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nice, that answers a lot. You've been a huge help.

.INFO is not a great  SEO extension, according to Rand. REF...Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains If you're not concerned with type-in traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this one. However, if you're at all serious about building a successful website over the long-term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and while directing traffic to a .net or .org (as SEOmoz does) is fine, owning and 301'ing the .com is critical. With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that's out there - don't make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic to these folks. But you are not competing with very competitive keywords, while of course you should look at the SEO value but if you're branding yourself I would think YOURNAME.INFO is a very good use of the that extension. I would imagine it wouldn't be too terrible hard to rank well for your own name with a .info unless you happen to be in a group of people who share their name with somebody famous.

and I was thinking I was going well doubling my adsense income to £100 a month! wow.

If you switch a direct link to a 302 redirected link, you're absolutely going to lose the value of that link. See this 2010 post on SERoundTable about ways to retain that link value and pass affiliate IDs: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022446.html - read the comments on the page as well. As a sidenote, If I recall correctly, I have seen it indicated either officially or unofficially that Google doesn't 'like' the passing of link value through affiliate links - I think they rightfully consider them a form of paid links.

Hello Menachemp, Google is really good at detecting affiliate links, especially from any known network. To answer your question in the title, the best SEO value would come from a home-grown affiliate program that doesn't use any of the link footprints or networks that others are using. In terms of a linkbuilding strategy you'd be paying for links so essentially it could get your entire domain in hot water. Getting random affiliates to remove all of those links after the fact would be a nightmare. So unless you are ok with the very real possibility that you'll have to scrap the domain and start over again somewhere else I'd stay away from it as a linkbuilding strategy. Some people run those links through another domain first and then 301 them to the destination. That way if Google figures out what you're doing you can just dissconnect the redirects and remove all of those links with the flip of a switch in the middle-domains' htaccess file. Google knows about this tactic as well, and I would be very surprised if they haven't addressed it already, or very soon. This isn't a whitehat / blackhat or a moral thing for me. It is a matter of risk tolerance. In this case the pay-off would have to be big and fast for me to have enough risk tolerance to chance burning a legitimate business down. People have been trying this tactic for at least five years (that's about the time when I first thought of it myself, though I'm sure others were doing it long before that) so this is nothing new, especially to Google. Keep that in mind when planning it out, and get someone to build it for you from scratch if you're going to do it. Good luck!

anyone that knows a good one isn't going to give it up! I would checkout http://www.onlinemba.com/ and http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/ to get started and see what kinda competition is at the top very competitive niche

Thanks for the detailed answer Ryan. That was very helpful. best,

Hi Jason, You need to make sure that your page goes above and beyond the content provided from your affiliate partner. What can you add to this page that will be unique and valuable to your visitors? What can you put on this page that will make it worthy of sharing socially or attracting links. It's OK to have some duplicate content on your site in a case like this, but you also need to add as much value as possible to this page. Since it's a travel site, get your hands on some unique photos, write your own mini-travel guide, and simply be creative. What would you want to see as a user on this page?

I'd start by finding out what sites the people who use your service hang around on. Is it biz opp and affiliate sites or something else? Then target those types of sites. Plus you can always try getting some high quality content featured on tech review sites. Maybe an infographic that transparently explains how the schemes work or an alternative review of a product? Just my 2c.

I agree with Jim, there are plenty of other directories with authority that are way cheaper.  I have a list here if it helps!  My List

Hi Rob, If the links back have nofollow in them I do not believe they will add any backlink benefit to you. The benefit you receive is what the affiliate links purpose was intended for – to drive sales. Here is an interesting article that wills hed some light on your question. http://tentblogger.com/affiliate-links/ Hope that helps.

Thanks Mcarle.

Unfortunately, Rome wasn't built in a day... That's why Google invented AdWords. It all depends on your marketing budget, but good quality links, good on site SEO and generate as much traffic as you can. There is no quick fix.. Crunch the numbers, but once you get a small base of players - recommend a friend to receive 'x' dollars of chips always works well... Don't ignore FB likes (social media) too, again receive 'x' dollars if you like us on Facebook.. Large amounts of traffic is very important with casino's/betting site.

These don't bug anyone else.....

Hi Andrew, First of all, lots of good answers here, but let me add my own 2 cents. Google recently cracked down on link networks. Creating a series of multiple sites and linking them individually comes pretty close to a link network, even if you don't intend it to be one. The risk of getting penalized or deindexed completely is too high to consider this as an option. So really your 2 best options are to create subdomains, or subdirectories - this means each team would be a different folder on the main site, so MLB.com/team. If I had my druthers, I'd go the directory route, unless there are reasons that you thought this will kill conversions or ruin the user experience. The benefit is that each subfolder would benefit from the link metrics of the root domain, and the site would be much easier to maintain. My feeling is this would give you the greatest traffic/ratings advantages over the alternatives. If you choose to go the subdomain route, I think you'll be fine. Last summer, Google started reporting subdomain links as "internal" in Webmaster Tools, which is an indication of how they now view subdomains, which agrees to an extent with what Alan has mentioned here. Here's an older article from Rand on the subject, but much of it is still relevant today: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Given the over optimisation penalties that google are applying, I would use 90% brand anchor text and then vary the anchor text around the main keyword you are trying to rank for on each page Exact match is pretty much dead or dying. Use your page content and internal linking to let Googel know the contextual relevance of the keyword you are attempting to rank for Stephen

Thanks EGOL...much appreciated.