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I've been thinking about Squidoo for a while also... It's not because I like Squidoo... In all honesty, i've been thinking about how I could use it to send some more link juice to my site. Although it definitely is a great vehicle to host spammy pages with the sole purpose of generating backlinks and pass on linkjuice, I think it can also be used for a white-hat approach. The way to do it right should follow rule #1 of good internet marketers: to create valuable and unique content with  useful information that helps people out. In this specific case, it might be a how-to piece "on how to select the best self storage service" or "5 pitfals to avoid when selecting selfstorage". The article should be unique (in terms of content, so it is not picked up as duplicate content), **useful **(so that people actually read it and eventually tweet or +1 it) and **authoritative **(using 3rd party references to support what it says). No hard selling pitches, no blatant promotion of products/services... only useful information, with relevant links to different and authoritative domains... and, of course, a couple of good links back to your site. PS: I haven't tried it... so I don't know if creating such a page would have any impact on a website ranking. What do you guys think? Is it worth spending the time to come up with such a  page?

Tons of sitewide links all at once can hurt a site that has very few incoming links, they get discounted anyway so the best thing to do is to get a homepage link only since the homepage is usually the highest PR page on a site, and well crawled by Google. Also, being linked to from a penalized or bad neighborhood can hurt you so you should vet your incoming links and remove any offending ones. Too many links at once I do not believe is a factor, because Google is not going to penalized a site just because it goes viral, it is more about the TYPES of links and diversification of those links that can trigger a penalty.

Thanks

Frankly, sitewide links offer very little value these days to your overall link-profile. The engines simply don't like them as in a lot of cases they scream manipulation. You might also be interested to know that according to the folks who contributed to the SEOMoz Ranking Factors, the vast majority said that sitewide links would devalue your overall metrics with varying degrees of severity. Honestly, I'd try to negotiate a better placement and switch tact. Best, Anthony

My primary goal is to get links. Using the over used mortgage calculator as an example, someone with a mortgage type of site would approach other site owners for placement of their mortgage calculator on their site for which the mortgage site owner has embedded a link. The site owner benefits by having the calculator on his site for his visitors, the mortgage guy benefits by getting the link and some referral traffic. I want to come up with a widget that has real value to site owners in my niche so I can benefit in the same way the mortgage site owner does. But I need: ideas of what type of widgets would work where to get the widgets developed ideas on strategy (marketing of the widget, proper placement of my link within or around the widget, etc)

Hi Derek, the change of focus from pure/classic SEO to a larger Inbound Marketing vision that you have noticed both by SEOmoz and Distilled is the consequence of the evolution of Search Marketing itself. I suggest you to check out the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Survey by SEOmoz itself, which is showing how just the 42% of the ranking factors are links related (Page Level and Domain Level). Summed the links' factor still have a relative majority. And surely they lost % respect the 2009 version of the survey. Social Signals have taken a great importance and the survey shows how it is common the idea they will be even more important in the future. Just for this reason it is good to talk and dive deeper into the relation existing between SEO and Social Media. And regarding the page metrics, the survey again shows how them are considered to be important now and more in the future. The reason is quite clear: Panda. CTR, Bounce et al are probably to be considered Panda factors... as it is the duplication issue. Because of that it is overly important to talk and dive into what cause those metrics to be good or bad, and it is usually the Content. Are links neglected. I don't think so, and a lot of posts I've read both here and in the Distilled blog confirm my belief. Just that links acquisition is thought differently, "inboundly", that says: as content and expertise redistributed in any possible online channel that can lead traffic, generate social buzz and cause natural linking. Because, and that is the strength of the Inbound Marketing approach, it is now not possible anymore to rely on just one tactic to gain visibility, traffic, conversions and ROI, but a strategy that sees the integration of SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media. Ok... I hope I helped you understand why this "change".

I think I will choose the canon method sense I have more than 1000 products Thank  your for suggestion it sounds like the best idea so far.

I agree with Cyle. If you link to other authorities, it makes you look like an authority. Basically Google says, "These people know who other authorities are, so that means they must be an authority too..."

I would personally remove the page(s), but you could also do the following if you are afraid of losing links from partners linking to your site when they see their links are no longer there. a) nofollow or javascript all of the links b) noindex, nofollow, noarchive the links page(s) c) block the links section in robots.txt at a quick glance or to a non SEO person it would appear that nothing has changed, in reality you neutered all of the links - you should definitely do something to protect your site.

Thanks for your response and share your advice.

Yes, I forgot to include keyword research. It's such a normal part of what I do that I forgot to include it in the list. Thanks for reminding me Salman

Ryan is right. However I believe PERFECT on-page can still overcome links to some extent. I see it happen everyday, however the root domains I work with have some authority built up which helps to some degree.

Hi Judah, There are quite a lot of articles and resources on targeting branded keywords right here on the SEOmoz site. A search for "branded keyword research" yielded a nice list that you could start with. Hope that helps, Sha

If your posts are getting good traffic and rank well already, I recommend writing a new post and putting a link at the top of the old post saying that you have created an updated article. You can never be sure what the "magic sauce" was that made Google like your original article.

Hey Will, Very cool to see you dropping by on the Q&A Sha

Felicia, tell them to get fu#*$@ if they don't want to write content. Charging is a great idea too.

Can you send the link? I see http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#predictions but don't see a break down of facebook vs twitter