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Hello, You inquired in another post (http://www.seomoz.org/q/ideas-needed-for-onsite-seo#post-99529) about this Q&A and why my picture appears next to my SEOmoz results in SERPs. For SEOmoz, I added a link to my G+ profile page on my author page, and I also added a link from my G+ page to my SEOmoz author page. Now my SEOmoz results show with my picture next to them. How does this benefit your websites rankings? The only thing I can see it benefiting is the blog the guest post is on?? In short, it does not offer a direct benefit. It is not designed to either. Indirectly, it can offer a benefit. Let's forget search engines exist for a moment and think about how guest blogging works. You have a niche site on gardening. You would like more readers. You recognize Better Homes & Garden is a popular magazine in your niche. You publish an article in the magazine. In the footer, you mention your website. If your article is well written and helpful, some readers will then want to learn more about you, the author. They may visit your site. Additionally, they may become a bit more familiar with your name and image, so the next time they see it they have an opportunity to recognize you. This same logic applies to guest blogging as well. If you were to post the same article on the Better Homes and Garden website, all the same logic applies. The only difference is you would have a link to your website. That link offers two additional benefits. First, it is easier for users to click a link after reading an article on a pc then remember the URL after reading the magazine and visiting your website later. Secondly, Google and other search engines recognize the link has value therefore the link may help your rankings. Now let's loop back to your authorship. Every time you publish an article related to your niche it improves your recognition and therefore your status as an author (assuming the articles are of a quality nature). There may be a slight benefit in this regard recognized by Google. Also, since your image appears in SERP next to your guest blog article, users may later see your image next to another article on your site and then be more likely to click on that result due to the recognition factor.

cheers

I Agree with Keri that your posts should be high quality and focused to provide information to user instead of getting a link from the desired anchor text!

There was a YouMoz post last year at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-win-tweets-and-influence-search-engines-with-paywithatweet that explored using PWAT.

The links are already cloaked 'Jump URLs', the way you described. But as I have found if you do that without the nofollow added to the link, Google indexes the cloaked url as it looks like it is part of the websites structure. If I just nofollow the link Google may not pass link juice through it but it must still count it as a outbound link, now not saying I have but if I had a page with 50 outbound links with only nofollow I believe this will still have a negative effect.

No. You don't need to have the same anchor text occur in the post and the author bio. Just write your best stuff, and include natural supporting links in the copy and in your bio.

I would expect their influence to drop, as it's abused more often to get poor quality sites in the rankings you would hope google would decrease the weighting. I also wouldn't be suprised if they didn't change at all. As dropping them would effect the ease of correctly ranking brands for their own name.

Hi, Very interesting. I've never really considered pinging much at all to be honest! I would probably say from reading the article and what I know about pinging from the past, is that it is more about having just a couple of sites you ping that are of a high quality. I don't have any lists that work particularly well but would certainly be interested in any that anyone has! Thanks for the info again Matt.

Hi Activity Super, You are quite correct that this is a challenge faced by countless businesses just outside the borders of major towns and cities. Because of Google's stance that a business is most relevant to its physical location, you will typically be seen and displayed as relevant to your town in the main organic/blended/local results - not to a desired nearby major city. That's just the way it works. An exception to this is when you offer a service that is relatively unique to a large geographic area (the only large animal vet serving 4 small towns) in which case, you may find yourself dominating the local rankings for a variety of geographic terms due to lack of competition. Because of the way Local works, then, most businesses shoot for secondary organic rankings (rather than local ones) in towns where they do not have a physical locale. What is your business model? Are you actually an ironing service? Do you serve all clients at your shop or do you travel to some/all clients to render services? Defining this is critical to the handling of your Google Place Page. If all clients come to you, you can show your address in G. Maps and attempt to use the old technique of making one of the additional details on the Place Page 'Areas Served'. In this, you could list up to 5 cities (do not include your city of location) from which clients come to you. I refer to this as an old technique because it is one that worked well prior to Google's layout change last July at which time they stopped publicly displaying additional details on the Place Page (as well as citations and other elements). Though Google is no longer displaying this information, they are still aware of what you put in the additional details. The thing about this is, I'm not sure if this technique works as well as it did prior to the change. Still, it wouldn't hurt you to try it. If your business model serves some customers in your shop, and some on the road, you can show your address and also choose the service area radius feature, in which case, you could include Essex in your radius. This could be of modest help. If your business model goes to all customers and does not do business at your physical location at all, you simply have to hide your address. So, that takes care of the Place Page. Other local business directories often offer you a much larger field for describing your business. You could certainly work Essex in there somewhere. What you are left with beyond this is writing up a storm about Essex and how it relates to your business. If you've got a go-to-client business model (like a chimney sweep) this is a no-brainer, because you can simply write up your work in that city. If you don't travel to the town, however, you have to be more creative and become involved in some way in Essex in order to have something to write about. For example, a physician might give a lecture or a clinic in Essex. A brick-and-mortar business might host an event in Essex, or sponsor a children's sports team there and attend matches. Perhaps there are issues that uniquely effect your Essex-based customers (such as laws, weather, special offers, etc.) that you could write about. The thing is to find some genuine reason to connect your business to the major city in the absence of actually serving clients there. Then, as you've discerned, linkbuilding is step two. Some people engage in article writing as well, but in my opinion, investment of time in this should typically be minimal. It would be great if you could get indexed news about your business from Essex-based news sources but this isn't always possible. Also, you might play with using hReview to highlight testimonials from Essex-based customers on your website...not sure what impact this would have, but it's an idea. Essentially, then, a combination of a properly optimized Place Page, other local business listings, copywriting and linkbuilding will be your best bet for breaking into next-door city rankings, but if you are in a competitive industry, these rankings will typically be organic rather than truly local. Some visibility is always preferable to none! Good Luck!

