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The only links you want to be paying for are advertising ones if that's the route you're taking. If your tool is equally as good then they'll usually be more than happy to link to it!

I really see the theme of high quality relationships and value to the person/site you want to link to.  Of all the responses, I found X-com's most interesting because you are on the other side of the fence.  You are telling us what would prompt you to accept a link.  Lets not forget that the link requires work and attention to put up.  More importantly, you are putting your reputation on the line. I have just done an exhaustive prioritization of links for a client.  I noticed some wonderful opportunities in the top ones, not just for linking, but for partnering and for marketing programs.   I am fairly new to this side of web marketing, and think I've discovered a gold mine of ideas.  Certainly market segments are jumping out at me. I think hard work is also a barrier to entry to the millions of SEOs who would take the automated route.  So, if you are building a quality brand for your clients, they deserve a quality method that will stand the test of time. MY Question:  I'm wondering what you have found to be the link accept rate (%) when you are following the best in class methods we have been talking about here?

Oh, duh. missed the dropdowns. Not your UI, just me multi tasking. Thank you!

EGOLS video has a good idea at its heart buts it fails for me because its about 10x too long - 15 seconds is all you need to show that concept I bet it lost a ton of its potential reach due to its length before payoff - the client lost out due to the agency's ego

I don't think you can really separate the two.  As Rand pointed out a few months ago, likes and tweets play an important part in ranking now.  So I would consider it a necessity for an SEO to be able to maximize social media exposure.

When you have something of value to say. If you are not that creative, as I am not, then have guest bloggers add valued content. I think what is more important than frequency is quality. This also depends on expectations from visitors, which depends on what type of site you are running. Having too many may be too much for visitors to feel as though they are keeping up with the site. Small sites 2-3 per month Large sites (non news) 2-3 per day. (unless your site is broken into categories, then 1-2 per day per category)

It is my understanding that canonical tags help prevent duplicate content by telling the crawl bot where the original content exists. Say I want to repost an article from Seomoz on my site that I think my readers would find useful. If I did this without a canonical tag Google would penalize me for posting unoriginal content. To avoid this I would include the original URL back to the Seomoz post in canonical tag to tell Google where I am getting this content. An internal example would be on pages that include URL parameters (pagers for example: www.example.com/product-page and www.example.com/product-page?page1. Here you would want to include a canonical tag to the clean URL). I believe nofollow tags alone don't help with duplicate content issues. You need to also include a noindex tag. Combined, this is an aggressive and effect way to keep duplicate content out of Google's index and avoid penalizations. Hope that helped explain things a little better! Andrew

I went ahead and added the links to the sitemap, however when google crawled the links I receieve this message. When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL. However I do not understand how adding the redirected links to the sitemap will remove the old links.

Sorry, didn't read properly. Yes you should still block those pages anyway though... internal search result pages will still cause you issues in one way or another, whether it's circular navigation or competing for keywords... I would block them anyway.

Dr. Pete doesn't cover case (though it's mentioned in the comments), but just about everything else you might want to know about duplicate content is talked about at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world, including ways to remedy it. It sounds like you've got a plan here, but I'm also adding it for the benefit of others looking at this thread.

Submitting to 20 or 30 directories should not have any negative impact at all. Another thing to remember is that the engines will not find these links at the same time anyway. They will be found when each of those pages are crawled which could be days or in some cases weeks and months. So no, no problems at all.

crickets