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"Keyword phrases are highlighted with bold/italic/sizing/etc as appropriate", if you would do this purely for SEO I would say not to do it because it looks pretty unnatural.

Hi Grobro Do you have any other links that we are counting as follow that are using the "external nofollow" tag? Our devs are trying to find a pattern to rule out the possibility of the link not set as nofollow when we originally crawled it.

thank you for the insight. Let me ask you a related question: I own a website in a non-related field. The website is not doing anything for me, but is a trusted quality site. Can I redirect that website's homepage to my other website's homepage and otherwise just close that site down? Or, since the 2 websites have nothing in common (1 is about oranges the other about apples so to speak) would this be a move that could be considered manipulative and I shouldn't be doing?

Travis is right! It is generic and it can risk you for manual penalty. On the other hand ask for a link directly in to your email is not a good idea at all. If I would be at your place, I might have gone this way! -- Hello [Name], I was researching for some quality blogs relevant to [niche] and I found your blog very interesting. [Research a blog and talk a little more about it]. Actually we [name of your store] are planning to increase our audience’s reach and as I personally believe that you have the kind of audience we ideally want to interact with, I have a proposal for you! You can visit our website and choose any product under $100 and we will deliver 2 pieces to your door step for free. One will obviously for you and other we want you to giveaway to your blog’s audience via a blog post or anything you like. Please let me know if this is something you are willing to do! Looking forward to hear from you! Regards, [your name] -- I personally thing this email can also be optimized but atleast this sounds legit and do not really asking for link but you offer a situation in which he somehow have to link back to you the natural way! Hope this helps1

Thanks William and everyone else too!

I'd just add one thing. Twitter gets you exposure. If you have created a resource you think might help your audience and you want it to be memorable, you might then want to consider using your domain or a custom, shortened URL.

How you implement this will determine whether you get more visibility in search results or harm your own efforts on-site and off-site. Here are some key points: Never duplicate the full content across multiple sites if you can avoid that. Duplication of entire entries just forces Google to "figure it all out" and they often do so poorly. Two solid methods that can both work for your overall needs: 1. Create a "Press" or similar section in your site. Each time a new article shows up in a trusted off-site location, add it to your press section.  Either just the Titles and a unique snippet explaining what's contained in the off-site article, or with more info, as long as the info is almost all unique, and not copied from the off-site version. If you generate a lot of these, be sure to use proper indexable pagination in your site's list of outbound press links. 2. Write full blog articles on your own site that link to those articles, but where you go deep in your own content - make it mostly unique and only do so if you are sure it's a quality piece in its own right. Either way can work - the 2nd version is more likely to get both the off-site and your own piece indexed most of the time, however if the "press" versions are also robust, they can rank as well. Here's a screen-capture of how I did that for one of my best articles a couple years ago. The 1st entry is the original article, the 2nd entry is my own site's page about it. HolyGrail3Pack.jpg

Thanks William, and yes we did redirects at the page level. It looks like we didn't have the correct analytics code in a few different templates so that might have been the cause of some of the drop. It's also been just over a week since we made the switch so we're probably still in that window were the drop should be expected.

Backlink profile isnt spammy at all actually, and June/July were our best months ever in terms of organic search so I do not think we were hit with payday loan update. We started losing organic traffic in August. Are you sure that penalization requires a manually review?

If you don't have concrete requirements, you are right do it hourly as scope creep will eat up a fixed budget quickly. Some of the tasks have different market rate ranges (based on what Cole/William stated)--but if you are comfortable at $50 an hour and have capacity, go for it.

The following post might be helpful - http://moz.com/community/q/online-sitemap-generator You can also use Screaming Frog to create sitemaps.

there could be several reasons. Has Moz found new sites pointing to your domain. Check out this link explaining the basics of Domain authority, http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority but as they look at links and Moz Trust it could be a case of you getting a few good links, and removing a few bad links. Also note that a drop is not always a bad thing and really you should compare your score against your competitors. Your DA has increased by 3, but if all your competitors has increased by 4 then in theory you are worse off, but this also applies, if you drop by 1 and ur competitors drop by 2 then you have gained even though you have dropped so I would always recommend benchmarking yourself against your competitors and not using it as a stand alone number.

You're welcome!

Hello Jackinmathis1, We would need to have a look at the page/source code to help with this question.