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Hello there, I did some Googling and found the following. There was a Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, but it basically disbanded and then reformed as the Local Media Consortium this past fall. http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/the-biz-blog/225463/newspapers-ad-consortium-with-yahoo-reboots/ http://www.netnewscheck.com/article/29237/consortium-reboots-beyond-papers-yahoo The members of this group - do not include any of the newspapers (or the parent companies) you mention http://www.localmediaconsortium.com/consortium-members/ As of the end of February, this group is now joining forces with Google vs Yahoo http://www.adexchanger.com/publishers/private-exchange-deal-with-google-just-a-first-step-for-reconstituted-local-media-consortium/ As far as the ad deal you are being offered, I would only assume that it might be easier to work with the newspapers as it may save you a step in having to deal with only 1 ad system vs 2.  I would ask to speak with current clients of the newspapers and see how they use the systems, get a demo etc. Good luck!

I am not 100% (in general) sure but this recommendation in your screenshot f.ex. is closely connected with the activities of Barnes & Nobles and their listings in Google Shopping... furthermore this depends on the markup structure of the website/URL/page ... if there are good reviews Google will "link" to them...

I would +1 Wiliam's answer here. 301 redirects in addition to Bing's site moving function should do the trick. Particularly if the links that point to the old domain, which will be redirected via the 301, contain your brand name - I've seen this carry the branded search rankings over regularly. Moz has chosen to keep their home page title reading "SEOmoz is now Moz" for several months now - I don't know first-hand, but I'd imagine they've done this in part as insurance to ensure they rank for their old brand name. Might be worth considering the same.

Morris, As strong component of a linking strategy, the heyday of press releases has come and gone but press releases are still valuable.  They're valuable in the sense that they've always been valuable--as a means to reach a targeted audience with a creative message about a topic that will be of interest to them. Press releases are an active engagement tactic, in that you research what publishers you want to target, you craft a message that is going to catch their attention, you send it via a channel you expect them to be listening on, and then you expect to engage and develop relationships with your target publishers.  Unfortunately, many people today think of the press release as sort of a passive tool--you write something that fits into the template you pay your money then you hit submit and you wait for all the links to come in. Don't think of press releases as a way to get links, think of them as tools in building new relationships.

Hi Bill Thank you for your response, I run my own business and also get involved in the SEO, so there are always interesting things to learn. Your thoughts are similar to mine and in fact we are currently working on our links, having recently moved to a cleaner quicker server. Again thank you for taking time to reply, Regards Mike

Hello Rob, Rich snippets are still in an early fase so i understand your pain about not being able to show your logo in the SERP's. The publisher markup is an option as Matt Antonino mentioned but this only shows up for brand queries so it might not be what you're looking for. I do see that you have a YouTube video placed prominently on the homepage. Perhaps you could use a video sitemap to get a video rich snippet? The process for this is described here: Video sitemap for vimeo and youtube Other than that it's not possible as far as i know to get a good rich snippet for a business if you do not have a specific product or recipe to show.

I suspected that hence the original question. About greeting everyone... not a possibility for me at this time (maybe a weekly welcome with no name dropping). Thanks

I think you can create a "separate experience" on your domain, while still keeping some elements of your brand in tact. Look at a landing page like Moz's for Mozcon for example. The site header and the color scheme are the same, but the layout and design of the rest of the piece are nothing like the traditional Moz blog post, tools or guide. It's totally OK to create a unique experience on your website for a dedicated landing page centered around an event, contest, etc.

Any idea on what this does or how to use it: _cdn="<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">true</a>" Trying to find info but can't seem to find anything!

TShak I think  the issue is what part do you have in the creation of the content. You are in SEO as am I, if you outsource it to me without providing any of the background, information, etc., from an 'ethical' point of view, probably not something I would do. I do know that there are those who do use authorship and have others write the content. Frankly, our firm has copywriters who produce content for clients. The clients provide data, background, and oversight and we give them authorship on some occasions and on others our copywriters are the authors. We are the publisher for the content where it is not in conflict with the client. If we have a client we are producing content for and they are not taking authorship of the content, we will often make the client site the publisher. As to Google's TOS, I am not sure there is going to be a definite answer. If you are a subject matter expert and you are providing the vast amount of the knowledge to a ghost writer, I personally, do not have issue with you. If you are having them create content around your subject without your input, I do have a problem with it. (that doesn't mean you are wrong, it means I would be if I did it.) Our copywriters do create SEO content, they take the authorship when they do. If something is not up to standard, myself or the content and media editor will redo it and then decide how it will be handled. It sounds more involved than it is. But, you ask for an opinion and I wanted to be as clear as possible. Hope it helps, Robert

These links in the footer pass little to no SEO value anymore. I would stop doing this and encourage your client to spread the news about their new website to local media and have them write an article/press release which refers to you as the designer with a link. If the website contains a blog they could also place a blog post about the new site and give you credit themselves.

