Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you have relevant links from other countries they would help your rank but with the recent Panda updates from Google, if they are spammy sites, webfarms or paid links they will hurt your rankings. We participate on blogs and provide articles internationally that are on topic which help boost our rank, we even send products to reviewers overseas for evaluation.

I wouldn't even bother with using PR to judge the value of anything. For a link I'd check it's moz bar stats, age of domain, number of root domains linking in, and where on the site, and on the page you get to have a link... plus how many other links are on that page. I also hope you're not paying too much for a directory link... couple of quid at most

Shane, it tends to be the sites that manipulate the rankings (black hat) know all those tricks and if all it took was a seal from an SSL company, they would have a different one on each page. It would be surprising that the seal actually gives you page rank, it most likely does the opposite since an outbound link only passes juice to the destination and all those seals link directly to the ssl provider. As Ryan points out contacting Verisign directly will give you some insight, they are a company built on reputation and would not say it adds Google rank when it does not. You have to consider what their product is 'trust' and if they give you false information that hurts their marketting when you discover that is not the case. They would tell you what I said in my first reply, that their seal brings customer conversions, which is ultimately what you are after. Generally ecommerce sites exclude their ssl pages via robots.txt or nofollows so the question does not get raised. If the content on those pages is secure but not authenticated then the value is limited as it is public and open to exploit. As a developer, I have attended many seminars on this topic alone. The rank gain you get is secondary (from more tweets, blog links etc because people trust your site and like it) rather than a direct corelation. Read the paper (relevant section below) from the link: If I use SSL on my pages, will we be PageRank'd higher then non-ssl pages? So far, there is NO conclusive proof that a SSL site will get higher Google/MSN/Yahoo search rank listing compared to the same site which is unencrypted. In fact there seems to be no positive or negative result if you have your pages encrypted or not. This is because the quality of the data on the site is not validated by SSL, only that the certificate is independently verified. The most important factor in Google's PageRank for example is the amount of high quality sites linking back to your site. The idea being that if a site like Digg or CNN link to your site then your page rank will increase because their page rank is high. This is completely independent of whether your page is encrypted or not.

Michael, you might want to open a new question for this, as old threads don't get bumped when new content appears. If you don't have any content or anything on the exact match domains, the 301 really isn't going to help you.

Did you add any links to that particular page?  I have seen a handful of links with similar anchor text published at the same time kill a ranking.

Thanks all, I hoped it would be fine and I will proceed with your advice.

There's no way to generalize this, there are a million factors.  I believe rankings these days are pretty query-specific.  Is the search term Informational? Transactional? Navigational? If it's a competitive niche, how many of the competitors re penalized? One disadvantage of aged domains these days is they may have low quality links and may get penalized. From that point of view new domains are better.

Great discussion.  Here is what we do with some success. We don't do link requests, we do content requests.  Thinking what a web master wants, we can write and deliver content for them. A guest blog is an excellent example, but there are many other content suggestions you can make.  A  half page glowing testimonial about there services will often get published.  A tips page related to what they do might be very helpful for them. Think like the web master, be there friend, an the links and citation will follow.

Straight from the horses mouth, checkout this video from Google's Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI Importantly: "Now if you are still on the fence, let me just give you a bit of color. that we have looked at the rankings and the weights that we give to keyword domains, & some people have complained that we are giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. So we have been thinking about at adjusting that mix a bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given 2 different domains it wouldn't necessarily help you as much to have a domain name with a bunch of keywords in it."

This SEOmoz webinar should be exactly what you're looking for

Cloaking is defined as providing different content to users then to search engine crawlers. That is not what is happening here. Users and search engines see the same picture. The source of the image is irrelevant. Many sites use content delivery networks to deliver images. If you are viewing the page from California, then perhaps a server in San Jose, CA will deliver your image. Meanwhile if you view that same page in Texas, then perhaps a Dallas, TX server will deliver the same content. The delivered files COULD have different names or paths, but the actual content delivered should be the same. No, this is not cloaking and does not impact SEO directly. As oznappies points out, there may be other issues with the page which cause it to load very slowly and not perform well, and those issues can impact SEO.

I agree with the above and ensureing unique anchor text and Egol where multiple pages where you can dominate several positions in search is great. We have a main keyword that we target on several pages and use anchor text that includes that word but also targets longer tail variations. e.g. word, phrase with word, elaberate on word.

One of my most important jobs as a webmaster is to get website visitors to do what I want them to do. That's how you make money.    (pig nose intentional) If I have an opportunity to make money by getting them into a specific page then my job is to promote that page strongly.  Of course, I want the visitor to be happy but my job is to make money. I don't have any problem with promoting a money-making page twice (or three times!) on a single URL and there is no better place to promote my best stuff than on the homepage of the site.

In no particular order: http://www.seomoz.org/blog http://searchenginewatch.com http://searchengineland.com http://www.seobook.com/blog For a nice overview of a load of great SEO blogs, I usually start my morning with http://seo.alltop.com

Even Rank Tracker only compares to the week before and the guide says specifically that it cannot be changed. Sigh. Thanks, though.

Thanks Keri, Will do that. Appreciate your quick response. Cheers Geoff.