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Just personally I think this is the disconnect, just because something is nofollow does not mean it does not help rankings in an indirect way....

"Google probably still likes to see that you are active and people are talking about you on the web"

Not sure this is a "probably" i think they have come out and said it on many occasions

And this I believe is the point of YES they help, the Algorithm is becoming less and less robotic.... so thinking of it in a sense of Follow and Nofollow is not looking at it in the full perspective.

I also think #2 is not looking at the big picture of, are you in a niche that you could gain more traction from Social than in search?

I am just not sure an SEO answer is correct in an increasingly social world IMHO

So if we are looking at in perspective of what to do on 12/13/12 - #2 might be correct for some niches, but for 12/13/13 and beyond I think #2 and #3 will keep getting more and more wrong.... Not just from a search perspective, but from an Internet Marketing/Marketing perspective as well.

"I've read so much lately about social signals and got basically 3 completely different responses."

There is rarely one path to success, so as one of the best blogs I have read in a while stated today "Diversity" in all realms is the key in 2013. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-1-seo-tips-for-2013

1. is definitely correct, but not in a "Jump on the Bandwagon" sense, you would need to have a Social Strategy to gain the "buzz" - but I am sure you know that.

2. Should you focus 100% well it depends on the niche or even the strategy/ but I would not brush it off in a forward facing strategy.

3. Ehhh, yeah but it is not that hard to gain 1,000's of social signals with a good strategy and content/networking - But this probably comes form someone who is still using more old school tactics, which is cool and they still work (and I still use alot of em too) but I also know they might not always work and I will point out the blog from Dr. pete again, today where he talked about Google MIGHT not always being there, so again diversity.

to the last point on % of time spent..... That is such a tough concept for me personally cause I look at SEO/Internet Marketing more at what needs to be done to defeat competition or per "project"  as opposed to how much time i spend on each item to "rank well" generally But I spend about 40 - 75% of my time in "Social Endeavors" But I also do alot of the coding, design ect.... so I might actually spend more if I was only focusing on the aspect of "Internet Marketing: only - But I will say as Adam points out, I as well am competing with National Brands in the SERPS and holding my own with a probably over 50% "Social Strategy" but again % is hard, I would only say YES it is important, but don't ever put all your eggs in one basket.

I hope I gave some insight

Please let me stress though if your onpage and social strategy are not there link building is not gonna do it by itself.....

That is why I recommend really delving into SEOMOZ resources, as they give a well rounded idea of the intricacies needed for an "Internet Marketing Strategy"

I'm not quite at a "$2500/mo deal" so there has to be something between $2500 and nothing for building links around my content...

So I am in a much more competitive niche, and without giving to much away I do not spend a dime on link building, and compete neck and neck as a local business against national brands... With that said, my point above is you do not necessarily want to "Build Links" in the old school way, you want to create a content strategy that defeats you competitors crappy content strategy.

Copier Leasing

Copier Technical Whitepapers

A Funny MeMe Campaign about funny copier "offfice stories" or using the Office tv show

an infographic about the history of copying but maybe a funny take that goes WAY back to even Egyptian times

These may suck, but I am not in your niche Just be creative as your competition obviously is not

There are of course other white hat tactics you should be doing, that once again you have a plethora of resource material as a pro member that are not associated with content strategies (but many are)

If you cannot write these find a SEO copywriter or agency that can help but with even a 1,500 a month budget you could do wonders (in my opinion against a competitor like that)

and PS if you need a great copywriter I have a name I could pass you privately that she does great work PM me

"So, its hard NOT to want to throw up a blog farm and do as "the Romans do". "

Yes, but the Roman Empire fell, and fell hard

Content, Content, Content - Would be my advice to combat a spammer! But BETTER content and and EVEN BETTER content Quality not quantity, make sure you are smartly using social and trying to do everything the right way and the tortoise shall beat the hare!

There are hundreds of resources here on SEOMOZ that can help you with an Internet Marketing and Content Strategy Start with the Blog and work your way to Whiteboard Fridays and even last couple webinars have been really informative and timely

Hope this helps

http://www.seomoz.org/blog

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/whiteboard-friday

And I am sure others will add more sources and ideas

I would agree more with Cody, Readability and User Experience should be the #1 focus - Focusing on using a term a certain amount of times is moot and you begin writing for the keyword as opposed to the content or reader.

