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Just average articles with a link pointing back. The blogs/websites pointing to these article have very low rank though.

Thanks for the advice. I agree that someone who knows our business would have a better chance of optimizing our campaigns -- just not sure if we have the resources to accomplish this. As far as the work required by the agency, it would involve only the campaign setup (research & building the campaigns) and optimization after introduction. They will not be doing any landing page optimization. I guess I feel $2k is a high setup fee to charge when the monthly ad spend is only $2k. I'm not too worried about the $750 management fee, which is the fee that will be applied to the agency's optimization efforts -- but if the traffic is only enough to recommend $2k in ad spend, are they really doing $2k worth of "setup" work? I guess if we had a higher ad spend, it might make more sense to start the campaign, since the setup efforts would remain the same but with a bigger budget.

Yahoo would be giving much more help than Hotbot in this case. Have you read Rand's recent post about the SERP Analysis tool? That may help you in looking at you and your competitor and finding out reasons the competitor is ahead of you. It's at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-best-kept-secret-in-the-seomoz-toolset

It is really just a way to distribute your blog content to social media networks you have been neglecting or you aren't currently feeding content to on a regular basis. Because i work with photographers, it does help the bottom line, because as we gain followers we generate more clients. Is it a magic solution, no. Was it worth the time to implement, yes.

okay. Thanks all!

I could turn it off each night and turn it on in the am...LOL ...or better yet redirect it to google.com each night and redirect to the real site in the am. The 301 works fine no matter the page.  Chances are most people would only type www.a.com and all the backlinks are to www.b.com (the real site)... The actually site is at the incorrect spelling....but it is a common misspelling. Thanks for the help.... I did not want to get goowacked for a simple thing.  That is a good new verb ...goowacked.  If you run out and regiester the term ....send me my royalties. Cheers

Thanks John.

Thanks for the info. I've just switched to iDevAffiliate. Too bad I still need the pro version of 1SC for the upsell and digital download modules. I was also worried I was going to have to buy iDdevAffiliate for $200 for each website that I want to point SEO Links to, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Thanks again.

It is neither good nor bad for your site. The idea is you are anonymously sharing data. All information which can be used to identify your site specifically is removed. This process allows Google to do some higher level analytical analysis of your information. Google can use the information they learn to make better business decisions. It has nothing to do with you nor your site, except they require participation in order to make their process work. More details can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=87515

Great - thanks for the info Stephen!

I was thinking of doing that too, but it's just too much work. This site only gets a little traffic, so I would need to build it up and then build something good to blog about. I'm just going to 301 it for now. Maybe in the future I will be inspired to do something better with it. Good thinking though. THANKS!

You can have a page canonical to itself, so if you just add the canonical tags to all the pages, they'll appear on all of masked domains as well. Thomas is right; if your goal is to get any of the vanity domains on search result pages, the canonical tags will prevent that.  A better set up might be to have the home pages be different (with the reps name and information), and then have the rest of the pages on the site be duplicate content with canonical tags.  To say the sites do not exist isn't really accurate... it just means you haven't set them up yet.

Is this a package you're buying from someone, or something you're doing internally? It could be great, or a great failure, IMHO. If you have 12 awesome articles produced each month, and you find 200 blog posts each month that are high-quality and relevant and you craft relevant, unique comments on each one, that's a real good start. If you get someone else to write 12 blog articles, run those through a content spinner so they get to be 24 different articles, and then put that on article directories and auto-submit spam to a list of do follow blogs that make the bloggers consider turning off comments on their blog, you're better having done nothing.