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Hi I've already done away with our own embed linking facility and chosen addthis. I'll have to read up on regexes. thanks

Jim Boykin

Testimonials are also a great way to get some content in the first-person voice where it's unnatural to do so otherwise. You can have a testimonial that says "Company xyz helped me fix my computer" and it's a way to get the phrase 'fix my computer' in and sound natural.

Brilliant suggestion - I shall do just that!

I prefer the second site but I would be careful about using lots of links in your footer.  It doesn't look good and is seen as a negative by some search engines.

In theory, you're correct - the premise being they'd not want to risk penalizing innocent site owners. In reality, Google makes mistakes all the time.  Some bounce back, others don't. Also, Google is constantly changing their rules.  And based on rule-changing patterns I've studied over the past several years, if a technique even appears to be in the shady category today, it's very likely to be a primary target tomorrow.  Because of this, I prefer to focus on methods and tactics I believe to have a much more resilient long-term potential.

I have a Mac and I use Pages to make my articles and them save them as a PDF.  I'm pretty sure you can do this with Open Office as well. Adobe Acrobat is expensive!  I'm pretty sure you don't need to spend the money on it!

You are welcome!

lol, well... there's about a million and one reasons that could be But I'd hazard a guess as the main reasons being the same keyword phrase spread though-out the site including in title tags, and the whacking great ad banner at the top of every page as soon as it loads Get rid of the ad or move it, and focus on different keywords for different pages

Spec work is terrible and undervalues the industry. I say you get what you pay for. http://www.no-spec.com/

HTML / CSS.  I just found a way to change this setting in my server host (GoDaddy), so it looks like that's all I have to do.  It doesn't appear that I would need to change anything in my htaccess file. I take the following statement from Google as meaning we should only use the default 404 setting and not direct it to the homepage?  "Another example is when a site redirects any unknown URLs to their homepage instead of returning 404s. Both of these cases can have negative effects.............."   I guess I'm a little thrown off by the word "any urls."

Or they could allow one, totally non-spammy sig link once you get to a certain point... i.e. 10,000 moz points or something. I doubt spammers would hang around that long to get a link

Great information.  My understanding was always the same as Steve's .....it depends on the ratio of unique vs. duplicate content.  A while back, I had read that this ratio was something like 80/20 (duplicate not to exceed 20%).  However, I think I will make each piece unique for best results.

Yes but we need to remember that the 100 links limit is very arbitrarily. Some sites can have less than 100 links on a page while other can have thousands and still being crawled. It really comes down to the authority of the website.