Between profile links and article marketing, it sounds like you'll be building a pretty low quality link profile - one that could be susceptible to penalty.

If your client has a very limited budget, I'd suggest that they write and provide you quality content that you can use to gain some higher quality backlinks (i.e. guest blogs, etc.).

Perhaps they could also get links from partners, vendors, etc.

I'm not saying you shouldn'tpick up a few links from user profiles on established sites, but I would keep that a small portion of your link building efforts.

I think it depends on your site, the content, how intuitive it would be to split the article, etc.

I think SEOmoz had done an analysis awhile back that looked at which blog posts got the most links. Length of article was one of the factors they looked at, I think. Alas, I can't find that article now, though. Anyone else have the URL?

Hmmm. Their situation is further complicated by a less than clean link profile (not counting the spam links). They have very few high quality links. Makes me think that a new domain is a possibility to consider.

I did a super-quick review of your backlinks in OSE. What I saw was mainly press releases, with a few links from sites you own, and links from pages full of spam like http://www.alivincent.com/blog/post/2010/04/28/Work-Weeke280a6e280a6-when-the-reality-show-becomes-a-REALITY!.aspx

I also notice that your backlinks are overwhelmingly using your target keywords as anchor text, so you may be suffering for anchor text over-optimization.

My recommendation would be to focus more on higher quality, natural backlinks. Focus on SEO strategies that build your brand and focus on users. You might find http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-big-brands-get-all-the-breaks helpful.

Hope this is helpful.

Somebody has been building spam pharmacy links to one of our client sites. I presume they hacked the site and were trying to get their injected pages to rank for pharmacy keywords. The hack appears to be gone now, but we will check more code to be sure.

However, we're still left with a bunch of really spammy links, with pharmacy related anchor texts.

Anyone had any experience dealing with this? Did the links hurt your rankings? How did you get rid of or mitigate them?

Anyone have insight into what specific factors penguin is targeting and how it works?

Matt Cutts seemed to infer that the site was targeting things such as spun content, keyword stuffing, etc. but most of the sites that have been hit that I've seen aren't doing any obvious content spamming like that.

For example:

• Is penguin looking primarily at onsite or backlink factors?
• Does Penguin just discount spammy backlinks, or does it apply an additional penalty to sites that have poor quality backlinks?
• Anyone noticing specific onsite or offsite factors that correlate with whether a site has been hit or not?

Either

or

is fine - both are H1 tags.

H1's appear to have minimal impact on rankings, so I wouldn't stress over them too much.

So far, I see two sites that we work with that have notably dropped. Hopefully over the next few days we'll start to figure out specific causes and solutions.

Removing the tag cloud links from the homepage will not preserve more link juice on/for the homepage.

Removing the tag cloud links from the homepage will preserve more link juice to be passed on to other pages that the homepage links to.

Yes, a tag cloud with a bunch of links will dilute the link juice flowing to your other links. Adding nofollow to the tag cloud links will not help.

Yes, having duplicate content in your forum could hurt your ability to rank.

And yes, the canonical tag sounds like the best way to deal with your situation.

That number would include internal links, too. Your homepage has 96 links.

You don't need to worry too much about having over 100 links as long as it is natural and not spammy.

I think it would be better if it were hosted on a different server than your main site is.

That's not the best way to do it. The method Robert outlined is better.

"I guess what it would mean is for us to supply our name server details to him, and then ask him to put these into his DNS settings."

Don't do that. That would setup your site to be accessible via both urls.

Either put up a splash page on his domain linking to yours, or do a 301 redirect. I've had success with both tactics.

Agreed. Spend your time creating high quality links, not worrying about what low quality sites link to you for unknown reasons.

Nofollowing links will NOT pass more link juice to other links on the page. The link juice simply disappears for nofollowed links. This was put into effect a year or two ago.

1. Having the same content, in the same language to target different countries would likely be considered duplicate content.

2. Sounds good for users and search engines to me.

3. Not sure I understand this question. There are a variety of ways you can set country targeting on a .com domain - contact info on the page, country setting in Google Webmaster Tools, etc.

General rule of thumb: Never count on SE's spidering javaScript, but also never assume that they won't.

In this case, I do not think you should expect to get any link juice from those drop-downs.

Sanket,

As mentioned, Google's count of results is not a precise number and is known to vary.