Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for that Omid

If you take a product, as an example let's say... "Joe's Widgets". The site that received #1 rankings in the past might have been an article about Joe's Widgets on Wikipedia.  That was simply promotion of the most powerful site with a relevant article. Now, if Joe's Widgets appear on product pages on hundreds of sites, the brand site, JoesWidgets.com gets an enormous boost in the SERPs.  Perhaps beating Wikipedia because of these "brand mentions".  This is a relatively new development from Google within the past few months. Still not recognized strongly enough, perhaps, might be HowToUseWidgets.com that has 40 pages of articles about how to use, Joe's Widgets, how to select them, how to main tain them, photos of the different models, comparisons of Joe's widgets to six other brands of widgets.   In my opinion, this is the authority site but it gets lower rankings because it is not powerful and isn't the brand name website.  However, this site might get more relevant traffic than JoesWidgets.com and wikipedia simply because it has saturated the SERPs for lots of the important secondary and long-tail keywords.  This is the attack that I am building.

You should link to the most relevant page. Forget about A or B or which one you want where. When you are building links you should make sure that they are being built in a place where people will actually want to click them. They should offer relevant information, data, or resources to further assist any potential users of the page you are linking from. The rest of that is irrelevant. Link the page that fits.

From what I've seen and tested Google will consider %20 to be the same as space character. Moreover it will convert spaces in URL to %20 in SERP. According to RFCs URL should not contain spaces or any other characters that may be incorrectly interpreted (for example <.> but there are others). Such characters should be represented as '%' followed by hex code of the character (20 in case of space).

So, here's a few ideas, focused on press opportunities specifically, but with some other link ideas tossed in as well. 1 - HARO We've had a lot of success with HARO for clients. They won't have many opportunities specifically for window improvements, so you'll have to think broader - general construction, green/energy improvements, and general business ownership queries are all going to be relevant, especially if the business owner is fairly personable and willing to get involved. For our clients, we monitor the requests and forward the ones we feel are a good fit. If the client is willing to read 3 emails a day, they'll see a number of responses on their own that might be good as well. 2 - Case Studies This is a longer term project. Have the contractor ask their clients for energy bills a year before and the year after a project. You might have to incentivize this somehow to get participation.  It's tricky to draw too many conclusions, but year-over-year energy savings on average across a wide range of clients would make a good study. There's a number of variables that might be hard to account for - weather and personal energy use being the primary ones - so there might be some kinks to work out in this concept, but I think those could be mitigated somehow. Anyways, in regards to PR, a study like this could produce at least a handful of links, particularly from energy conservation and window-industry publications. Might not be a ton of results, but enough relevant industry publications could be a major boost for a contractor in a boring niche. 3 - Events I've seen some other "boring" companies that put on local events with a charitable focus and managed to get a decent handful of links, including a few news organizations. At the risk of tooting my own horn, there's quite a few opportunities out there to build links with local events, and it's a very natural topic to get covered by local press if the event is interesting enough. 4 - Image Marketing with Conservatories, Window Boxes, etc. While I'm sure many of their projects are pretty straightforward, I'm sure they also have some more elaborate designs and projects. Conservatories and bey windows are great examples of really attractive projects that people like to look at. Even if they're not the business's primary focus, you've got plenty of opportunities for visual marketing on social networks like Houzz, Pinterest, Facebook, and Flickr. It's a long shot that these will generate press, but they can certainly generate links and traffic, especially if you've got a really nice gallery/portfolio on the client's website. Hope that gets you started!

It is ok to link to partner companies and related websites if you think the links are useful and they are relevant. I see this question all the time and the answer is always the same: Just use common sense. If you have a site that sells bicycles online linking to a real estate site in Chicago and a law office in New York it is going to raise some flags. If you have a site linking out to hundreds of other websites, ALL of which link to each other in some kind of 2-way, 3-way or more complicated network it is going to raise some flags. If you have a store selling bicycles in Chicago that links to its other locations in other cities that is fine. If you have a website design company linking out to some other local businesses, clients' sites, etc... that is probably fine. I have never heard anyone from Google come out and say "All reciprocal linking is bad". If you're doing it for SEO it's probably worth reconsidering. If you are doing it for your visitors and potential clients/shoppers it is probably ok. Common sense. In regard to the original question, I think Dimitri gave really good advice. If someone says they'll link to you if you link to them you should probably just walk away because they've said that to everyone else too.

