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Thanks Ryan for the great answer! We do have the new social features in Open SIte Explorer that display the Facebook shares, collected from their FQL API. We are also in development of a new tool in the PRO app offering Social Analytics metrics. Here is Rand's blog post about it! Hope that helps, but let me know if you have any more questions! Thanks, Carin

I'm aware redirected links won't provide as much benefit as direct links -- I'm looking purely at relevance benefits from the anchor text. Shortened URLs seem like a good case because it separates the on-site benefit of having the keyword in the URL from the off-site benefit of being linked to with a URL that has the keyword in it. The question that really sums it up (editing the main question to reflect it) is: If http://boston.craigslist.org/jjj/... gets linked to through custom shortened URLs like http://bit.ly/Boston-Jobs, is it more likely to rank for the term "Boston Jobs" than if it received the same number of links using a non-custom shortened URL like http://bit.ly/ejq5uX9 ?

Thanks James

You can read about Ngram viewer here: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/info Google has digitized millions of books, magazines and written documents. Each book has a publish date. The Ngram viewer is a query tool which allows you to search for words or phrases over time. You can see the rise and fall of certain phrases, and understand when they became popular or lost popularity. For example think of "nursing home", "old folks home", "senior care facility", and other similar phrases. By using Ngram you can better understand related phrases or keywords and their popularity. This information can potentially help with any site by helping to target popular keywords or phrases related to your niche. I would suggest it is more useful for generating ideas. There are other tools better suited for both generating ideas and measuring traffic so in that sense, I would not recommend it for your needs.

Once you create an account, just create a "topic" you can upload your own topic. From what I understand, you can use thora like you use,  delicious or dig, if your topic becomes popular then other people will follow the topic.

If you have the resources and you are a well known brand its great to have both the generic and the real person. But if your brand is relatively unknown, resources are limited and you are wishing to promote your company I would be using the logo. I use my company logo for Garden Beet. Many in my tweet network have got to know me over time and use my name on tweets as well. That has its own set of problems and benefits. Nevertheless it loads easier to create connection with a person than a logo. I know I prefer a person to a logo - but that is not meeting my longer term goal of trying to get my brand - Garden Beet -  known.

Hi Brenan, Social is worthless if it is not, well, Social! The most important facet of using social media is building authority and/or recognition in your space. This kind of authority brings a raft of benefits, not the least of which is the fact that people will want to share what you share... At a minimum I would pick the two that "work" best for the individual (or company they represent), and start participating in those in a meaningful way. If that works out, then try adding another and see if it also works for you. How many you can realistically manage to make a real contribution to will become clear over time. My personal view is that a profile that looks like it has been deserted is more likely to do harm to your reputation than good. Cyrus talked about managing profiles as part of a link building strategy in a blog post just last night. There is also some discussion relevant to your question in the comments on that post. Of course, there are some directories in the SEOmoz resource list that fill the bill for your co-worker too In short, give yourself a big thumbs up on this one and send your co-worker a link to the post as well! Sha

Thanks for your feedback, but I'm talking about newspaper websites in particular. Would you use this for a news website? Also, if you have the budget how would you go about link building? From what I gather, all budget, time and effort should be put in towards generating interesting content and then promoting it via all possible channels on the internet. Right?

Thanks very much guys!  Very much appreciated....

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Paid links surely works, but are too much a risk, as they are not something Google likes at all. Reciprocal link building... if meant as the classic page "links/resources" not as well, because: the quality of your backlink is crap and, second, because for Google is so easy to detect them and discount the minimum PR they pass. No, follow the way I suggested. Then, if you want to compensate the blogger who reviewed the product, use their same review as testimonial in your product page. That will also give more force to the product itself toward the visitors of the page, hence, it may better the conversion rate. About Social Bookmarking... they are ok if they are not alone. And more: if they give some quality. For instance, have you ever thought to create a Power Point as a manual of use of the tools and publish it in Slideshare? Or, better, to create a video and publish it both in your YouTube profile and site, and then create a video-sitemap xml? That way you could be in first page also for the video result in the universal search. About article marketing... mmmm... if doing 1 article for article portal and writing a quality content. But I would prefer to try the guest blogging way. What I'm trying to tell you is to think out of the box, not to rely to classic and old fashioned tactics that a time consuming and not have a long lasting effect.

Hi Thomas, I think this is a question that comes up often. One way to do it is to have both types on your page like we do on our blog. You'll notice the SEOmoz page "like" in the right nav bar, and the post "like" at the bottom of the post. If you're trying to figure out the best thing to do purely for SEO purposes, then I'd say you want them to like the actual URL of the content. I say that because Google now shows social sharing in the SERPs. So if for example you're logged in and do a search, if you have a connected friend on FB who has shared content on that topic it would show their face in the SERPs. Hope this helps!

If only I had 120% to work with!  Man I could use that extra twenty... Thanks Phil

Nice work, I had noticed something similar. Not to mention the fact that if you are logged in to twitter (which everyone always is) it automatically logs you into and creates an account on their site. Bad Ju Ju.

The plain old simple fact about deleting twitter accounts is that you will lose followers and potential opportunity to shed some light on your brand and service (no to mention build some pretty solid links to great content). The idea in having foreign twitter accounts is to be able to adequately represent the locals in their own language, destroying the language barrier and bringing everyone a warm fuzzy. So take a good look at your referral sources, conversions from twitter vs the amount of time and energy your staff is taking to manage all these accounts. That equation should spit out a suitable response. That being said my two companies have 1 twitter account each and employees are able to create their own and tweet as they wish (within reason) we have been able to get followers from most developed countries and tweet entirely in english, with a smattering of foreign words here and there. in the end your analytics and referral data should be more than enough to answer any questions of effectiveness you might have. Raven tools (and soon SEOmoz) has some potent Social Tracking / Social Mention features, maybe take a look at those as well.

Hi Cisaz, Company profiles are not yet available in Google Plus. Private profiles were opened to the world in the past 24 hours. Word from the Plus team with the announcement is that the Business offering will not be far away. Just need to wait a little longer Sha

Hi Chris - totally understand your question. The key is that the brand name is included in the search query and the test (in that particular case) was less about using the social networks for rankings, but to see if search volume itself and CTR could influence rankings (which it appeared to do). You can read more about the experiment on search volume and CTR here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/experiment-google-rankings-w-search-volume And more on the experiment to influence rankings with Google+ and Twitter here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings Those should help clarify. Cheers! Rand