There are two ways to go about this project. 1. Send out a press release and do no further work. This, I assume, means you just want the press release duplicated, syndicated, and just basically reproduced as you wrote it for the purpose of getting links only. That's all sending out a press release will do without a good person with good contacts to follow up with key journalists. There are no more "major" PR news wires that are not having their link equity stripped, due to the fact that they are paid services. Any others that might be free would be smaller scale. I am sorry to say I know of no such places. But once Google/Bing find them, I am sure their ability to pass link equity will diminish as well. That update was not about the newswire services, but about press release syndication. If you just want your press release published, it will do nothing for the company. Press releases are not read, stories are read. There will be no link equity, Google is removing it from any syndicated press releases. If this is really the route you want to go down, just avoid press release sites altogether like you mentioned before. 2. Now, if you mean to get coverage for the company on this story, which is what you should be hoping for, a story, not the publication of the press release, then yes, you will need a PR person. You might not need someone who identifies themselves as that, but you need someone that can talk with journalists, pick out people who might be interested in the story, and talk to them about covering the story, This is the right way to do it and what will produce the most benefit. The only benefit of a press release at this moment in time. I hope that clears up what I mean.

I think you should register the .sg domain for sure and get started. It's going to take some work to help get the domain built up with authority. If you start with the .sg, and later want to move into the more .com.sg, you could then strategically plan a 301 plan for all your sites and move the site to a new domain. There you have it .sg is the best option for now. Just build a solid strategy around your site, social media, content and inbound marketing and help push and drive traffic to your business. It won't happen overnight and will require work Good luck!

Wow great advice and thanks for sharing Rand's post. Very timely indeed!

Adding on to what Peter said, a press release is not a news story, it's a statement about a newsworthy item. The purpose of a press release is to grab the attention of journalists/bloggers so that they will want to to contact you (the press contact) for the information they need to craft their own news and feature stories. A press release should be concise and scannable. Leave out the details. They will get those after contacting you. While I agree with EGOL that distributing content authored by Christie Christie on bridge traffic would definitely garner a ton of attention, I would consider that an article meant for syndication if widely distributed to publishers --- not a press release.  Including a direct quote from Chris Christie would be one way to grab attention with the press release, as would mentioning an opportunity to interview Chris Christie in a press conference, for instance. And yes, press releases are often released solely to let journalists know about press conferences and other PR events. I hope that helps!

Totally agree - amazing reply - I was think about doing bullet points for each section - i.e. a short paragraph/sentence or two and then bullet points of do's and don't for blogs, twitter and other social platforms. Will think about them tonight and try and post tomorrow.

Is one domain with four directories an option? If so, that's what I'd probably go for (as long as the four products don't compete with each other directly). The reason for this is that I imagine you have a finite resource pool: using those resources on one website rather than four websites or subdomains (remember that search engines treat different subdomains in much the same way as different root domains - as separate entities) will be the most efficient way to use them, giving you the best chance of success.

I have mentioned this a number of times but will rgab the opportunity and say it again.Nobody can fix google's algorith, not even Google itself. It's out of their hands, always was, always will be. The past already shows, that their algorithm gets a lot of things wrong and penalized small biz and ranks spam high, you all got examples of that. They are already bad at identifying machines or humans. Assuming they will go for keyprhases such as Marie Haynes is a writer for example.com...", or "Visit my website at example.com" is simply impossible, for thishappen 99.9% of the guest post authorship tag must include the same keyphrase which i doubt. I find more likely to devalue for example ALL authorship links or even anything with /blog/ in its url, but for that to happen it would mean that 99% of the blogs have the same phrasing which I doubt. If you are wondering how they will try to minimise that, my pov is that they will take into account a couple things such as 1)frequency of posts, 2) how many of these posts are original content and 3)OBL which to my surprise noone mentions here. Matt refers to spam sites that are there for link selling purposes. If you follow his tweets and his latest activities you would know he is after the private blog networks advertised on the most popular black hat forum on the internet. What does that mean? that the algorithm cant track them thus he is trying to figure it out manually. Black Hat SEO is the art of making a machines work to look like it has been done by a lot of humans. Google's job on the other site is to find out who's the human and who's the machine. Google gets better at identifying machines, so the SEO industry gets better at mimicking human behaviour. Guest Blog is an area that got abused but trust me there is a difference having a guest blog on a PR5 site, with unique content and 1-2 links and a total OBL of less than 30 than a guest blog of 500 words with 3 EM ancor links on high competitive keyprhases and roughly 20 comments with link in them. Then again in this case OBL would explode so why would you want a link like that anyway? You lose the value thus wasting money, time and resources.

I agree completely with Simon. We too have attempted to syndicate content and had the sites we submitted to then outrank us with our own content. The fact is, if you submit your content to a site that has higher authority than you, chances are they will rank for the content, not you, even if you have canonical tags and authorship in place and even if you publish the content on your site first. We've seen this happen not just with content like articles, we've seen it happen with products (i.e. if we have the same products for sale on our site, Amazon and eBay, Amazon and eBay will outrank us for those same products), and we've certainly seen it with videos. Post the same video on your site and YouTube and YouTube will rank for the video, not your site. This isn't to say nothing should ever leave your site or get posted externally. If your business or someone at your business wins an award or does something positively newsworthy, reaching out to a reporter or blog editor with a story is a great way to raise the brand awareness you seek and obtain valuable referral traffic from the exposure. The scenario at my company is almost identical to yours. The other difficulty I face (and I'm sure you and Simon have seen this too as in-house SEOs) is one of vanity. Stakeholders can get very caught up in the number of views their videos are getting on YouTube, or the number of eyeballs an article will get if it's syndicated versus just placed on their own site. Convincing them that being the sole location of that original content is sometimes a hard sell. I think the best way to do that is to produce a couple of pieces of great content and convince them not to distribute those around, then track how well that content gets positioned in the SERPs. If you can show them some real examples of the strategy being successful on a small scale, they'll be more apt to allow you to continue down that path. Hope that's helpful!

So glad that hit the spot!