Just re read how I wrote the question - it's actually a competing site that has the spammy link profile - that is why I was frustrated they were ranking higher. But hopefully Penguin refresh will impact them. Thanks

Sorry gave wrong link http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

Hi Jonathan. Internal linking is linking to another page within the same domain. On your homepage you may not go into giant detail on something specific but you do cover it in a blog post. You would link to that post from that section of text on the homepage copy. It's all about continuing the user experience and passing on the authority of your homepage. Check out this post from SEOmoz for a more in depth explanation. Also, I'm finding that our biggest ranking increases are coming from great content on the homepage and also throughout the site. I've seen link building also give increases but usually slower over time. Great content can bring the rise and link building should hold you there and move you up the final few places. A search engine's aim is to rank sites that it thinks a user will want to see and will find interesting and useful. I think great content and info is the key to this. Hope this helps bro!

Huge list of directories: sites.submit-everywhere.com, almost all of them are free.

Here is a good list to get you started: http://getlisted.org/resources/local_search_ecosystem.pdf http://getlisted.org/resources/local-citations-by-category.aspx http://getlisted.org/resources/local-citations-by-city.aspx http://www.yext.com/blog/2012/09/the-most-important-local-business-directories-for-seo/ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-definitive-guide-to-local-seo/47319/ Enjoy! Mike P.S. You owe me a Coke

Check out: http://blumenthals.com/blog/  from Mike Blumenthol and http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/ from Phil Rozak (you can get a free 7 step guide for local SEO on here)

Hi MM, Here are the resources I usually hand to beginning link builders to get them started: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-resources.html http://www.clockworkpirate.com/ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/link-building It should take you a year of full time link building to truly go after all of the strategies listed in the first 3 resources, and all of them contain tactics that you can use indefinitely. The important I'd focus on is keeping a steady pace of content creation and outreach efforts, diversification of your strategies, and avoiding anything that feels spammy (because that's a good sign that it's a low value tactic). Feel free to ask any questions here, but that should get you started!

Hi there, In order to rank for specific languages and countries is important that you build a crawlable and indexable site structure, with their own URLs that will be ranked (the Google translate plugin won't help you with this), with optimized content for each one of them, and after, you build links from sites in these countries towards them. Remember the fundamentals of SEO: Is Relevance (relevant text content that is indexed and optimized) and popularity (links, citations, references). Please take a look at this presentation I did a month ago that will take you through the most important aspects of the process: from researching the best way you should target the audiences (language vs. country targeting), the best type of web structure for your international versions (ccTLDs, subdirectories or subdomains), the usage of specific annotations in order to tell Google the content is in a specific language (hreflang tags), and then of course, identify the appropriate relevant sources for each country to build links from, etc. To go more in depth with your international SEO strategy, take a look at this post, where I also share some dos and don'ts and finally, these recommendations to take into consideration when developing your international web versions. As you can see, this cannot be achieved with plugins to automatically translate content, is a real investment to identify the best language / country opportunity and then develop a whole site structure targeting them, this is why it's very important to validate well at the beginning and do a in depth research, so it's cost effective and help you effectively achieve your international SEO goals. Thanks, Aleyda

The difference is probably the competition for keywords. You are comparing apples and oranges my friend.

Probably no better proof we are kid's party bloggers trying to pick up a bit of knowledge and not SEOs Ha! Thanks for pointing that out - and so generously giving of your time.

Thanks for your answer. Yes, its possible when I am the owner of the blog. But having my website placed on some other blogs blogroll which is recurring shouldn't harm my website until the following points that you have addressed. "But if the area on the page is titled: sponsored, advertising, etc, google will know the link is paid for and if it's not nofollowed it could be a problem. Is the link paid for? If yes, be careful. Also review the other links around it, if it's surrounded by other external links that aren't relevant be careful." Thank you, you addressed some valuable points. Regards, Susan Smith

I do see the links in a google search.

Thanks for all the input! I was pretty sure that we shouldn't disavow this links but thought it was worth opening up to the community!

My pleasure. However the real credit belong to Cyrus Shepard for writing this masterpiece, Many takeaways on it.