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No, they were red flagged on Webmaster Tools. It says your site has violated google guidelines.

I'm guessing that means its a manual penalty?

I'm helping a new brand (service industry) to try to dominate the first page for their own name. They have a name that also exists in another state AND a negative Yelp review which (shows up #4, whilst they show up #1 on google unpersonalized search).

Aside from Linkedin/Facebook/twitter, what are good places to Tag Images and have them show up under the search for this company's name. This is a picture/heavy industry (jewelry) and I'm looking to create profiles on several sites that would immediately show up if I tag the content properly. Are quora/pinterest good choices? I need to grab-bag as many properties as possible.

Secondary question: would these properties on quora etc, respond well to exact-match anchor text links to shoot them past the negative yelp rating that is showing up #4 for their brand?

I have a client that wants to rank for low comp local keywords (i.e. service + suburban area). Would several well written blog posts on relevant blogs be more effective than 100's of low level spammy directory links? I just want to give him an initial base of a few links, aside from submitting to the local search engines such as those in whitespark citation finder..... please keep in mind this would be a low competition area where on-page would probably rank in the middle of the 2nd page.

What are people's thoughts on whether or not social spam will become a major problem soon, just like forum profile/blog comment spam, etc, and what do you think the search engines will do about companies that are blatantly gaming the social signals game

I.E. since social proof seems to be google's answer to combating anchor text manipulation and content farms, what do you think will be google's answer to combating the rampant social spam that will surely overtake us.

I'd like to write good, unique content, and one of the places i was looking at was article repositories. I do understand that most of them have been spammed to death, but I was wondering how I would go about finding ones that would accept my article. I do realize that niche news/forum/informational sites are probably my best bet. Beyond that, would would be a step down or a 'general' article directory where I could get something approved and post content that is high quality. I'm not sure I have time to go around to every niche site and make the handshakes necessary at this time.

I was wondering if it was still a viable strategy to pull up 'your keyword' on google.uk or google.au, and email all the top ranking sites or call them and personally ask them to reciprocally link to you. Do these links still hold any value in google's eyes? Or is this a well known strategy that no longer holds any weight and is a waste of time?

We have a blog related to computer support, and we have been using guest posts and promotion of those posts to boost freshness and rankings of the blog. We have been restricting outbound links to prevent words such as 'computer repair, 'computer support' etc, because we were under the impression that if we want to rank for those words, we should only allow INCOMING links with that anchor text, and that outbound links from the page, would rob the other parts of the site of the link juice this page provides. My question is, is this wrong? Should I freely allow outbound links on my blog page that contain anchor text that I my self am trying to rank for? Or was I correct initially? Current the anchor text is in 'related' industries, such as mobile apps, technology news, etc...things that google might think are 'related', but not exactly what the site is about.

I was wondering if banned domains pass any page rank, link love, etc. My domain got banned and I AM working to get it unbanned, but in the mean time, would buying a new domain, and creating NEW content that DOES adhere to the google quality guidelines, help at all? Would this force an 'auto-evaluation' or 're-evaluation' of the site by google? or would the new domain simply have ZERO effect from the 301 unless that old domain got into google's good graces again.

if a blogger is using that template, do you think it would affect my chances at ranking better or affect my ability to use that template for a site I'm trying to get 'unbanned/de-penalized'?

Prior to the Panda update we had 1 main site, and 300 or so satellite sites. The satellite sites all had an identical template with identical content. The satellite sites all got flagged, and the main site persevered.

We'd like to TRY to get all of these sites unbanned in bulk. My question is...how 'DIFFERENT' should these sites be? I know that a real google employee will be looking. All of these sites will be in the same industry...so how 'different' can the content really be? I am going to try to do this in sets of 10 and purchase a different template for EACH city/satellite site, as well as having varying categories, but realistically how doomed/successful do you think this endeavor will be? Any advice? realistic timeline?

Thanks Donnie. I'll check it out.

Where is a good site for joomla and wordpress website templates that are free? I want to learn how to do everything on a zero budget (except for hosting and domain name) and I'd like to find some decent free templates.

Gyi

I concur with your thoughts...however myblogguest provides UNIQUE content versus the rss scraper plugins I used to use. I hand pick the content I want on a weekly basis.

Do you guys recommend I pursue this combination? I want a semi-automatic (spend a few minutes a day picking interesting blog articles) blog and to automate its promotion. Is there anything else I could be doing?

Also this combination doesn't seem to post to facebook pages well. I'd like to also add buttons to like/tweet/ etc, right on the blog. What are some best practices for this?

Do you guys find that visitors find pop up livechat software annoying, or do you find that it leads to significantly more conversions? What I mean by pop up is software that appears without the user clicking the 'chat now' button.

do you think linking to a page from related pages improves the likelihood it will be indexed?

I have a number of pages that rank on the 1st page for highly long tail phrases, despite the pages having outbound links to things like 'privacy policy' 'terms of use', make a payment, etc...all pages that can be accessed from the home page. Do you recommend I eliminate these administrative pages from the long tail-targeting pages, to reduce outbound page rank flow? Does anyone create a different breadcrumb navigation or remove one altogether for pages that are highly targeted to improve their rank?

wow that's a great idea......getting professionals to answer questions prior to booking....

I run a mini-content farm so to speak - a nationwide computer repair business. We have screened professionals that are specific to one industry. I was wondering if the SEO community would like to offer ideas on how to make this type of site more interesting  to end users. What are some things that could be integrated into the site that are 'location specific' that would be of interest to users. I'd like to be able to offer a list of certified, screen, professionals that is searchable by zip code and town. We are planning on showing the quality control rating, as well as current certifications, and a checkbox showing that they were background checked. Customer testimonials are also in the works. Any other ideas?