Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can test the robots.txt file in Google Webmaster tools. It's under "Crawler access" in the "Site Configuration" section. Input the robots.txt content and the directories you want to test and it will give you feedback on the status.

Thanks James, Excellent response. Are you or anyone else actually building back links to the social media page?

I would recommend reviewing any content including your images for their names, alt tags, and anything which may indicate your content is adult oriented. If some of your competitors are succeeding in an area where you are not, I would suggest taking a closer look at their site and noting any differences. A bit of conversation around this topic: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5515ba22bd52d12e&hl=en http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021499.html

Hence why I said adding the robots.txt block would be the first choice.

It's not new. You can read some more information about when it first was reported in late 2008 over at Search Engine Roundtable. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018996.html.

Ryan, thanks for responding, but I may have not been clear in my question. Your answer is about domain authority for the ultimate destination of the link; let's say http://bit.ly/xyz redirects to http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-url-shorteners-building-domain-authority-everytime-someone-uses-a-link-from-their-service And let's say 20 people on tweet the http://bit.ly/xyz link, and the text of several of those tweets is reproduced (link included) on eight websites. Does http://bit.ly 's domain authority increase as a result of those 20 tweets and eight website links?

If you haven't already you could take a look at this article from a year ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

Hi Dunamis, Check out the post Justin Briggs made about How to Build Links with infographics. He does talk about the landing page for an infographic, and mentions this in relation to one specific example. This landing page removes almost all distractions, except for engaging with the content via social or embedding. It links back to the post and the site’s homepage. There is this wonderful share bar at the top, which allows visitors to easily share the graphic. It even sticks at the top as the user scrolls down the page. If you look at the link for this example, the link goes directly to the infographic with almost nothing else on the page except for social sharing. It does link back to the infographic in the context of a post, where the site looks more like a regular page on the site. Hope this gives you an idea of how other people balance the layout options you have.

Hi Kyle. Magento takes up a lot of resources and seems best suited for sites selling many products. I believe the software supports thousands of items. The specific need here is for a lite cart. There are only 2 products being sold. There is also a requirement that users only have to log in once at the site. Logging in once to the site and then another time to the shopping cart is undesirable. Therefore only a shopping cart with an established Joomla bridge would be workable. Thank you for the suggestion but they are not options in this case.

Maybe a better way to get an author is go out to see who are the very competent bloggers in your industry.  There you have someone who is excited enough about the subject because they have a message to share.  You get to see the quality of their work and perhaps their personality. One reservation that I would have about hiring a copywriting service is my concern that they might not be experts in the topics that I would ask them to write about yet accept the job and produce content that might have flaws or that might have a tone that anyone with experience in the field would know that they are winging it.

Ryan has a great idea. Think about who will link to your site. Will people want to link to a "cheap flights" website or would they prefer to link to a magazine?

Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site? No Has anyone  experienced problems doing this? There are not any problems that can arise from this issue unless the target site which belongs to the SEO receives a penalty. If you stick with SEOs whom use only white hat techniques this should never be a problem. Does this negatively impact the site with the links? No. If you want to really look at this topic under a microscope then a very small amount of PR would flow from your site to the SEO's site. How small? If your site had 100 links per page and the PR flowed evenly to all links then we are talking about 1%. Google has inferred they devalue footer links so most likely it is a fraction of one percent. If the SEO is doing their job well and you are pleased with their performance, I would suggest leaving the link. If you are unhappy with the SEO's performance and would not recommend their services, remove the link. Personally, the link is something I discuss with clients upfront. I inform them exactly the words I shared in the above paragraph. If you are happy with me, leave the link and otherwise remove it.

I agree with the thin content assessment. Below is what I wrote before I read your comment a second time. I'm looking at interior pages on the site, and my question is "if I were Google, what benefit do I get from including this site in the index?". What does this site offer that's not already on the web? I visited a few random pages. Several of the offers were expired, some as much as a couple of years ago. The product information is taken from another site, and is duplicated all across the web. The blog hasn't had a new post since January. There is very little to this site that is not from a data feed, from what I can tell. Why should Google include this site in their results, when other sites can offer more information? On the technical side, don't include "all" in the robots meta tag, it's not an option (see http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html). I don't know if it's causing any problems, but it doesn't need to be there.

I think that reply is pretty good at least they will consider it with the product team. Could be a easy way to get this feature implemented.

Interesting...is this common practice?