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The prevailing view, in my opinion, is that no one should do anything for the sole purpose of getting links. Google is increasingly getting smarter and seeing through tactics such as widgets and awards banners. First, review Google's rules on link schemes. Second, see that Google recommends that webmasters add rel=nofollow attributes to links within widgets that other websites use. (I'd also include award graphics and banners.) Third, see this Moz post on "Widgetbait Gone Wild." What I would say is that you should give awards first to reward other quality websites and promote awareness of your website. Don't do it directly to get links. Make the links within the badgets nofollow. If you promote and PR your contest and awards in the right way, you'll get a lot of referral traffic from the links along with possible mentions of you by other websites and bloggers who will give you (dofollow!) links naturally by themselves when they write about you. This is earning links the right way -- not building them. It is more difficult and takes more time -- but it's much more worthwhile in the end. Don't do some BS awards to get links. Make it a real, noteworthy award that is worthy of getting coverage by others. Be newsworthy -- see a Moz post of mine on using PR to earn links. Good luck!

Never worked for Chinese version but as far as search engine Google is concern it will count these two URLs as separate URLs. I mean URL: example.com/Australia and example.com/Australia?al=zh will be considered as different URLs and if the content is available in different languages then there will no duplicate content issue and link juice for both pages will be separate. Hope this helps!

Hi Sebastian, Thanks for reply and sorry I hadn't checked back sooner, must have missed it. As we provide our affiliates with several different options for widgets/links so try and not disrupt the flow of their site, we have a couple of different kinds. We tend to set up affiliates with their own subdomain so that our system can track how many sales they make etc. while also allowing them to retain their own branding with a "re-skin" of our site (the root domain is http://www.experienceoz.com.au ) One example would be: http://www.surferscentury.com.au/ where they have the token "skyscraper" banner on their page Another with the full "booking widget" is the Great Barrier Reef official site: http://www.greatbarrierreef.com.au As you'll see from this there is a "logo" of our company at the bottom of the widget currently with no link; I can basically get the developers here to automatically switch it from a static image to a hyperlink to our homepage (we'd literally get hundreds of more backlinks from pretty high quality sites instantly if we made this change) however I don't want it to come across as us "paying" for the links as mentioned even though we technically aren't. Anyway appreciate the reply, cheers.

Thanks for the suggestions Dana, very helpful.

I agree Michael, it's a stereotype sure but most of the stuff churned out for the sake of being churned out as "fresh content" that is written in poor English simply doesn't have a use or practical function on the Internet other than a desperate attempt to soak up whatever meagre traffic they can. It's especially glaring considering their continued mantra has been "write for the user instead of the search engines" when these pages/posts are doing exactly the opposite...

We switched some of our products from paragraph to bullet descriptions and our conversion rate has stayed about the same.  However, it has reduced the number of questions that we receive about those products.

This has images. Even bosses can understand those. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2129359/How-Search-Engines-Use-Machine-Learning-for-Pattern-Detection

Google looks at URLs, and not pages. It's the same content, but on different URLs. If Google delivered mail, it would think the following were all different houses: 123 Main Street, Los Angeles, California 90210 123 Main St., Los Angeles, California 90210 123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210 123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210-1234 If you're able to use a canonical tag in your custom CMS, you can effectively tell Google that one specific URL is the "right" one, and that all of the others should be treated as if they were the "right" one.