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I'm not convinced social media is on a path of convergence. Each platform offers something different for its user base. But if you want to overcome the duplicity of multiple platforms, I found that Hootsuite.com has really helped me put a leash around social media management. Simply put, this platform combines all your social networks (Facebook, Facebooke pages, Flickr, Ping.fm, WorPress, etc.) and can post to all at once, or you can select which networks to post to at any given time. You can also schedule posts to be delivered on a schedule, which I find very convenient. Reports are pretty good in letting you know which post on each platform gives you the best response. I've also tried Hubspot but found it a bit under-featured and overpriced.

Rankings were unstable for a couple of weeks but we are back at strength almost everywhere.

Thanks, this makes sense to me. So, if I get it right: -Rel-canonical is mostly to tell search engines which page to index. -A link shared on twitter or facebook or anywhere else for that matter that is a bitly will be like a 301 and will past most juice to my site. But here's what I still don't get....If my main page is a descriptive url (as above), but someone links to it using the ugly url (i.e. www.mydomain/question.php?id=1), will the juice from this link still help my page in the serps?  Would it be just as effective as if they had linked to the "correct" url?

I think I found it. I'm seeing multiple meta robots entries on pages, including meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow'. I don't think you mean this to be intentional? Found it on these two random pages, and I'm betting lots of others. http://www.dasreviews.com/das-game-news/call-duty-black-ops-escalation-trailer/ www.dasreviews.com/das-game-news/halo-reach-defiant-map-pack-leaked/

this is a good idea 

I'd probably go with a book - either Inbound Marketing or Friends With Benefits

Thanks Aran!  I'm going to look into this too!

Hi Spencer - I think there's some awkward phrasing combined with the challenge of parsing the true meaning/intent of your question on this one. I'll do my best to answer what I think you're asking. A shortened link, by default, does not lose its ability to pass link juice, PageRank, trust metrics, anchor text signals or anything else an engine might associate with a link. If it did, all these years, our TinyURL links (which existed long before any social stuff) and all those 301 redirects (which are essentially how shortened URLs function) would have failed. Clearly, they didn't, nor do bit.ly, j.mp, t.co, etc. type links today. If you're asking if, by placing a shortened URL on a normal webpage and linking to it, the target of the 301 redirect loses out compared to a direct link, the answer is no. If you're asking whether nofollowed links in Twitter tweets or profiles that contain shortened URLs (or that exist elsewhere in the social web and may not be followed or even crawlable by engines) lose value, the answer is "it depends," but also "probably." All that said, at one point in time, a Google representative did note that 301 redirects and rel=canonical tags do lose a small amount of the PageRank they pass to another page compared to a non-redirect/canonical. We're of the strong opinion this is between 1-10% of the PageRank value, though we also suspect that other link signals, many of which are often more important than PageRank nowadays, are unaffected. This is my opinion only, and we can't know for sure whether Google still puts this slight dampening on redirects/canonicals. Hope that helps!

To date there is no detecting "fake" accounts because they go to great length to imitate real people's accounts. Facebook has no interested in outing them because they love to boast the 500 million+ user base they have. If they deleted the millions of fake accounts out there that number would take a hit. So they don't mind. Outside of Facebook, how could any outside source ever detect a fake account? So as it stands, you would be safe from anything that could be considered black hate by buying facebook fans, friends, shares and likes. Should you? That's up to you. But you definitely can and you definitely won't get penalized for it...at least for now

Right now I'm watching Rand's webinar on the future of linkbuilding.  I just got to the point where he talks about an experiment where they showed two identical pages of a website that served the purpose of fighting hunger in Sierra Leone.   The way I understand it, SEOMoz asked people to link to page A and tweet about page B.  The page that had tweets ended up outranking the site with links! That's pretty interesting.

I don't think you can really separate the two.  As Rand pointed out a few months ago, likes and tweets play an important part in ranking now.  So I would consider it a necessity for an SEO to be able to maximize social media exposure.

That's a nice list you've got there, I particularly liked the disclaimer about public relations at the top of the page ;-). We're putting something together that's similar, but coming at it from a PR agency perspective rather than straight linkbuilding for SEO. Well, the wedding's over so this may not help the OP directly, but could be useful for others: For tech clients we use sourcewire regularly (and find it works very well) For cheap, releases that still give half-decent links and get picked up by google news, we often use www.journalism.co.uk (which I didn't see on your list and costs about £30 for the basic service) As a (slightly) amusing aside, we put an April Fool's blog post up about being appointed the PR agency for the royal wedding - would you believe we actually got a couple of enquiries from journalists asking us for information about it! I dread to think how many more enquiries we would have got had we used a wire.

crickets

Great content can get some good attention through social bookmarking. As you probably know, most of the popular bookmarking services are no-follow until a link attains a certain level of "popularity".

EGOL is right. I think its only a matter of time before thinks built on/thru social media begin to have a greater effect on SEO, but for now it's a terrific way to share content and gain natural links. Google sees all.

Very good point.

Hello, This is the most popular resource for easy implementation of this: http://twitterfeed.com/

Your employees need to have linked in profiles and need to list your company as their current employer. It is based off members self identifying as your employees.

It sounds like a useless scam. The good thing about getting "liked" by a Facebook user is that your link/info shows up on that persons wall for ALL their friends to see and it gets you more visibility and the chance to get more traffic. With these companies that offer to sell you "likes" it will do no good to you since it will be only fake Facebook accounts, with no real friends, that it will show up on and not give you the added exposure or value that you really desire.