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There is a nominal value in submitting your press release to places like prweb.com. I've successfully used their site to get a few backlinks that helped out, albeit only a small amount.

Another tactic is to use HARO to get your organizations message published.

The true value of a press release is in its news-worthiness. If your PR is just thinly veiled advertising, its not going to be worth much. If your PR is exciting and new, it can go viral and a press release service can help with the first steps to getting it there.

You can see anchor text on the first tab, "Linking Pages", its the 2nd column next to title and URL. The only problem is you cannot sort the results by this column.

While I can't comment on how SEOmoz did it, here is a link on how to create a similar app using the Drupal framework:

http://blog.attomsoft.com/drupal/122/how-to-build-a-stackoverflow-or-yahoo-answers-like-system-using-drupal-part1

We're currently in the IA and design phase of rolling out a complete overhaul of our main site. In the meantime I've been doing some SEO triage, but I wanted to start making a longer term plan for SEO during and after the new site goes up. We have a pretty decent domain authority, and some quality backlinks, but we're just getting creamed in the SERPs. And so on to my question:

How would you fix this site? What SEO strategy would you employ?

http://www.adoptionhelp.org

Thanks!

If you start it on a new site you are beginning at step 1 for optimizing your new site, and because its a new site the links you point back to your main site will be of limited value.

I would keep your blog on your main domain. That way all the benefits derived from a blog are going towards improving the SEO of your main site.

If the flexibility of being able to rebrand it later is more important to you than the SEO value of the blog, then you should consider a new domain. Otherwise stick with your existing.

There is data out there that suggests Google updates rankings for less competitive keywords less often. So even though your backlinks may have disappeared a long time ago, its possible your position in the SERPs is only now being adjusted. Its also possible that you or sites linking to you were hit by the panda update.

In terms of what to do about it, I wouldn't advise going "wild" with backlinks, like you say above. Use some of the strategies you can find here on SEOmoz to develop quality backlinks and a good user experience.

You could try other CSS methods to hide the content, like setting the height to 0 or positioning the element off screen.

One common source of this problem is the tag, category, and author pages. I include these links in my blog because they're useful to site visitors, but I make sure to link them as NOFOLLOW to avoid the content duplication problems they can cause.

EDIT: I use the All in one SEO plugin for this. There are checkboxes to add NoIndex to those page types.

I would change the sorting to be dynamic, probably with AJAX. That way your users still get the feature but you're not duplicating your content across URLs. I'd target the long tail with landing pages, rather than re-sorted copies of my content.

<base> allows you to set the default attributes for links on the page. For example if I set <base href="http://www.mydomain.com/"> then I can make a link to and it will point to http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html

I believe this magic happens on the web server before the page is sent to the browser, making it a safe practice for SEO.

This matters mainly because of the potential for link dilution - most people agree you won't be explicitly penalized. See http://www.herseo.com/blog/2009/05/30/how-important-is-it-to-htaccess-redirect-to-www/

The best way to address this is to set up a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. I recently did this for my own domain with the following code:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
  # Redirect adoptionhelp.org to www.adoptionhelp.org
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.adoptionhelp.org [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.adoptionhelp.org/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

Add that to your .htaccess file and drop it in your root directory.

Bottom line: Google is treating it as a valid global TLD, but it will be a while (if ever) before people accept it as authoritative as a .com.

Individual pages will lose a tiny amount of page authority, but your domain authority should remain unaffected because all subdomains are included.