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I'm going to give two responses to each, one being what I suspect might be Google's take on it, the other which is my take.

Which of these strategies, if any, cross the line from relationship building to link buying?  Assume all links are do-follow.

• You're a local business.  You give the local Boys & Girls club a few hundreds buck a year.  In return, you get a very nice link on their Sponsorship page for 12 months. Google: paid; Me: paid

• You send a sample of your product to influential bloggers, for the purpose of a review and hopefully a link back to your website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• One of your clients is a college bar.  You invite 50 college kids over for a slow evening and stuff them full of chicken wings.  Then, you ask them to please review and link to the bar on their college wiki. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• You give a client a free service, in exchange for that client linking to your business on its blog roll. Google: paid; Me: paid

• You take a blogger out to lunch, and pick up the tab.  Later that day, the blogger writes up an amusing little story for the blog, and links back to your desired website. Google: relationship; Me: relationship

• In your email newsletter, you put out a request to your customer base, "Please link to my website, and I'll provide you a special 20% off coupon." Google: paid; Me: paid

Scary! Turns out I agree with Google on those... purely coincidence

Thanks, Phil, I'll go check those out, as soon as I put out a couple of fires.

Another option is to ask webmasters to change your anchor text. But you'll have to do that on a link-by-link basis, in order to provide anchor text that is relevant to both the source and target page.
Also, we've seen a lot of luck changing some portion of your profile to generic anchor text like "read more", "more info" or "website", as well as others using the destination page's title as the anchor text. Finally, you can resort to raw URLs in some, as well. What we try to do there is use a raw URL where we can use either the brand name or the destination page's title in the same sentence.

Kyle, if you have done a domain level disavow, there's no need to do another URL by URL.
We are seeing disavow take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months to take effect. Wish I could offer better news, but it looks like you're in a hurry-up-and-wait mode.

Hi, Phil-

Your points are well taken. Certainly, a CDN will handle the BW concerns, if a site owner is prepared to go that route. The alternatives you mention will certainly work, too, with the added benefit of not having to content with a 5 second ad on the screen.

But I think your concerns regarding YouTube doing poorly doesn't really hold water. If you self-host, either via CDN or on Vimeo, you'll undoubtedly be promoting the video in some fashion, on and off-page. Presumably, you'd do the same if embedding a YT video. So I see no difference in terms of traffic generation. Perhaps if you're depending upon YT for your traffic, but really, how many people do that? As for YT outranking the content, I would say if that happens, the content probably either went viral or there wasn't any meaningful promotion of the webpage undertaken.

We did a hangout the beginning of July, and embedded the YT video on our website. Our page is in the #2 slot, while the YT version is on the bottom of page 2. Aside from a couple of social mentions, we did very little to promote our page. http://www.google.com.mx/?gws_rd=cr#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&ei=GJYGUtuzOuiqyAHr7IGIAQ&fp=7a8e48b9e5b6684f&hl=en&newwindow=1&pws=0&q=matt+siltala+on+infographics&sa=N&safe=off&start=10

Granted, the views it garnered are hardly noteworthy, so the example is far from definitive. But I'd wager that even if it had gotten 1,000+ views by now, we'd be able to easily outrank it. 30,000 might be a different story - 300,000 probably pretty tough.

My point is, while I accept that your options are good ones, and quite likely, are better in some circumstances, I think YouTube is still worth thinking about for some circumstances, too.

While we can never really quantify how much benefit a given link affects rank, we do know that a link can convey equity both for the link itself and for the anchor text. Google has indicated that a "safe" method of protecting ourselves against an impression of over-optimization is to use anchor text like "read more", "more info" or "click here", as well as using the target page's title for anchor text or a simple raw URL (as I recall, it was John Mueller that told us that in a Hangout some time ago).

Personally, I see the question of link quality as dealing with the quality of the source page and the relevance between the source and destination, and I evaluate links first by those criteria. I see anchor text as a separate issue, considering relevance and diversity. We have successfully cleaned up trashy profiles where the same anchor text had been overused, by mixing up KW anchors with generic anchors, page titles and raw URLs, and have gotten penalties lifted.

That said, your last point: "While spammy links on non-keyword rich anchor text is certainly not a good practice, is it nonetheless effective?" makes me wonder exactly what you mean by "spammy links". That, to me, sounds as though the source page is either low quality or not sufficiently relevant to the destination, in which case, I'd say it's an ill-advised practice.

