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Much respect to Steve Jobs, but I definitely salivated when I saw it too, for a moment.  Quite possibly the most powerful link in the entire world - although it's presence will be short-lived, undoubtedly.

Well, it's going to make registrars a ton of money, that's for sure.  So the financial incentive is there, for them.  Big corporations will eat it up too - and why shouldn't they?  It offers a great branding perspective, and because of the somewhat selective nature of who will be allowed to actually register for these TLDs, adds a definite legitimacy factor to any company fortunate enough to get one.

I agree with Gianluca.  I think having a keyword-rich Twitter handle has extremely limited value, whereas conversely, a Twitter handle with your brand can have a ton of upside.

Considering that it will cost $185,000 USD just to apply for a .brand TLD, you may want to first make sure that this will be an issue that you or your clients are realistically likely to encounter before you lose any sleep over it.

That aside, nobody's quite sure how these TLDs will affect search rankings.  Given Google's growing (and increasingly worrying, for some) trend of trusting established brands in search rankings, it is certainly possible that having a .brand domain name could help your search rankings.  Moreover, some aggressive applicants are likely to try to snag keyword-rich .brand domains, although it is anyone's guess as to how Google will weigh the importance of keywords in the TLD algorithmically.

Distilled had a pretty good article on their blog a while back.  It's not an authoritative source for how this will play out (that doesn't exist, because we simply don't know enough yet), but it is an interesting analysis.  Definitely worth a read if you're interested in these new TLDs.

Yes, this will be seen as duplicate content.  There's no "easy" way to create unique content for each locale.  The best you can do is have a general outline and outsource the content creation to a high quality writer (or sit down and start writing yourself).  Article spinning or cheap writers will lead to low quality articles that will be difficult to get to rank well.

I don't think there is any "good" rule of thumb out there, as it really depends on your website and the amount of authority you have, but I would say that your SEO guy is certainly right in that you should try to cut back on the amount of links you have.  I don't know what your website is, but I would generally say that anywhere close to 1000 is probably too much.  Mathematically speaking, the more links you have on any given page, the more the "link juice" is going to be divided up.  For this reason, it makes sense to focus internal links on your most important pages, particularly if they are coming from one of your strongest pages, like your home page.

SEOmoz's Pro tool uses 100 links as their standard.  Any pages with more than 100 links get flagged.  In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, I believe he cites his number as 150.

Dr. Pete wrote a tremendous post on this topic earlier this year which is certainly worth a read.

The rule of thumb I would use: Are these links good for the user?  Is this the optimal way to offer easy navigation to my visitors?  Can this be done easier, cleaner, or more efficiently?

At the end of the day, if your page is authoritative enough, something like too many links isn't going to pose a problem.  But if they're affecting user experience, or if they're weakening your SEO efforts, than they can certainly hold you back.

SEOmoz knows and has acknowledged that this resource requires a good bit of TLC.  That being said, there are still a couple of good directories in that list - it's not a terrible starting point.

In general, I would try to minimize the importance of directory submissions in your link building process.  For my clients and my personal projects, I target perhaps 10-20 high value general directories (some paid, like Yahoo and JoeAnt), as many high quality niche directories as I can find, and then I move on.  It's not a huge part of my process, and I don't think it should be a huge part of yours.  The fact is that these websites have thousands upon thousands of outbound links that dilute the power of the link to your website, which is already buried deep on some sub-topic page below hundreds of other links.  There are directories that are the exception to the rule and do indeed provide great links and good click-through traffic, but in my experience, those are usually industry-specific.

Now, I'm sure a lot of other SEOs on this forum do way more directory submissions than I do (I'm definitely on the low side), but I think most people here will agree that you don't want to make them a big part of your link building strategy.  Pour your time and energy into creating great content, networking with bloggers and auhority figures on Twitter, writing guest posts, etc.  I'll take one GREAT link from one of the above methods over 1,000 directory links in a heartbeat - and I think that you should too.

I think you should check this article out by Rand Fishkin.  He goes into detail about some companies in very BORING industries that have managed to develop incredibly successful link bait.

Probably not.  I've tried it all, from paying for social bookmarks to just submitting content and hoping for clicks.  What I've found is that if your content is truly quality, it's not going to need links to pick up steam and get shared.  A little nudge to your Twitter followers should be sufficient.  If an article sucks, buying 100 thumbs ups or diggs isn't going to really get it any exposure.  These things tend to balance themselves out - high quality content always rises to the top.

