Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I understand, we can format the pages on the blog as we want. That is the answer that I was looking for.  Thanks!

SEO is always for the long run. PPC will take you there but If you don't have enough budget. PPC in 1 year will go deep into your pockets and If you don't do well in PPC campaigns you're money will just be wasted. Is "to be found in search engines" the answer? Yes, but SEO is not all about being found in search engine. SEO is about building brands that can be considered as an authority on its niche. Brands that last in people's mind. Is link building a waste of time and money? Yes and No. Yes - If you are building links that aren't meant for the long run then they will be just waste. No - if you know how to build links that lasts such as quality content, themed link building campaigns, guest posts and other efforts that raise brand awareness into further level. _**Is it better to just concentrate on quality content?  **_The word "just concentrate" made me pick NO as an answer.  You need to explore every possibilities when you are doing SEO. Just don't break the rules. I love the fact that many SEO do experiments and share their success stories everywhere.

Jason, actually I prefer softball questions Value depends on what you need and want. With Yahoo directory if you look at $299 and then look at what can be obtained at that cost for other directories or submissions it might not be. But, if you have a single site that you want to promote, are in need of quality level of Yahoo, etc. it might be a good spend.  In the U.S., for clients who have multiple sites in services or professions as opposed to an eCommerce site, it is not as good a value for sure. Can you find a couple of high quality submission sites, spend that same amount and possibly get two to three times the value? I think it is possible. Really hope that helps.

This is a bug with Linkscape and OSE, and has nothing to do with Google. In short, Linkscape gets confused when it sees binary files and has wrongly said they are links. We're fixing this problem and it's decreasing with each crawl (you should see fewer of these tomorrow after today's crawl has been released). The other regular links you see are valid. If you'd like, you can email help@seomoz.org and our help team will help you out as well. I would wait until tomorrow though, when the fresh crawl is available and you have the most current stats, and fewer of the bogus links.

Thanks for that. I have just altered the page now and will see how it goes and then alter more of the page at the end of this week

Can you link to the webinar you mentioned? I'll keep an open mind, but from everything I've experienced in the last five years, links that don't get clicked still work pretty darn well. It would be hard for Google to track which links are getting clicked. In addition, the links boost the site's ranking and so they will gain traffic organically. (Maybe I misunderstood you) I don't consider forum profile links to be spam or even grey hat when used appropriately. If you are using a tool like Dripfeed Blasts, then of course that's another story. Much of grey hat SEO and a moderate portion of black hat is still in effect. I still see competitors from two years ago sporting a large number of links from terrible neighborhoods, and still ranking incredibly well. I've reported them countless times to no avail. It almost seems like you have to get a competitor featured in a New York Times article for Google to do anything substantial. Cheers.

Check with writers before you give the interview & make it a condition of the interview

David, One thing to consider with print is are you allowing the NYT, Home and Garden, etc. to control the story so to speak. Assuming for the designer, do you put out your own press releases? These can work two ways: Start a story for someone who the media is used to seeing printed. Designer X to preview new ABC collection in Sydney at 123. You put out the press release and say, "some of the upcoming items can be viewed prior to the event at designerX.com along with companyR.com." So, you set the stage for getting the domain names out in print.  The other way it works is to put out press releases about the "news release in the NYT tomorrow," or about the news release in Home and Garden today/yesterday." Again, you have to be timely with these and not just put out a lot of releases about old news. ALWAYS give readers the opportunity to go somewhere and see or read more. Control where somewhere is. You will be surprised how national media is made up of humans who copy others. So, if you keep putting the urls out in press releases, soon they will follow your lead. That said, make sure when people are coming to the site they are seeing something that appeals to them and that has quality content. Part of the appeal of print media like Home and Garden magazines are totally the images. It is your job to drive the media and not the other way around. You can control good and bad press if you work at it just as strongly as you do your SEO. You just have to become an MO....media optimizer. Best of Luck, hope this helps.

Thanks for the extra feedback on the matter. Highly appreciated.

Thanks for your help Alan!

The question you maybe need to ask is 'Should I submit my articles to article directories in the first place". Many on here will tell you the answer is no, that you should put the content on your own website and not on another website at all.

I chatted with bluetoad tech support.  She indicates that Google does index their publications, but did not know if the vendor links were follow or nofollow and will have to get back to me. Is it possible for flash magazine publishers to provide the content to googlebots, even though the magazine is by subscription only? Best, Christopher

Not at all. If you know the target site is reputable (i.e. is not likely to be penalized) then leave the link as followed. The primary reason to add nofollow to an external link is to protect yourself from being penalized for linking to a "bad" site.