Phil makes a good point about holding your customers by self-hosting. I would say that it is something you should consider very carefully, though, as bandwidth issues could be a bear if your hosting isn't right for it. You need to consider the size and number of videos you'll be hosting, and the traffic they'll be receiving.

If self-hosting isn't the avenue you opt for right now, then I would recommend YouTube. They offer more traffic, as was mentioned, as well as decent tracking ability.

I don't think 50-100 KW is that much. I'm rarely targeting less than 30 on a very small site of 20-30 pages, and on an ecomm site, 1000+ KW is nothing out of the ordinary. Resources, as you say, are the governing factor in determining how many KWs you'll be going after simultaneously. I'm usually only focusing on a handful at a time.

Hi, Egol-

From what they say here, I don't read it to indicate that schema markup is required.

As for ranking articles losing their spot by submission as In-Depth Articles, I see that as unlikely. If you want to play it safe, you could submit one and watch its rankings in SERPs after it pops up in the In-Depth index.

If you're unable to get the webmasters to remove the links, I would definitely disavow them, by domain. They may be unwilling to remove the articles, but as long as you're not using them on your own site, the links are really your only concern. If they're showing your author profile on those sites, then I do think it would be a good idea to have that removed, as well, since Google still stumbles occasionally on attribution issues. That wouldn't have any effect on your link profile, but it could conceivably muddy the authorship waters.

Generally speaking, I would agree that validation is often too strict.

Google seems to handle this well, however. In fact, I seem to recall Matt C. once saying that the VAST majority of websites don't validate. I think he may have been talking strictly about HTML, though.

Validation isn't a ranking factor, of course, and most prevalent browsers will compensate for minor errors and render a page, regardless. So I really wouldn't be too concerned about validation just for validation's sake. As long as your pages render in most common browsers and neither page functionality nor user experience is adversely affected, I'd consider it a non-issue. As to whether a bot could be fooled into thinking the head had ended and the body had begun, I suppose it's possible, but I've never seen it happen, even with some absolutely horrible coding.

I changed to Wordpress SEO by Yoast. I had some issues with both Platinum SEO and Ultimate SEO, and have never had a problem with Joost's plugin.

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

The only limit that I'm aware of is that you shouldn't use more than one H1

An indexed page is simply any page that has been crawled and then pulled into the search engine's index of web pages (Google's, in most contexts). Until a page is in the index, it can't be returned in the SERPs for any search query. Pages that haven't yet been discovered by Google, or that are somehow blocked for indexing (such as by a noindex directive or a robots.txt file blocking the bots), won't show up in the index. In the Google search box, you can enter "site:yoursiteurl" (without the quotes) to see the pages that are in the index.

Branden, I used to use Platinum SEO and occasionally had some quirky behavior like this with custom pages. Since the Blog page is basically an empty page importing recent posts, it might be playing poorly with PSEO. Have you tried turning that plugin off for a minute, doing a hard refresh and seeing what happens?

As Mat said, you could be risking more scrutiny, so if you submit a recon request, be sure you can endure the attention your site will get.
However, I can see no possible gain to doing so. So why bother? All you'll get out of it is a message saying they found no manual action against your site, and advising you to check for other possible causes of a loss of traffic, yada, yada, yada...

I agree with Tim... I'd even say that I seriously doubt that 302s had any impact at all in moving a site up, given that Google has stated many times that a 302 passes no link equity.

Hi, Stephanie-

Googlebots read as raw code. But in the example you give, it would see those links, as well. What remains as a question is whether it recognizes the nature of those links and therefore pays them limited attention. Personally, I doubt Google ignores them, as it's a valuable source of data for them for both the link graph and the Knowledge Graph.

It's difficult to say whether you may have been smacked, from a superficial glance. But I will say this: your homepage copy is keyword stuffed and full of grammatical errors of the type that even algorithms can spot. I would certainly say that your site is a possible candidate for a Panda slap, judging just by the homepage.

To me, your approach seems like a sound strategy, assuming that none of your present sites are suffering any penalties which could be transmitted back to the new site.Sure, you'll lose a small amount of equity in the redirects, but compared to starting over from scratch, that's negligible.

The consideration, I think, would be in ensuring that the new folders for individual countries/cities are afforded the optimal opportunity to rank in their respective regions. Utilizing hreflang attributes is probably sufficient to accomplish that.