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Who doesnt need more links? More links due to good content + good user experience/ creating value = bigger business.

Thanks Matt for your answer! Let me ask you this in regards to all the elements that are needed in SEO I was wondering if these were possible when using a Weebly interface: is it possible to 301 redirect a non weebly domain to a weebly domain? are canonical tags available on weebly? are url structures problematic? for instance I read that urls skip subdirectories such as www.example.com/weebly instead of www.example.com/hosting-reviews/weebly? Thanks for letting me know!

I actually have tons of goals set for 2016, I will update a post regarding that on my blog tomorrow (I am sure not many will be interested in that but it’s a good performance tracking indicator for me). But above all the most important thing I have to do in 2016 is action. There are so many things I know I can do but obviously people will only believe when they see you doing that. So, this year I will talk to people with my actions.

Some additional thoughts.... If I was going to do this myself, I would put the detailed article on my own site. Then, if I have ten top quality sites who will accept the infographic with a short article, I would write ten unique introductions that will appear above the infographics on these other websites.  And, I would write ten unique conclusions to the infographic that will also appear on these other websites.  The conclusion would be followed by an invitation to visit my site where more detailed information can be obtained. Another way to do this, which I believe is superior, is to give the full article with infographic to the ten top-quality websites and have them implement rel=canonical back to the full article page on my site.

The main thing that an exact match does for me is that it provides "mental energy".  If I own Baloney.com I am going to be all about baloney and post plenty of baloney every day.  Mental energy is the most important weapon that I have.

For me, I've always had something "on the side" of my marketing/agency life. I want to have personal experience with ecommerce. How does it feel to sell clothing online? What are the concerns? How can I help clients? What are the hiccups with certain sources of traffic (Stumble, Reddit, Pinterest, even Digg back in the day). When does that traffic help? I like to always have at least a couple side projects so I can keep a bit of "skin in the game."  If I'm spending MY money on Adwords, I get better at it. If I'm spending MY time building a site or generating links, I find ways to maximise the resources I have. If you don't have your own site, maybe split/share one with someone. Just a simple side project and always have at least a little stake in the outcomes. That goes back to how I learned - I learned marketing by owning a business. I learned SEO by ranking #1 for my own keyword. I learned Adwords after wasting thousands & thousands of dollars. I learned CRO after wasting thousands & thousands of website hits. Make it PERSONAL somehow.

Thank you Eric.  It's definitely a gray area, I had considered your suggestion about requesting the author change the source parameter to something other than affiliate- and that's a great idea too. I welcome more dialogue on this from others who may have some input.

So if the placeholder domain you're using here -- "site.co.uk" -- is the same for both the Hubspot blog and your primary domain, this is more than likely what's going on. The only way Hubspot could serve pages on your domain and prevent you from redirecting them would be if you have CNAME records for your domain set up to point to Hubspot's servers. (Essentially this creates an alias.) So if you want your redirects to work, you need to go into your domain name registrar and look at your CNAME records. If there's something in there for Hubspot, then remove it. To answer your questions in order: You can check the index by googling this format, not in quotes: "site:blog.site.co.uk" If it's not indexed, no. Even if they are indexed, no. It just means you probably would not get much, if any traffic to them. I would just make sure the old hubspot blog is down and then add them at your new location, as long as they actually got decent traffic. Then, provided you've taken care of the subdomain/CNAME stuff, write 301s from the old locations to the new ones.

Hi Christy, Thanks for taking the time to reply. Great feedback and recommendation to pursue building out each company website with it's own domain. Thank you!

Very open question, campaign process is dependant upon the business model, target audience, budget, and expected outcomes. So it would be vastly different however I assume the questions is trying to ascertain and compare the base processes that would be undertaken and how those are prioritised. We conduct a lot of time initially gathering  and reviewing intel about the business, domain history, WMT, GA etc, I think this is a given for quality process to be established from evidence. How you interpret the priorities from this data depends upon the outcomes you wish to reach, the more competitive and broader the targets the more consideration comes in towards the quality content assets both onsite and creatable. Outreach and Content needs to be thoughtful, creative and above all sharable across Social platforms. So this activity along with other quality linking processes, competitive, keyword and link research are created to bring together both onsite and offsite work we do. Once you have placed a stake in the ground at the start, we generally see uptrends in traffic and more importantly new customer engagement within a short timeframe, again this is dependant upon what your initial intel work reveals.

