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I think that any study would have to be case specific to be worth anything.  A circle with two influencers or two popes would be far more valuable than a circle with 5000 drunks.  And at the same time who YOU are and what YOU produce is going to make all of the difference.  If you are putting out crap nobody is going to pay attention to you and if they do pay attention to you it is really going to be damaging to your brand.

Not especially for link authority as they will be "nofollow" attributed links. I would recommend doing it from a social link traffic perspective as any specific SEO benefit would be negligible, traffic is traffic though

Hi Rachel, So, for a multi-location local business like your medical practice, you should NOT be attempting to merge with Google+ as it is unsupported. You should simply be creating a local listing through the Google Places for Business Dashboard for each of the physical locations the company runs. Do not merge!

Just ideas that seem to work for me.... Design a site that allows you to advertise your most valuable content on all or most pages of your site - like in a sidebar or in "related boxes".... go to a good site like CNN and watch how they do this. Look at  right side of this page with all of the promoted content.  This promotes your content to your current visitors who should be your most important fans. Make it easy for people to share your content with FB buttons or addthis.com widgets If you do the two items above and you do have viral content then just exposing it to a few people will be like throwing gasoline on a fire.  If you have pedestrian content then not much will happen. *  Get an RSS feed that allows people to subscribe.  I use feedburner and have lots of people who get my feed by RSS and email messages.   Whenever I publish something new it goes out to thousands of subscribers and many of them visit my site within just 48 hours.  Enough of these people post to FB, Twitter, etc. that I don't have to do it myself. Keep in mind that it is really really really hard to produce viral content - even if you have done it many times and intentionally try to do it.   When I intentionally try to make viral content it does not work.... then I write a simple article on a topic that I know a lot about and it pulls in more traffic than something viral - but pulls in that traffic over time because it gets good rankings in the organic SERPs and a steady stream of social shares. Most of the content that I produced gets less than viral attention.  A few percent can pull in major traffic - often 100,000 visitors within 48 hours, but that type of content  only happens for me a couple times per year. However, once you have a large library of high quality content  and people are visiting your site regularly the number of visitors from social sites and blogs will grow steadily. This is not viral it is simply the steady  social sharing of good content which for me brings in lots of traffic - far more over time that if everything that I produce would go viral for a short time. So, you don't have to focus on viral to get lots of traffic.  Who would you rather have on your baseball team - a guy who hits a homerun every few games but strikes out a lot or a guy who hits a single almost every time at bat? SEOs overvalue viral and undervalue steady.  It is like the tortoise and the hare.

Quick reality check here, Brad. Your home page has over 180 links. So each of these social media links you're wondering about is passing 1/180 of the PR juice of the home page. I certainly wouldn't be fussing about this either way. Far bigger challenges to be focusing on. That said, I certainly wouldn't be risking compromising user experience and user expectations in order to conserve 1/180 of a page's value. I'm not saying you're doing that - I think in some circumstances a dedicated social media page can be great. But as always - make the best decision for your users, not the search engines, especially in this case. And to reinforce what Adam said - no-following links in NO WAY conserves page rank - that hasn't been the case for well over a year. No-follow has very specific purposes - to denote a link that you don't trust (e.g. from user-generated content like comments) or when the link is a result of a commercial relationship with the target site. The third use , which might apply to a few of your home page links, is to tell  the crawlers not to follow links to pages that are of no value to users other than being purely transactional - like your View Cart, Checkout, Create Account, Track Package etc. The reason to no-follow these isn't to "save Pagerank" but to help conserve crawl budget so the crawlers can spend their time indexing more important pages. Hope that helps? Paul P.S. If I were looking to conserve and transfer front page influence more effectively, I'd be seriously looking at reducing the sheer number of links on the page so the links that remain can transfer more value to the most important pages/sections of the site. Not going to be easy while maintaining usability, but that's where i"d be focusing my attention.

1. by authority, local citations, reviews, frequent updates, interaction as a brand (posting and interacting as the brand itself on Google +). 2. I've seen 7 and i've seen less I think it depends on the search query and device, mobile vs. pc etc... 3. Can you share a link? 4. No, because if you check the map it will show more results. Perhaps Google does not think others deserve to be there.

