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Most of the places where I am defeated by wikipedia are places where they deserve the top rankings.  A few places they don't deserve it for the PAGE but they do deserve it because of the authority of their WEBSITE. In my opinion, donations to wikipedia are paying a HUGE bandwidth bill and the administrative expenses required to run one of the busiest sites on the web. If wikipedia is beating you then you must earn the position above them.

The most dangerous competitors are the ones who have yet to arrive.

I would suggest contacting the group and first asking how the ads were placed. Just be honest and share you represent the site owner, you noticed the ads and want to understand why they exist. If they wish to verify your authenticity, they can always e-mail you using an e-mail address on the given domain. Either way, 5 out of 362 linking domains should not be any worry at all. While these links are not nofollowed, they are marked as featured links so Google likely devalues them anyway.

Perfect! Glad to hear it's all fixed

Hi Daniel, Whenever I hear "Nothing is redirecting when I add this to the .htaccess file" I have one thought: Is the site using Joomla, Drupal or some other CMS that will overwrite .htaccess rules externally? Sha

Here's my opinion; Google's spiders will have more difficulty interpreting and following affiliate links using the onclick="window.open... method, but that doesn't mean that they can't. To my knowledge they can follow these links and even pass juice between them. Although I'm not sure that it would affect your rankings and so whether changing the links would do anything; after all, they're outbound links. If you were to nofollow them, then you would still loose the same amount of link juice, it just wouldn't flow to the trading sites. On a separate note, as you know; Google's problem seems to be that you're acting as a 'middle man' from the sites who are actually selling the treadmills. From the odd story I've heard, unless your site is bringing something 'unique' to the equation then they don't like to have it promoted in their advertising space, they prefer to have the actual seller paying for the advertising. One way I've heard to get around this is to have a PPC specific landing page that concentrates purely on the review side of things, however I'm not sure whether your site would be flagged by them now or not.

A 301 redirect is sent to the browser as part of the header of the page. If Magento returns the same page for both URLs, it should return the same header information and you should only have to make the change once.

A very late reply, but just in case anybody else has the same question.... I've been using Tribulants shopping cart. Once you get the kinks worked out it's good. I included SEO tips in my review. The short version is that it is a well featured cart and it's very cheap.

painful self promotion, but anyone would do it! We do a lot of bespoke ecommerce on our own in-house platfrom, please encourge your business partner to take a look over our website and get in touch with me if needs be? Chapter Eight Cheers, Jamie.

It's an interesting article, what I don't get is why my rankings in Bing and Yahoo used to be completely or nearly identical, and then all of a sudden they aren't even close. Just seems odd to me.

Dan, IIRC, it may relate to the sort order and looks at the ad that's currently at the top of your list of ads. Try showing only ads that are not deleted, or sorting by impressions in the past month (thus showing the most active ad at top), and see if that works.

FYI, campaigns became available the following day, so if anyone else runs into this, just give it 24 hours and you should have your campaigns.

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded the Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information about the directory updates and link building via directories at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices. It isn't paid directories specifically, but it is a freshly reviewed list that should help you out.

Great question. It really depends on the directory. As a general rule, if the directory is advertising that is "sells links," those links are likely to be valueless, or potentially even detrimental. On the other hand, directories that have fees for "editorial review" (i.e. dir.yahoo.com, etc), are less likely to have that problem. Generally speaking, if a directory is specifically relevant to your site (i.e. content and/or geography), the directory will likely have more value than a general biz, or non-relevant directory. I also like to stick to relevant directories with DA equal to or higher than the site that I'm submitting. In my humble opinion, the value of submitting to a large number of low quality directories, as well as, article directories, is very low if not non-existent. However, if you find higher quality directory links in your competitors' back link profiles, they may be worth the investment.

I marked the two I received over the weekend as Sp*am.

SEO Moz only gives out 20 Moz points per month for responding for asking or answering questions or leaving replies.  After that I you can still thumbs up your own question, response, etc.

Yep

Thanks for asking. A few ideas: 1. Review of link-building services or networks. Rate each on cost, size of network, page rank of network, spammyness, etc. Any of them worth the trouble, or is the whole group to be avoided as grey/black hat spam? 2. How to get .edu or .gov links. 3. Find a small site that ranks higher than the wikipedia page for the generic keyword category the small site is about, and then offer an analysis of how/why the small site is able to rank higher than such an authoritarian site for that keyword/category. 4. List of top 10 article databases offering do-follow links and their requirements, if any (min word count, links per article, is the directory human reviewed, etc). 5. How to cost effectively have video testimonials made (by actors not working at your company), and then top 5 sites to post them on once you have them.

Yeah we had tons of top 10 rankings and now nothing is better than 100. I thought the way I did it would work the fastest but needed some validation I guess.