely follow up on those strategies even if we give them everything it takes to apply them.  However, I would avoid doing things like cloaking and anything that is extremely black hat.  However, do note that you'll usually get answers from people saying stick with doing things as "white hat" as possible.  Who wants to take a beating here proclaiming the opposite?

Oooh.  I like the idea of adding internal links to the page.  Thanks.

Thanks Andrew. Your help is always appreciated.

Hi Schmeetz, Thanks for clarifying that we are talking about a drop of your Local Organic rankings and not your Place Page. Obviously, the biggest shakeup happening right now is what's being called Panda 3.2. See: http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-3-2-update-confirmed-109321 Is there any chance you've got thin or duplicate content on your city landing pages?

Hi Samyao, Did our responses help answer your question, or do you still have more questions?

Maybe I didn't understand: but if it's a PDF, it's not html and the source is not visible–so how does that help your link? Or are people taking the info from the PDF and typing it into their site? It sounds like a great idea, just want to understand. Afshin Apples of Gold

Well said Oracle.

Thank you. It was indeed helpful.

Every Link is not necessarily counted.... If the Blog comment was a nofollow outside of his niche, and on a completely irrelevant subject, it can't necessarily "hurt" but it sure wont help. Maybe back in the days when Authority was based solely on the amount of links or Page Rank. But sorry, from a long term Internet Marketing and Strategy perspective it is a waste of money to get 60% Nofollow blog comments, especially since it was done by someone who there is no idea what he was posting. So maybe if you just want to make your clients do good for a few weeks or even months, but as a longterm strategy paying someone to do this is a wasted effort in the grand scheme/big picture. Where you are correct, a link is a link in the fact that someone looking for a service may see the post and if it is genuine and on topic you may get residual traffic, or even a conversion. But as a strict link building tactic... It is very weak and money could be alloted to other places for more return on investment. It is not always about just gaining links... it is about Return on the money invested. SO in the aspect of return, it was a waste of money, but sure your right, he gained a few links.....

yes..we all make mistakes...I've made many. It's good to learn from them and other peoples. Thanks..Yes.. I will always test throughly.

Hi Mihaly, The life live in Dubai is great It is a perfect place for me since I don't like winter time at all. It is a beautiful city with a great culture and places to see and enjoy! If you get a chance in future to visit Dubai, don't lose it! Business here growth very fast, only during one year there are around 20 SEO companies appear on the market And all of them pretend that they are Professionals. Cheers, Russel

I really don't think I should be pointing fingers here.

I don't necessarily have the answer for you but I can tell you that you ABSOLUTELY should NOT get into Site Optimization with MVT or A/B.  You want to make sure that your tests reach statistical significance and to do this you need numbers.  If her conversion rate is only 5-10% of all visitors then you can expect that only 10-20 people a month actually purchase a product.  Even if she has 50% conversion rate you are only looking 100 conversions a month.  That is fairly insubstantial ESPECIALLY when you are considering a MVT.  At a very minimum when I am testing on a clients site I need to see 150+ conversions and even then I do not feel very comfortable in making a conclusion unless the lifts are enormous enough to extremely outweigh the interval/margin or error. Links are going to help quite a bit as well as making sure that there are no big impediments to her site ranking well, hence a site audit.  I would also strongly consider looking at some pretty interesting techniques in doing local to attract business.  Does she have a B&M store as well?  If so look at hosting a geocache.  She might look at signing up with Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and trying to find some articles she could help out with.  Try and think outside the box.  Also just revisit a lot of the basics to validate that everything is done as well as it could be.  But I highly recommend that until traffic picks up, you stay away from testing or at the very least MVT.  You need confidence to choose a winner, statistical confidence.

Nailed it. I hate content spinning and software to do it. The last company I worked for (ch e ck n Go) was developing a huge script that would rip thousands of pages of content, replace various words with theirs, put in their links, and mass publish hundreds to thousands of these pages a day. Very unethical and very pathetic. Write high quality content and do the work.