Well, You can try http://oceanfeather.com.au/ ...

Mike is absolutely correct. Whenever you are changing your website and the URL's are changing you should always make sure 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. Saves all the hassle of finding the links.

Thank you!

If the website you are looking at is the one in your profile, then I'd look at improving your content so that it is easy to digest.  Right now you have really long articles that aren't broken down with different headers.  So, I can't quickly scan it to see if I even want to read it. Anyway, a blog alone isn't going to succeed.  You need to create a social media presence to gain attention for your blogs, and make them super easy to share/like/tweet/+1.  That way they can potentially go viral.

Hi TorontoV, I'm not sure why you say one cannot promote posts on Google+. Are you talking about paid promotion like in FB? Or are you talking about promoting your Blog posts in G+? Adding to what Matt said, which is great advice: In G+, you can promote anything you wish to from your home page or profile. Write the comment, include your link to your post and make it Public and also choose whatever Circles you want it to reach. I find it naturally reaches way more users than FB. As far as self-promotion inside Communities goes, make sure you check the guidelines of the Community before promoting your own posts. In some Communities, it's frowned upon. You can also write a post specifically asking the modorators what the policy is. Some may delete your post and/or ban you from the Community if they feel you've done it too often. It's important to respect the guidelines if you want to build relationships. What I have found is that if you participate in Communities in good faith and do your promotions publicly, your fellow Community folks will see your post, know who you are and will more likely click through because you've spent time engaging within the Community. And as you build your Circles, more and more people will see what you post, click through and comment on it. Also, make sure to comment on posts at your Home page level so you are getting to know people you wouldn't ordinarily. Just keep at it. It takes time, but I have found it to be much more fruitful than FB overall. Hope this is helpful and not just a bunch of early morning talkativeness.

Great answers from the other guys there, I will just say that googles approach while crawling will only ever be about content and mark up, not about brand. Wordpress and blogger is only as good as the markup you put on it, bad themes, bad markup, but SERPS.

Consider having him/her produce some content for you as well. It's easier to get links if you have some good content for them to link to.

You also need to attract/build links to your site. If other sites are covering the same topics as you are and they have higher link authority they will push you down the search results. Also make sure that the topics that you are covering are not super competitive, otherwise you have little chance of showing up on the first page of search results without building sufficient link authority. If you have the Mozbar installed, you can enable the SERP overlay and see if sites ahead of you in the SERPs have greater link authority (PA and DA).

Joshua - I moderate all of the comments to my blog before and remove any links before they go live.   I find this effort worthwhile because the comments seem to increase user engagement (time on page) on the articles that have extensive comments.  These pages seem to become reliable traffic generators and seem to withstand the algo changes.

Well, all they do is switch the names of the accounts. I'm not sure what Tourism Australia's username was before, but Twitter switched their username over to australia and that way Tourism Australia's followers and tweets transferred over automatically. And since Tourism Australia's username is now australia, which was previously your username, then that means your account had to be moved to a new username which in this case turns out to be Australia1_. Unfortunately I don't think there's much you can do about it at this point.

Hi Sara, Google+ required 1,000 followers in order for your Google+ page to be verified, however this did not mean you need to have 1,000 followers in order to add rel="publisher" code to your homepage - that can be done regardless of follower count. You can see this in AJ Kohn's article on proper rel publisher setup: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/google-plus-seo If you go to the Google+ Page Verification page at Google, you'll now see that the requirement has been changed to state "Your Google+ page must already have a meaningful number of followers." Obviously this is open to interpretation, but based upon that language change, I believe you'll probably be OK with a few hundred followers as opposed to 1,000.

I actually use this system https://accounts.zoho.com to keep track of leads, you could import people from twitter you want to keep in touch with so it reminds you to speak with them

It might likely play out sorta the way links do--deep content/less linked-to content/old content equals less-crawled content.  Maybe you could have 1,000,000 authors on a site but the ones that derive the most value from it are the most recent, the ones on the most active pages, the ones on the most linked-to pages.