Examine the below two URLs: yoursite.blogspot.com www.yoursite.com Both sites start off with the same value from a SEO perspective. They have no inherent value and any PR needs to be built from scratch. The advantage of the yoursite.com is you own the domain. You can create subdomains and use the domain for life. With a blogspot.com subdomain, you are using the sub-domain under specific terms, and you could lose the subdomain if those terms are violated. There are a few instances of angry people who had built up their blogspot.com subdomains over a period of many years and then had their site taken away from them. Generally speaking, you should create your own domain.

Yes.

Question is does this [blog commenting spam] even work to get links back to your page? It works by definition. You see the link back to the page, so yes it works. I think the question you really want to ask is whether or not this is a best practice and should you be doing it. Is this that even ethical SEO? No. It is a black hat tactic. This practice as you described is being performed specifically to manipulate search engine results. How am i suppose to fight this when its already hard enough to come up with unique content for a e commerce site and then i have to battle my competition doing this? Do everything you can to practice ethical link building. There are dozens of means by which you can obtain links. Focus your effort on creating world-class content which others will want to link to. I will use the SEOmoz blog as an example. Take a look at this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo Notice the article has received 82 thumbs up, 0 thumbs down. Scroll to the bottom of the article and you will find impressive social engagement: 399 tweets, 82 facebook likes, 22 google +1s. Every tweet is a link, and facebook likes and Google +1s can be links or create other links. I am also willing to bet many people will quote, reference and link to the article as well. This article is topical (SEO topic on a SEO site), it addresses a real need which affects many people, it is very short but well written, and it includes a great infographic. If you can generate one article like this a week for your site, all you need to do is let the world know about the article and the links will come. If you decide to use blogs as a means to promote your content, I would share a few suggestions: focus on blogs relevant to your industry. Linking to a vitamin site in a blog comment from an article discussing health tips has a lot more value then linking from an article discussing car insurance. become an active member of the blog communities where you share comments. Learn the latest topics and issues in your industry and talk about them. don't link to your site in every reply. Don't link to your site in most replies. Become a genuine member of the community. Be authentic and helpful. If you have knowledge, freely share it. Build up a reputation in the community as a respected authority. A single link to a site from a respected authority is worth more then 1000 of the random blog links you described. Also understand Google is aware of the problem with blog article comment spam. Many blogs will nofollow all comment links for this reason. Others allow the links but then manually review and remove the spam. Others will leave the spam, but generally these blogs are less respected and valued because people don't like spam. Also, the blogs which leave their sites open to spam are flooded with links. Each link devalues the other links on the page. When you get to the point of having 500+ links, none of them have any value at all. I've seen pages with thousands of links with people still adding new ones every day as if they had value. In all likelihood, Google's quality team has seen many of the sites you are referring to and devalued the site's outgoing links due to spam. People will continue adding links, but none of them have any value. Additionally, Google may have reviewed the site itself and determined the site has too high of a percentage of spam links and devalued them. TL;DR - don't add to blog comment spam and don't worry if your competitors engage in the practice. Buckle down and build the best content and links you can.

Simply speaking, as soon as Google crawls a web page with a link to your site then you can immediately receive the benefits of that link. A few examples: you receive a link to your site from a popular story on the New York Times. That article will likely be indexed within 1 hour of it being published. You can then immediately begin seeing increased traffic. you receive a link from a "regular" site on an article which is mentioned on the site's home page "Recent Articles" block. Depending on the site's DA, the page will likely be indexed within a couple days and you will begin receiving the benefits after it is indexed. you receive a link from a regular site which is not promoted on their home page but instead is buried in the site. The site structure might be mysite.com/en/blog/articles/cars/2012/ford/sports-cars/mustangs/2012-mustang-gt. Well, that article may never be crawled and indexed in which case you would receive no benefit from the link. your link might be on a page which is noindexed or blocked by robots.txt which would not be seen Also keep in mind a link to your site offers two benefits: direct traffic from the linking site and any benefit to improving the ranking of your search results which Google offers to you based on that link. You can receive a direct traffic boost instantly. You may or may not ever receive a boost from Google based on the link. If the link is nofollowed then Google wont offer you any benefit. Many sites are penalized from Google by having their links devalued for various reasons. If you receive a link from such a site, there is no ranking benefit. The last point, Google will examine your site when determining a boost from the links. Are the sites linking in independent? If the sites have similar IPs, similar backlinks, same owners, use the same anchor text, etc. then Google will likely devalue those links.