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It looks like basically all of your inbound links are from low-quality directories and article marketing. If you want to move up, you're going to have to do some real linkbuilding.

I think it's a safe bet that the way we find information and making purchase decisions will undergo another dramatic change in the next few decades. I mean, thirty years ago, a bunch of ad copywriters were probably sitting around and wondering if the Yellow Pages' phone book market dominance would ever be challenged. They couldn't imagine web search, and we can't imagine what will replace web search.

In the meantime, Bing seems to be growing slowly but steadily. I wouldn't bet on them overtaking Google at any point, but it's conceivable that they could approach them in volume.

As for whether they have "too much power," obviously competition is good for consumers ... but we're not consumers, are we? I'm wondering, would we really prefer that search volume was equally distributed among, say, five or six different search engines? Meaning you now have to optimize for a half-dozen different algorithms in order to get lots of visitors from organic search? Oy.

Well, first of all, if you control all those links, they're probably not "quality." Second, collective wisdom suggests that post-Penguin, you need to keep KW anchor text below 50%. So if you're building 300 links, they can't all have "example tools" as the anchor text.

When using Twitter to generate interest in company blog posts, is it better to do it on a company account like @AcmeWidgets or a personal account like @JoeSmith, the owner of Acme Widgets?

Common definitions of "black hat SEO" include

• techniques that are illegal (e.g. hacking a competitor's site)
• techniques that mislead bots (e.g. cloaking)
• techniques that are risky and not disclosed to stakeholders (e.g. paid links that your client/boss doesn't know about)
• techniques that are not consistent with search engines' guidelines (e.g. spammy linkbuilding)

I don't like the fourth definition, personally, because there's nothing morally wrong about trying to game the algo. I'm not ethically obligated to play by Google's rules. Their guidelines are intended to boost their business, nothing more, nothing less.

Now, whether or not a particular technique is effective is a completely different question. Some unethical and/or spammy techniques still produce results. The search engines seem to be getting better and better at punishing sites that don't follow their guidelines, so adhering to those guidelines is probably the best long-term strategy. But hey, if you're just going for fly-by-night profits, it could be very effective to exploit the stuff that still works.

Hmm, I didn't mean to mark this "Answered." Is there a way to undo that?

That's my suspicion, Igor. Now to convince the higher-ups, who saw our competitor's strategy and decided that must be what we need to do in order to vault over them in the rankings.

I should clarify that the EMD blogs are not attracting actual inbound links; their e-commerce site is doing fine.

One of our competitors has built a little blog network, and I'm wondering if it's worth it for us to imitate it. Here's how they have it set up: They have domain.com, their e-commerce site, and blog.domain.com. They also have a half-dozen EMD blogs set up that all link to each other and to the e-commerce site, each one supplying content related to one niche of their busines (e.g. kitchenwidgets.com, widgetsforkids.com, etc.). It seems they've been doing this since December 2011.

In my opinion, the content on these EMD blogs is pretty low value. Sure enough, they have basically no inbound links from outside the blog network, and it's not getting shared socially. I'm having a hard time imagining a lot of long-tail searches that would bring in qualified shoppers, since they basically just write up 300-word long descriptions of photos.

Based on SEMrush data, it doesn't look like this approach is hurting them -- they didn't take a Penguin dive in April, for example. But how likely is it that this approach is helping them enough to justify the time they must spend writing (probably ~30-60m a day)? It would be trivial for the algo to determine that these are not natural links and completely devalue them. Would it not be better to consolidate that time into 2.5-5hrs a week spent researching and writing a valuable, link-worthy, long-tail-rich post for the main blog and then promoting it in hopes of attracting natural links?

I suspect this is a flaw in the title generating algo they've recently implemented. Honda doesn't appear anywhere in the code, so perhaps Google thinks Hyundai and Honda are synonyms?

My only other explanation would be that the title tag used to say "Honda" and Google hasn't crawled the corrected version yet.

This recent webinar had some great examples.

Our company has a few different brands, each with their own domain and site. These are not microsites intended to drive traffic to a main site; they all have independent e-commerce functions, full product lines, etc. Imagine we run Plumbing Widgets Inc, Kitchen Remodeling Company, and Springfield Countertops. It's not immediately obvious to surfers that one parent company operates all of these brands, and we're fine with that. Considering that it enables us to own a lot of SERP real estate for some money KWs, we're more than fine with it.

We'd like to create a blog for each of these sites/brands. Here's where it gets tricky. After doing some reading, I am persuaded that using rel=author will help us with SERP CTR and possibly rankings themselves. I am going to be writing all of the blog content, at least to start. I don't think I want to rel=author myself on all of these discrete blogs, do I? And surface the fact that one person is the head writer for the blogs of all these brands?

Creating blogging pseudonyms doesn't seem like a good idea, since part of the value of rel=author is genuine social engagement, and creating social personas that seem genuine is probably more trouble than it's worth. (Not to mention icky and dishonest.) Should I choose a customer service rep or manager for each brand and use their names and social identities (with their permission, obviously)? It seems like that would involve challenges of its own. I've ghostwritten for one business owner before, but this is on a larger, more complex scale. Any insights are appreciated!