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This is a strange thing for an SEO company to say, because it's still widely accepted that good links pass PageRank / authority and add to the likelihood that a site will rank well for its chosen keywords. "Link building" itself might not be a term that fills Google with joy, but it's still a valuable way to improve a site's rankings and Google knows it. The truth lies somewhere in the middle if you want to stay white-hat: you need links, but you should acquire them in a way that does not constitute buying or being manipulative (again, if you want to stay to the letter of Google's law). The activities they mention are fairly standard "link building" tactics though, and something like "social bookmarking" was a type of link building that lost popularity due to being ineffective nearly 10 years ago. I would have doubts about their SEO chops if they cite both link building as being out of bounds, and social bookmarking as being a good tactic!

Believe me when I say, Google has enough experience to deal with this kind of "attacks". They automatically monitor click fraud and even using proxies won't circumvent Google's techniques to detect click-fraud. Anyway, you can contact Google explaining the issue right from your AdWords dashboard.

I second  ReferralCandy Black Hat is littering. don't

Press releases CAN rarely be useful if you have actual newsworthy affairs... say an event sponsorship that is for a good or community cause that can make it to your local paper or news sites actually. stay AWAY from CHEAP providers such as lightening press releases (pure spam artists) or others as they all will involve a high degree of utter rubbish spam networks of scrapers and syndication sites that will constantly generate links for you for months on end, that COULD POTENTIALLY BITE you at some point even if Google currently does not care about them. PRweb does nicely and is about the only one I would personally trust to be least spammy in the network of their 30000 bloggers. but there will be spam unless you are taking the highway and having a professional PR firm or person take care of affairs with more personal relations in the media crowd than one of these web services. costly, but can get you HOURS OF LIVE COVERAGE on tv (say if you are a restaurant and your fox666 local channel has nothing better to do for 8-11 am slot) which in turn not only can bring more traffic and actual market exposure, but will more than likely have some people check u out and give you links/reviews/etc.

To add an actionable response to the mix..... I suggest making a list of authority sites within your niche or closely related.  Research what kind of sites they are linking to (if only gov sites etc. then scratch off the list).  If you find other sites similar to yourself that have links then make a resource not currently available and start a campaign that has merit as to why high authority sites SHOULD link to you.  (for the benefit of their users and their site) "I want to make money" is not unique in any way and in my opinion if you are teetering on turning to spammy farm style marketing to build your site then you are probably a long ways from where you need to be.  When you are talking about yourself you will find few to listen but when you start talking about others and focusing on ways that you can be an asset to them you will find an audience truly interested in what you have to say. For example:  Dedicate a small section of your site to filters specially for homes that were certified with Energy Star AirPlus at the time they were built.  Then go to http://epa.gov/iaplus01/join_now.html and sign up as an ally to the program.  If accepted (it is not tough by any means) then you get a DA 100 dofollow back link from the ultimate authority in your industry, the EPA.  Doesn't that sound like a better long term business building option than choosing strategies that will position yourself as the enemy to a $100 Billion Company that controls 70% of the worlds search volume?

it doesnt matter. Like they said, just continue to write here's a tip, especially for starting blogs, it helps a lot if you be consistent with the amount of posts and content you produce.

Is there a reason to not post on your own site and build up the authority of your site, rather than put the content on a new external site?

''How many word'' to included in the content. As few as possible if you want to be cheap and don't care about success. As many as it takes to do a good job at explaining the subject matter if you want to have a chance at success.

What I'm trying to say is that your criteria may exclude blogs in your industry that are high quality with requirements about not needing to register. Everything on YouMoz is about online marketing, so it wouldn't be a place to post about furnace filters. I think you're missing requirements about the topic of the blog, making sure that the post is a good fit for the blog, making sure existing posts on the blog are high quality, and making sure that the guest post content that you provide is high quality with proper grammar, spelling, references, fact-checking, and formatting.

You can find alot of info on the subject but easiest way is to find competitors doing it and google search the author bio or look at back .

