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If you're following the Google rules, those are paid posts that should be nofollowed. Therefore, if you start to accumulate a lot of them, and you're not asking them to nofollow the links, and they're generally nice reviews, you're running the risk of getting reported as it starts to become obvious that those are solicited reviews. In my opinion, that's an unnecessary risk and there are better ways to get the same exposure, probably for less money. If you're going to give away product and spend they money, I'd focus on targeting blogs that will do a contest to giveaway your product to their audience. If they want to get paid behind the scene to do the giveaway, then that's between you and them, but at least it won't be obvious to the public and your competitors that you spent money to get on that site. That said, one site I have noticed doing reviews is Parent Tested/Parent Approved: http://ptpamedia.com If you're targeting families, that might be worth looking into.

I think the general consensus would be to write your social media profiles to appeal to your audience (good copy etc) rather than search engines. With that said, I think it's really good practice to be consistent across all your social media profiles, the addition of keywords in your profiles will produce 'synergy' across all your SEO efforts. Those bots are getting smarter!

Look at the link profiles of the other sites you're competing with and see where they are getting their backlinks from. You can identify some great link opportunities and it may give you a feel for what looks like a natural link profile in your niche. I think that diversification is the way to go. Don't rely on any one type of links.

Hi, You've got some good answers there with regard to the Facebook links. If you're looking to post images, I'd use pinterest.com. Use the Google Chrome plugin to pin the images directly from your site and you get a do-follow link back. The value of the link is up for debate due the sheer size of the site but I've seen decent traffic levels coming from Pinterest recently. Make sure you write a decent description for each image you pin, engage with other users and I'm sure you'll see results.

If you feel as if you're being "sold" or "double-talked" you probably are. Still kills me to hear that, after calling several SEO companies, this is the impression you have come away with! Appreciate any insight you can give me before I spend any money on SEO work. Thanks so much! I'm a new user and really, really like this community! I'd start with this list: http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/companies/recommended Not all SEO companies operate the way you have described above. You do run a big risk for paid links - some people are willing to take that risk, but it can mean a penalty or significant drop in rankings in the future. My recommendation is to go with a company you feel comfortable talking to, if you ask what their techniques and strategies are, they tell you directly without trying to talk around the issue. They may mention a few specific tactics to obtaining white-hat links which also drive referral traffic.  They'll tell you exactly how they go about getting the links.  Plus rankings, page rank and DA are just another way of "selling" you - a good company will talk conversion, and ROI and how SEO fits into your overall marketing/business plan. -Dan

fair point

You might add "in English" or "en Espanol" to the end of your title to avoid duplicates.

Why does this spam page have such high authority? Andrew's analysis of this subject is right on the money. I will add a couple important points: 1. DA / PA are SEOmoz metrics. They are independent metrics created by SEOmoz. These metrics are not endorsed by Google. 2. DA / PA offer insight into a a web page's backlink profile without regard to any other factors. As I look at the SEOmoz site today, it has a DA of 95. If SEOmoz was to create "The Ultimate Spam Page" and filled it with pure spam (i.e. viagra, buy links, free nude pics, etc), that page's DA would still be 95 because DA is a sitewide metric and applies to all pages on the domain, irregardless of the content on each page. If this web page earned links from SEOs and other websites then the page could have a PA of 63 or more, just like the page you shared. When you refer to the web page as "spam", you are referring to it's content which has nothing to do with it's DA / PA or backlinks.

If search engine robot can't read this information then it means that it is useless for search engine optimization. It will only help to increase your brand name population ! The best way to check is to place an image with your details on your website. Then open Google Webmaster tools open it as a Google bot. I am pretty sure that it can't read this hidden information. Cheers, Russel

Thanks Cyrus, I will see what happens in a couple of weeks with the new release.  Seems like we need to get some links from more authoritative sites.

Hi Ahtisham The sites they publish to are pretty OK (PR 3 or 4). You don't get a list as such but you can see the post and link for each of the links. I believe they have almost 3000 sites to publish to. I use this as a supplement to any other SEO for my clients. Why not try it out? They run a 30 day free trial (no subscription charge). If you want their writers to create a 150 word post and link you'll need to pay $2.50 for each post. I use their writers most of the time and find the posts to be of average quality. Of course you could write 150 word post yourself. Hope that helps

+1 for everything Sha said - no indexed page on your site should be without a paragraph or more of original content, especially if that page's purpose is to aggregate product listings. In terms of on-site optimization this is likely the best use of that employee's time aside from blog or other content creation.

Matt Cutts states that Google discounts them, it does not say there is any exceptions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZKHFQ5JBpI&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL8E8E1B5EF584C448 I would asume that all the rerady made comment plug ins would be know to google and will be discounted, but home made comment systems may work, if they are not no-follow But I woul;d say you are wasting your time

Thanks, but I rather not since the competition is reading this as well

My pleasure. While I'm still thinking about backlink profiles, there's a post by John Doherty about analyzing your backlink profile vs. competitors based upon Domain Authority. I think this is a more worthwhile way to analyze your own backlink profile for spam. I won't speculate if Google is doing anything similar. You can find the article here: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/three-phenomenal-excel-spreadsheets-for-link-analysis/ Also read this follow up post about what a bad backlink DA profile will look like: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/paid-links-backlink-profile-visualized/

Yes, it usually takes weeks or often months to see SEO results.

I soo am wainting for the first "PM me & we talk" posts But on toppic: If you need to buy links, than see what domains/pages are also ranking for your targeted keywords and directly contact those webmasters and see what you can work out. Skip Teliad et al. There are bloggers here and there who will link to you for a free sample of your product or some paid article without disclosing it. But beware: you are in violation of Google's webmaster rules.

Don't have much more to add to what David said here (and Egol's excellent replies below). I would check out http://raventools.com/blog/mozcon-2011-how-to-earn-the-links-the-lazy-link-builders-buy/ and Wil's blog on http://www.seerinteractive.com - he gives more great advice around how to beat black hats with white hat tactics.

Thanks for promoting it, just wanted to drop a correction that it's really MyBlogGuest.com