There will be a million and one reason why this might be, but I always start with any e-commerce site by looking at the content. For this example, I looked at the following page: http://www.grandcrayon.ca/hlr26411-hilroy-coil-scrapbook-26411.html There isn't a lot of content on there, but if you look at the description "Studio scrapbook features durable manila paper pages and oversized coil binding for easy viewing without tearing." in Google, there are another 23 sites using this as well. Another example page has this description "Jumbo straight straws are designed for use with cups that hold up to 32 oz. Straws are translucent and individually wrapped to keep them sanitary." and in Google, this shows another 19 sites using it. So, as a first take away, look at writing some unique content, although I appreciate this could be a big job. Looking at your site in Open Site Explorer, you are lacking on some good links, so I would be looking to expand on this as well. If you don't have much in terms of site power, internal pages will suffer. As I was on your site, I noticed it is quite slow, and after testing this, it isn't great (although I have seen a lot worse). Google doesn't like slow sites and it is bad for usability too. When testing in Page Speed Insights, it does give you some suggestions. Do your internal pages not feature in Google anywhere? -Andy

Actually all of my sites are info sites and all of my sites are retail sites.  I'll explain below.... INFO SITES My info site has thousands of content pages, but it also has a store that sells hundreds of items.  That's an info site with a small store. All of the info pages display ads from adsense or another ad network.  Some of the info pages have a very closely-related product in the store and we have house ads on those pages to move interested visitors to the store.  The info pages usually outrank the store pages, but that's OK because they also outrank almost every competitor too.  If we don't make money from a sale we make money from the ads.  Its all good.    Most of the revenue comes from ads. RETAIL SITES My retail sites have lots of info.  Lots.  More than all of our competitors and the manufacturers combined.  They also have more info pages than retail pages.  That is how much content we are attacking with.  But, these sites produce more retail revenue than ad revenue.  So they are retail sites, but they really are content sites. All of my sites are content sites, but a couple of them produce more retail revenue than ad revenue.  All revenue is good.  I don't worry about my competitors ads taking a sale.  I took a piece of their ad budget and their ads on my relevant pages usually pay pretty good.  And I am under the assumption that they are wild ass bidding and don't realize that they are losing money.  :-0

Sorry you didn't get much of a response to this question Neil. I'm closing it down since it was so long ago. Craig

I've installed Google custom search engine (CSE) on multiple client websites. The $100 option is a good place to start, that gets you 20K queries. Plus, over the past year Google has updated the features and UI allowing to easily customize the look and feel of the CSE. Attached is a screengrab showing the CSE UI. Hope that helps! VHV7RcM

At the risk of sounding too repetitive, I'd advise against this: And that's what I'm looking for: a few good articles mkt sites (3-4) to put some good articles on. That's what the client can afford now and I'm sure it is better then nothing. If you find a site that will allow just anybody to post to it and link out to their clients then it's either not going to pass much link equity or be a site that is on Google's radar as a low quality site that links out for SEO purposes. Now, I do believe that it is possible to strategically connect with the owners of quality websites and find ways to either provide content for them or offer them something of value on your clients' website that will make them want to link to them.  But, this is not something you can do at scale.  And you have to be really careful. What I do for the majority of my day is deal with websites that have been either penalized or algorithmically demoted because of link schemes gone bad. I can very easily spot a link scheme vs earned links. If I can spot these, then I'm sure Google can. If you're looking for a list of great sites that will allow you to post articles freely and add value to your clients, they likely don't exist IMO.

Thanks so much Patrick! Interesting points you make as well! I'm looking to bring out the quality in the industry and grow it from there. Can you tell me I had a question from a potential "contributor" who wanted to know interms of copywriting if usually a contributor creates an article for the blog who owns the copy right? I'm not so big around this side of things, but it wasn't something I was actually aware of until she mentioned it.