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The amount of link juice you will receive is the same in any of those examples. Your question is similar to "which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead". A link's value is determined primarily by the linking page's DA/PA/ or PR (however you measure link value) and the number of links on the page. There are other factors such as a link in the content area of a page offer more value then links in footer areas for example. Based on your question it seems the link will appear in the content area of your page. We know Google associates anchor text to a link's value, but I am not aware of that text influencing the amount of value that is passed.

The client does not want to be associated with a physical location making directory listings very difficult. Sponsorship is a great idea though.

Heya, my pleasure... it's from 2009 but most all of the services listed are still relevant (surprisingly!)

Like the other two responses, the answer is no. But I would also like to point out that PageRank is probably not the best metric to emphasize either.  Check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday for an updated discussion about PageRank from last week's WhiteBoard Friday. Be well!

thanks for your answer guys! Sean, I do whatever is neccesary to get the .edu.. at least anything that isn't against the google guidelines!

Are the domains owned by the same central agency?  i.e. is the registration information identical? Also, are the domains hosted on the same hosting and share the same IP? If either of the above are true i would say the short answer would be "don't do it" If both of the above is false, then i would choose which site you want to have the most authority and send links from all the other sites to that one site.  I would avoid crosslinking unnecessarily between all the sites.  Overall i would work towards a 'natural' linking structure.  Try to find believable reasons to cross link between the sites.  If you are talking about elephants on one site in a blog post and you have another site that is all about elephants than that would be an excellent oportunity to crosslink.  Do it naturally.  I can't emphasize this enough.

I commissioned around half a dozen pieces from TextBroker and I was utterly unimpressed. The pieces were not insightful, had very little thought behind them, and looked like they'd been written in about two minutes flat. On one of the pieces I paid for the top level "professional" service, and still the piece was very weak. I asked for it to be revised, but the revision did little to improve things. I'm steering clear.

Thanks for you response!

Many thanks!

At 10:07pm tonight.  Check then and you'll be first on SERP. Obviously kidding, I have no certain idea just like the first two responses.  Consider some of the other factors - sites that re-post the TechCrunch article, number of shares you get on Twitter, whether or not any of the linking sites get "news" status from Google. It's like studying an elementary particle... one thing in theory but they don't exist in isolation long enough to be sure in our reverse engineering of Google's thinking.      With a surge of links from reputable sites, I'd expect a surge in rankings on some keywords within a couple days, with longer status near top if you continue to get referenced/links and a return to lower results if you don't.

Hi Matt, I checked it out. What I saw was a quality site using your service as intended and citing you as the provider. I would be incredibly surprised if there was anything negative here. There are absolutely no potential low quality signals I can see. Your service is getting adopted by legitimate users and cited appropriately. I just can't see anything wrong with this. If you were "penalized" for growth this would be a gross distortion of what what the "penalty" is intended for. I really see nothing wrong here. Do you have further growth lined up? The only thing I could see POSSIBLY being an issue is getting a burst of links and then having it drop off. But it's only 50 sites - not the thousands you can get using "other" means. I strongly think you should just go for this. If you were a client that would be my recommendation. This IS natural linking. Any other SEO's care to weigh in on my thought process? If I'm full of it I'd love to hear it. But I don't see how.

We never give content away.  Never have, and never will. If you have great content promote it heavily on your own site.  Submit it to sites such as slashdot, stumble, digg, reddit as appropriate.  Make it very easy for visitors to tweet, like and share.  Other than that I don't market my content, instead I spend that time to produce more. Links accumulate slowly at first but then once you start getting a little traffic the links arrive a bit faster. That's my experience.

Consider posting excellent content in a dedicated area of the merchants site..... great articles such as... "How to select a mountain bike tire for sand, mud, rocky, road or leaf litter surfaces" "How to change a mountain bike tire in 60 seconds" A sporting goods site could have hundreds of these articles that answer common customer questions and demonstrate expertise and credibility.  They also sell products such as the tools needed to change that tire. Mountain bike blogs will link to these articles individually or as a collection if you have done a great job.  Ask them to write one for you and they will link to it bragging (and you get free content). These will be articles with lots of photos, quotes from experienced riders, short video and more.   They can attract links from mountain bike clubs, manufacturers, bloggers and more.

This may be a known bug in OSE where some downloadable (binary) files are incorrectly being counted as links. Please see a Linkscape engineer's comment on a similar post at http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitive-edu-research-via-open-site-explorer, as I think that will answer your question.

I would say that integrating it with the site would be the best option.  When dealing with eCommerce I like to think that the least confusing you can make the process the better they will accept it.  Unless what you sell is extremely interesting no one is going to read it but the SEO rich pages you can create will be priceless in serps. The big issue is when they find their way to your site through the blog content do you want them to be on some weird page that seems questionably attached to your eCommerce page or one that is integrated with it fully.

we tried MC for 5-6 clients and we spent a lot of time writing blogs, coupons etc.  and spent a lot of time & money, but we did not get any single benefit from merchantcircle.com.  it was totally a waste of time and money.

As I see it, Google needs to take no action on paid links. Well, no action different than devaluating them. While the market for paid links grows, the overall value and quality of each purchased link is deemed to go down. At one point people will stop bying them at all.

I've worked with a guy who was absolutely sure his site will do great if he purchased enough links. The month he decided to get rid of the service he do 9 links for 1800$. It turned out he paid that amount on a monthly basis for over 6 months. I went back though the email reports he got from the company. Every now and then there seemed to be a couple fo good links and a couple of nofollowed one, just to add color to it. The really bad part was the amount of links he got from blogs made up from content sharing articles, already housing 100+ links to external site. Just another good example that is always a good idea to stay clear of such services.

Peoples love video, invest time on it and money. Host in a professional video hosting as wistia.com Make a embed anchor to ur page. Delivery it to the peoples you want to focus in. Make a e-mail marketing with the video and send it by wistia. Probablly gonna help u a lot.