I don't know if you should be worrying much about the change in accuracy of the Google KWTool, in my opinion/experience that tool was not very accurate anyways.

They are just looking to find someone who is a sucker. Hold to your pricing and eventually they will crack. But at the end of the day something is worth what someone will pay. So it could be valued at that if they are able to find someone who is dumb. So it really boils down to, is it worth it for branding? If not, don't get emotionally attached and move on to another domain.

Still it seems a minor factor (as H1 for On Page): the whois data can be turned to Private in order to not expose private information to the public knowledge (that means also to Google) Google itself says this: Server location (through the IP address of the server). The server location is often physically near your users and can be a signal about your site’s intended audience. Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal. What it told in that post as a truth, really seems just a gut sensation and it is not confirmed by any scientific test. Totally different thing is having a local address, which is considered an important factor both for Local Search (Google Places) and Geotargeted Universal Search.

My Initial Reaction with all the new reports and studies coming out on the Importance Social going forward - Would be to say the Social Benefits, heavily outweigh the loss of PR to external sites.. But then again, also in PR as I understand it, the difference between .0001 and .001 in PR CAN be huge in the determination of placement.. So I think it is a give and take.... But both positions cannot be ignored **NOW  **BUT I most definitely agree that Vinnie's take on it is a more longterm approach, than hoarding page rank...

Hi Jen, Thanks for the reply. That would be useful, social seems like a big area now for SEO and I think maybe even some SEOmoz input on the subject would be great. 1. Best practises for getting the most out of your social pages (facebook, twitter, plus1) and these types of articles.

Lots of people (philosophers) have an idea about how they think google "should" behave.  Then you have people who know what they are talking about and philosophers who are unwilling to believe that they are wrong. Finally, just because we see something happen doesn't mean we know what caused it.

I think that post (if it's the one I remember) was talking about making a graph of the pr of pages that link to a website.  Ie How many links come from pages with pr0, pr1, pr2 etc etc. All the sentence is referring to is looking for a spike in the graph at the lower pr levels pr0, pr1, pr2 etc as a sign of perhaps low quality. There are various plugins available for the different browsers to see the pr of individual pages (eg I use Chrome and have SEO Site Tools installed).  But bare in mind that the TBPR is rounded number of the actual PR of a page from one moment in time and is only updated a few times a year.  True PR is a constantly updated value.

I think this video would explain a lot http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture

Yes I agree they work great. But this topic has been openly discussed way too many times..including directly with Matt Cutts at Pubcon. In short, the effects of EMD have changed a lot from 2 years ago...and it will continue to decrease. It's not that they will get penalized (although in a way they will)..it would basically mean that the "magical" effect will go away but they will still have an advantage in my opinion. Here's how: Let's say your website is abc.com and keyword is Blue Widgets. If somebody links to you, the link code will be: Blue Widgets vs if your domain was BlueWidgets.com the link would be: Blue Widgets or Click Here You see what I am talking about. That advantage would always be there. Having your keywords in every incoming link, even if it's not an anchor text link.

If you are comparing link building through blog commenting with link request, link bating, infographics and similar stuff then yes it is indeed a low quality idea but I might disagree when you say it’s a waste of time… On a ground reality, If you write great comments on industry relevant blogs that actually contain value then you do get links that pass quality link juice. To prove my point here is a small example: http://kikolani-com/  (convert '-' with '.') A blog own by Kristi Hines is a do follow blog where you can add a keyword if you can produce some valuable comments… (Kristi is a great content producer who holds a great value in the industry as a front link blogger for blog and social media marketing)

I mentioned the copy writer because guest blogging is a big part of what I do and have seen good rankings from it for other keywords. The keyword in question is connected to a brand new page with only 4 guest posts going to it so your answer helped me understand that flux will happen but if I carry on I should move up but carry on fluxing to the point where I will stabilise over time. The money spent on guest blogging is spread out across multiple keywords, a small amount is being used for this new page. But because I do so much of it, I need to understand as much as possible about guest blogging, thus spawning this thread.