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It is against Google TOS to ask for a link, so the best way to do this, as Dejan SEO have said is to cause a reason to link back to the competition page o the home page.

There are various methods of this, and the best has been mentioned - include a code snippet on your contest page, perhaps with a blog footer like so:

This post was for a competition hosted by Company Name, promoting Product. Visit their website for more details on this competition

(With links in obviously). This will trick a lot of people into thinking that it is necessary to include that footer following their post to keep their entry legitimate, and will obviously be gaining you the contextual link you're after, to multiple pages if you'd like.

The other method is via profile badges, or a specific badge for that competition. Encourage users to add your badges to their sites/blogs/individual posts, and make it as easy to do so as possible.

One final thing, make sure you give out badges to the finalists, again, linking to your pages. If they're winning something they'll feel obliged to use the badge!

Hope all of this helps EuropeanSEOguy!

The link juice always flows to the original page, not to the new page as the user follows the 302 redirect. Therefore if the 302 is removed, then the juice stops back a the old page as it always has. I can't see what your genuine reason for this might be, however this would be the best course of action for you.

Here is an excerpt of some OSE about page:

301s, 302s, and Meta Refreshes301s, 302s and meta refreshes are all ways of redirecting one URL to a different URL.301 refers to the HTTP Status Code for this type of redirect. A 301 Redirect is a permanent redirect and passed between 90-99% of link juice (Ranking Power)302 also refers to the HTTP Status Code for this type of redirect. A 302 Redirect is a temporary redirect and passes 0% of link juice (Ranking Power). This is bad for SEO.Meta refreshes are a different type of redirect that is executed on the page level rather than the server level (There are usually slower and not recommended). They are most commonly associated with a 5 second count down with text "If you are not redirected in 5 seconds, click here". Meta refreshes do pass some link juice but are not recommended as an SEO tactic due to usability and juice passing

Hope this helps

Aaron

I've put up a new site recently that I had been link building to during development. It got indexed in a strange way - just the main keyword, hyphen, domain name... I had it set to noindex but Google obviously followed a few links to it to see where they went.

I'm hoping this will clear up for me once the site is cached. I assume you're experiencing another quirky Google ranking script, so it should be all cleared up on the next index of your site, regardless of the 302's actually supposed to be 301s

Aaron

It really depends on when the pages that your links are on get indexed by OSE. And that depends on what links to them. OSE will only be able to discover sites by following other links to them. It may or may not choose to index a domain if it finds one... I'm sure help desk  (link in a post below) may be able to help you out however I doubt that there is a way of getting these pages crawled ahead of the others.

Essentially the plan of action should be to continue link building and just have a little faith that OSE will catch up with you one day!

I usually monitor my link building efforts by looking at the SERPS and monitoring Yahoo backlinks. For me, OSE is a way of finding other's good links to steal from them!

Bearing in mind OSE is always using historical data, I wouldn't concentrate too much on using it on your own site as you're link building to it, but after.

We can always hope that out most recent links come up in the next OSE index! (I seriously hope this too!!)

Aaron

Forums get crawled pretty regularly. Whilst this wont help your ranking, it will mean that if you add a new product and theres a link to it in a discussion it may get indexed quicker. As Daniel said above, every little helps!

Erin, what tool are you using to find this? It might be something to do with the language that your CMS is written in - it might also be a matter of a trailing slash or a non www. version.

I'd be happy to help if you could provide a little more info, perhaps a screen shot?

Aaron

When this happens does it all point to the same URL? It might be an idea to use rel=canonical on this rather than a 302 (temporary redirect).

That way Google will acknowledge the links to all, but only index one copy of it.

In answer to your question regarding the different title tags - this does seem very strange. Because it happened so recently, I'd assume that there may be a small disparity in Google's distributed indexes (however I'm not sure!)

Aaron

I assume by this post that it has positive implications, however I must admin that I'm not too familiar with eTags.

SEOtown - article on eTags

I have to agree with Alex in some extent too, so his is an actual answer. OSE does not have an index as large as Google/Yahoo's. If you're looking for a slightly more accurate up to date listing of your links, check out Yahoo Site Explorer.

If the links are remaining up (assuming you've built links that wont get removes) they will show up in OSE eventually, however it may take a while for lesser known domains to appear in OSE's index. Try looking in OSE at your competitors backlinks and going after those, that way when it does re-index OSE, at least you'll be able to see that .

Hope this helps a little?

Aaron

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!

If it's just this one link on one website then don't worry at all! Getting too many of these links will be a problem, but the odd one will not be a problem. How many sites are linked to from the individual page that you have your link on? You dont want to appear in amongst a lot of spammy links.

You're correct in thinking no link juice can be passed through an iframe. You could however have a link immediately before or after it in the method you mentioned, and then give your partners the whole HTML including that link.

Hope that helps!

Aaron

Yes MonaVie as Steve Ollington has said, once it's realised that the two are one of the same, then there is no risk of penalty!

Jarrett, the canonical tag you have in place will suffice. I'd suggest either to have users moving between the sites in the future or to modify your CMS to auto add the canonical tag in any future posts. It might be worth speaking to your syndication partners and changing your API to only show an excerpt with a link back to your site. This will also eliminate the duplicate issues and allow more of your pages to rank. It's highly unlikely for you to get your larger media partners to add a rel=canonical to your posts on their site as they simply don't need to, as they are more likely getting the content indexed.

Aaron

If it's canonical then don't worry!

Does your aggregator cause a lot of duplicate content issues? I've seen a few Youmoz posts or PRO Questions where some sites have lost up to and over 50% of their traffic. Please describe in a little more depth. I don't like these online translators!!

Go for the deep page lining and aim to achieve the double listing like EOLG has suggested!

I don't know of any Google updates on that day, and a quick Google search doesn't seem to throw anything up...

Could you expand on your post a little more? Did you lose more long tail traffic, branded traffic etc. Do you know whether any powerful links to your site were removed, or whether there was any downtime on your site/sitemap whilst being crawled (check Google Webmaster Tools for crawl errors)

Yeah we've got our real list of links at the ready for launch, just laying some ground work lower quality stuff to diversify the link profile.

Link bait's at the ready too!

Thanks Dejan SEO

Essentially to this point only low-medium quality links. Forum, blog, 'designed by...' site wide links and a couple of articles.