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Unfortunately you are not allowed to run contests or promotions on G+.

The social network’s content policy bans direct hosting of contests, sweepstakes, offers and coupons on Google+ pages, BUT posting a link to a promotion page is OK

I suppose this makes it a little more difficult to run a contest on the social network

It sounds like you need to find someone to help you with all this work.

It might be worthwhile looking at finding a VA in your local area especially someone with SEO or copy writing experience. There are a growing number of Virtual assistants in the recession with people working only part time hours.

Use a site like Craigslist or ask your business contacts or networking group if they might be able to recommend someone to help you during busier periods.

If I understand correctly you want to ensure that a piece of content triggers a Google alert.

If that is the case you want to make sure that you ping as many services as possible when you publish new content you also want make sure you submit your RSS feeds to any relevant RSS services this will increase the likelihood a new web page is crawled and indexed and ultimately triggers an alert.

Blogging contests will only be successful if they are promoted well, have good prizes and have very rigid and well defined rules. As Tom mentioned you'll get extra content for your site but you need to maximise the number of links you will receive too.

For Example: If you are an e-commerce website you could invite bloggers to imagine they have $500 and for them to write a blog post on their site about the products they'd buy with this money and many will link to the products. The prize could then be the $500?

You want to make sure that if the blogger is going to write a guest article for your site that they also write an article on their blog promoting the blogging competition.

You can give out extra prizes based on social measures such as the article that gets the most  FB shares, +1's or Tweets that the article receives.

I recommend that Chrome is part of your link building tool kit and get a broken link checker, you'll also find that visiting web pages with images off in Chrome will speed up your prospecting efforts. I can see you want to search a whole website for a broken link then try a tool like Screaming Frog or Xenu.

A 301 redirect is for pages that have moved to a new location....if they didn't move somewhere and were just deleted, then they should respond with a 404 or 410.  You can return a 410 with a custom navigation menu. If your home page is relevant for the content then by all means redirect your pages here, but as a visitor if I followed a link and ended up on an irrelevant page I'd bounce. You might be better editing, merging or creating new content then doing a 301 to your homepage.

Hi Nick,

Broken Link building isn't just about getting a broken link replaced with your link. It's also a tactic to build a relationship with a blogger/webmaster to later pitch them a proposal for a link.

Jon Cooper (@pointblankseo) loves this technique so be sure to hop over to his blog

http://pointblankseo.com/creative-broken-link-building

He also recommends a few broken link tools too

I do love my Orange Juice!!

Morning from Leeds!

I agree with Paul, it looks as though it might be because <title>is over 3 lines</p> <p> </p> <pre id="line18"><span class="attribute-name"> </span><span class="attribute-value">esheet" </span><span class="error"><span class="attribute-name">/</span></span>><<span class="start-tag">title</span>> Great Inns of Britain - Home – Independent, Historic Inns, Quality Service </<span class="end-tag">title</span>></<span class="end-tag">head</span>></pre></title>

Link Juice provides a way of illustrating and conceptualising how PageRank flows between pages and websites, therefore Link Juice is just another term for PageRank

Firstly do a search online for Guest blogging opportunities. Here’s more or less complete list of phrases bloggers use to invite people to guest post:

• “Submit a guest post” / “Submit post” / “Submit blog post”
• “Add blog post”
• “Submit an article”
• “Suggest a guest post”
• “Send a guest post”
• “Write for us”;
• “Become an author”;
• “Guest bloggers wanted”
• “Contribute to our site”;
• “Become a contributor”;
• “Become guest writer”
• “(Write for our) guest column”.

Include your keyword in the search term i.e. "submit a guest blog" Link building

Don't always start with the people on page 1-3 they get inundated with requests everyday so jump straight to page 5 they are more likely to accept.

I don't think the relationship of your other sites is having any effect on your rankings but it maybe Google post Panda is showing syndicated versions of your content as the most relevant. Finance and Making money online are very competitive niches and scraping/syndication is rife.

I recommend that you firstly make sure that when you publish your blog posts you are pinging pubsubhubbub to make sure Google knows you are the originating source.

Two questions:

Which landing pages and keywords have seen the biggest traffic change in the past 6-12 months?

Have you checked your competitor and your own link profiles for any recent changes ?

Hi Alessio

One common Black hat tool that can be used in a White Hat way is Scrapebox

Scrapebox can be used to harvest valuable backlinks that you can manually work with e.g. search for Guest posts you can also do competitor research, bulk check your backlinks to make sure they are still live, perform bulk WhoIs lookups and lots more things too.

As you can imagine a tool that can automatically scrape blogs for guest blogging opportunities or who  might publish your new infographic is going to save you lots of time.

Hope this helps

It doesn't matter sitemaps are designed to make sure all your pages are crawled and improve the chances of indexing.

Happy Link building

Having more than one sitemap is not an issue for SEO.if anything it makes sure the search spiders can definitely find your content.

The Google XML sitemaps plugin normally creates a file in the Wordpress folder i.e..

yourdomain.com/wp/sitemap.xml but you can define your preferred location

When you publish a new blog or page the sitemap will automatically update.

If you install the All in One SEO or Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin you can no index no follow the tags and categories within the settings.

there is a recent article by John Doherty here:

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/noindex-organize-categories-tags-in-wordpress/

The more links a sitemap the it harder it is for people to follow but should be ok for search spiders.

Can't you no index no follow the categories & tags or rel = canonical the duplicated pages? Tags & Categories are good for user navigation.

Hi Cecily - what's the URL and I can look at your on site SEO

Jonathan Welcome to SEOMoz. Your question is very open so can you advise what your current Strategy for link building & content marketing is that you plan to use & maybe we can give you advice on your strategy