That's a pretty solid method, but I think you need to look at a few more things at the same time. I don't think it's completely safe to look at just 1 metric. PA and DA is a good one - but look at how many outbound links are on the homepage, particularly if they have a blogroll.  If I see a blog that looks like it's selling text links in the blog roll or footer, I don't want to post there because the blog could find itself deindexed.  If you have a link from a deindexed site, it could harm your rankings. I'd also look at social media metrics and comment count. Whenever I guest blog, I want to make sure I'm posting for an active, engaged audience - links are secondary to this. Maybe look at the first 5 blog posts and count how many comments they all have. Maybe look for blogs with at least 3 comments in the first 5 posts. There are a number of other things to consider as well, such as checking if the site is in a bad neighbourhood, but for a quick check of a lot of potential blogs, I think PA, Outbound links and comments are a good place to start.  Before posting, however, I'd always check the rest of the metrics.

not possible!

I agree with Danny, but let me add this in as well. If you are keeping a tight control over the blog content and quality (hopefully you are) then subfolder is the way to go. If you are allowing guest bloggers to post weak content and external links, and they have the ability to publish live without you vetting prior to release, then a subdomain would be better to protect the main site.

I don't agree with this response. Sorry Dana. BigBlaze is going to lose rankings very easily. Also, listen to Matt Cutts here talk about duplicate content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw Also watch this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFNK8gSDxHA If you can't do 150 product pages with a unique TITLE nor DESCRIPTION, then you don't deserve to rank. Do 10 per day. Your problem will be over in 15 days. After that, start writing a couple paragraphs of original content of why your service is better than the competitors (even if you don't have competitors). You are in this for the long haul. Your TITLE - 10x20x1 furnace filters - shop at furnace filters canada My example TITLE - 10x20x1 Furnace Filters - Breathe Clean Healthy Air & Avoid Allergies.

You're right about him referring to what is actually a subdirectory, Woody, but then you go and confuse him by calling blog.furnacefilterscanada.com a subdirectory too, when in fact that IS actually a subdomain. Oops! And as I mention in my other comment, what Jean wants to do is typically accomplished using a reverse proxy, so it is definitely do-able. Paul

Takeshi is right, but I'll chime in that the whole purpose of SEO is to increase traffic to one's website. It follows that if your targeted blog comments produce an increase in traffic, then they have boosted your SEO program. The link Takeshi sent is a fantastic reference. I highly recommend it also.  It is one of my favorite blog posts of all time and I refer to it often. He is right that there are probably some quicker "wins" in terms of tactics (in comparison to blog commenting) on that list. Cheers! Dana

I agree with EGOL and Takeshi. If you want your blog to work and you have a content strategy in place where you will be adding a lot of useful content and you would want that content to rank by itself, I would try to put it on the domain.com/blog. Now you know that already, that's why you asked the question. **One solution you might have is to find out if bigcommerce can do Reverse Proxy. That way a domain could be hosted at anywhere.whateverdomain.com but to the search engines and everything else it will appear as yourdomain.com/blog. ** The reason a lot of these hosted platforms do not allow wordpress is because of security issues. They then have another piece of software / files / plugins in the same environment which is sometimes a threat.

A lot of "coments" plug ins will use javascript, which generally google is not so great at indexing. however, disqus and some of the larger players have "callback" systems that will let your comments get indexed into google for your site so you don't have to worry about it.  i would suggest doing a trial on a few product pages you know have traffic. that way you can test a small segment and see if it's improving the traction on those pages.

You need to find people who have specialties - First decide what area to focus on - onsite , link building , viral content , social media marketing, technical audits,  - Then find experts in that area and have them help you. Or you may just need a jack of all trades (master of none) to point you in the direction to start.

A good answer to this question can only be given after an analysis of your rankings, your traffic, your targeted keywords, keywords that you are not targeting, and other factors. So, anybody who gives you answers on the skimpy information provided or without spending considerable time looking at your data is guessing. You have access to this information.  Spend some time studying it and see what you can find. Based upon your post I am guessing that you have about 200 different filters and your pages link to them.  If you have a strong site the 200 links are not a problem. That could be a good approach, but removing the filter pages links and replacing them with links to category pages that each click to filter pages could allow you to target valuable keywords. Your conversions might drop with that approach and might not.   You might get more linkjuice into category pages by dropping filter page links from filter pages... that might improve rankings of category pages but could hit conversions. As you see, the question is more complex than the number of links on a page. That's what I can offer. Good luck.