Here is a good list of them from Parallels.com.  The Page strength is only a 17, but the domain strength is 100 and the links are not nofollowed.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=download1.parallels.com%2FPlesk%2FPPP9%2FFedoraC6%2Fparallels_installer_v3.4.1_build090204.18_os_FedoraCore_6_i386%3Fid%3D323%26sub_id%3D44465

Ah, gotcha.  In my experiences dealing with SMB clients, some great links for local businesses are from:

• Local directories (these also help build citations for local SEO purposes)
• Guest blogging on industry-related blogs (in your author bio, you can include a link back to your Wisconsin Cheese company - or whatever business it is that you are promoting)
• Sponsoring local events or finding other ways to get your company local press (links from newspaper websites, press release websites, and charity/event websites)

I don't mean to steer you away from link exchange requests as a tactic.  It can certainly be useful, and you're right, it can be an easy method for small businesses to obtain links from other local companies or websites.  I just get frustrated by the low response rate  and oftentimes relatively weak link opportunities that I see with this tactic.  Usually local competitors' websites are just like your own before you start working on SEO - weak, unoptimized, and with few backlinks.

I'd rather spend my time to get a guest post published on an authoritative website in my industry.  It might not be as relevant of a link as one of my competitors in the area, but I can guarantee that it is going to have a ton of authority and link juice behind it.

I'm glad you posted this, because I noticed the same thing with one of my competitors as well.  It was a file from Parallels.org, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was.  Anybody got an answer?

I don't really do any formal reciprocal link exchanges via e-mail, but I do have a ton of success with the following method:

1.) Write a great blog post or piece of content for your own website.  Include in it links to other great blogs or resources about the topic you're writing about.

2. When the post is published, Tweet at the people whose websites you linked to and let them know that you mentioned their amazing, helpful resource in your latest post.

3. This generates a TON of retweets, and once in a while a great link back to my website from the blog/website that I mentioned.  It also helps me establish a line of communication with authoritative figures in my industry.  In short order, it puts me on their map, making future link requests much easier.

I know this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but I thought you might find it interesting.  Just my $0.02!

My short answer, which is also included in my YOUmoz post that got published today, 15 Smart Ways to Find Guest Posting Opportunities, is to do both.

Posting on a number of blogs helps build a large quantity of relevant, high quality back links.  Some part of SEO, however big, is indeed a numbers game.  You want to get as many external root domains linking to you as possible.

Posting on one blog, however, can help you build a following within their community.  Particularly for A-list blogs in your niche, you will find that if you write multiple guest posts, stay active on the comments section of your guest posts, and interact with their community via social media, you will get (at least) as much benefit out of the branding and traffic implications of your guest posting strategy as you will out of the link you built.  The SEOmoz knowledge base has a great thread on this exact topic.

If I had to pick just one, I would go deeper into just a few blogs, assuming that these blogs truly are authority websites in your industry.  I understand that it can be difficult to have the time to create all of this high quality content, so you will need to prioritize, and so you may opt to focus on a few authoritative blogs at first, and then expand outwards.

Shamless Self-Promotion: If you're looking for ways to scale the development of high quality content, check out one of my recent blog posts, 3 Ways to Outsource High Quality Content Creation.  Having the time to consistently write great content can be tricky, and these are the methods I use to help me out.

I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal.

When I initially read this article, I was happy.  It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again.  The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz.

Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue.  There seems to be a few different opinions:

• The SEOmoz opinion that bad links can't hurt except for when they get devalued.
• The idea that you wouldn't be penalized algorithmically, but a manual penalty is within the realm of possibility.
• The idea that both manual and algorithmic penalties were a factor.

Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about.  I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point.  It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that.

What do you guys think?  Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other?  Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another?  Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept?  I'm curious to hear your responses.

I don't know about all that...

A quick site: search turned up this Game of Thrones paper.li which is indexed by Google.  The links look pretty good to me on the text-only version of their cached page.

The links are not nofollowed, so one could reason that there is some link juice being paseed.  How much link juice?  Hard question to answer.  Paper.li is pretty much just a really polished content scraper, so I can't imagine these links would be super valuable in Google's eyes, but they definitely won't hurt you.

Yessir.  SEOmoz is just trying to have your back - there's no need for concern whatsoever.

Items under the "Notices" section are just that - notices.  If a canonical tag points to a URL other than the page it is on, the notice comes up.  This is because engines will not count this page as the reference resource, meaning it won't have the opportunity to rank - which could be a terrible situation if you're using the tag incorrectly.  SEOmoz includes the notice just to make sure you're targeting the right page.

You can learn more about canonicalization and the rel="canonical" tag at the below resources:

• Canonicalization Best Practices
• Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement In SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
• Complete Guide to Rel Canonical - How To and Why (Not)
• 301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical - Which One Should You Use?

Additionally, you can find information about other crawl diagnostics in the SEOmoz Help Forums.

Cool!  I'm primarily concerned with for-profit uses, so that's great to know.  I'll definitely check it out.  Thanks for sharing your experience.