If you are an expert in the field and writing an Article about New Orleans, then inherently the term will be there naturally and organically. And no matter the density with the algo updates going the way they are, I personally think that intent will weigh MUCH heavier than any kind of previous "density" rules.

i would also go with option one for both long term and short term benefits -

Be careful about doing a "Lazy" redirect as seen below, as this can have disastrous user experience implications.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For every page that is in Google do a one to one 301 - if the page has no user experience or search implications you can just let it drop. In my opinion

Also make sure all these new pages consist of High Quality Unique Content

Hi,

a 503 means unreachable - or server down variant  to HTTP port www.checkupdown.com/status/E503.html 

It appears the link you gave is to your own campaign, which only you can see - but I assume at the time of crawl there was an issue with the site or page in question, but is now fixed.

You can check your logs and see if you can determine the root cause, but I think that is all the information the community could supply based on the information provided.

Hope this helps

1. I had never heard of Onlywire, but seems like the free service PingFM (now seemic) -- As to using it, I would highly suggest against it, as blast messages across Social Networks kind of defeats the purpose of social networks in my opinion.

2. Social "Juice" does not come from the links themselves it comes from the interaction after, so once again I am not sure you will "reap" the benefits with this mentality about social

3. Don't post the same stuff, if you have genuine interesting content every network has its own methodology for "success" so a blast defeats this so you might as well just concentrate on the Big 3 In my opinion (FB Twitter and G+ with Pinterest and LinkedIN being conditionals based on niche)

Hope this helps

"Minimum guaranteed number of media websites on which your release is posted" alarm bells!"

Not necessarily an "Alarm Bell" on its own, as that really is all syndication is technically -

BUT what this probably means is a HUGE group of websites that just dynamically place any niche relevant content on the sites of that niche. It is most usually all no follow, so penalties would not be felt - but results might not be felt as well. (Unless it is real news and you are just trying to gain exposure and traffic)

I am not the biggest fan of online press releases so I am probably jaded, but from an SEO standpoint it is not necessarily an alarm bell for something bad. It just means your content will be automatically accepted on the distribution partner sites (as long as it passes quality checks for most reputable release agencies)

Shane

If PRWEB is still worth using, is a pretty loaded question and answer in my opinion - The advice I would give specifically to the links, is to use naked, or brand name URLS -

"and it is actually news worthy compared to a lot of things on PR web."

This statement alone, (which I agree with, and reason I stopped Press Releases as an "SEO" tactic many moons ago) would be my answer to whether it is still a VIABLE option, but once again it is a loaded question and answer.

Shane

Should I use the Remove URLs tool in Google Webmaster tools to remove them, before making my site live or after I made it live? ---- NO

Should I remove my site completely and re-add it, and have it verified again? --- NO

Should I just remove the old sitemap and re-upload the new sitemap and ask Googlebot to re-crawl my site? --- YES (do not even have to remove in WMT, just re-add, but replace in server new sitemap.xml before re-add)

And I should also probably re-upload a new robots.txt file and remove the old one. --- If changes yes

should prob do a 301 redirect --- YES, on pages that are needed to be for User Experience purposes. For bot purposes do a operator search in Google "site: yourdomainhere.com" -- then 301 any pages here to their redesigned counterpart address.

A piece of advice, would be to have a nice, high quality, industry relevant content distribution strategy for launch and post launch - get lots of G+'s to that new content, and make sure the new content has the new architecture

As Zach says though, the most important part is the 301's as if this is not meticulously planned for and implemented correctly it will mess with rankings and will also hurt user experience

Hi,

I understand that "Compare Travel" is your brand, but I would think, that would be at least a moderately competitive keyword, so just existing would not dictate a high position. (until you establish yourself as the "brand" compare travel - which is tough, cause compare travel to what and how?

I also, am not sure that "Compare Travel" would be interpreted as a brand signal, right off the bat either.

Cheap Holidays | Holidays Ireland | Compare Travel | Comparison Site

This just seems like a list of keywords, with your "Brand" thrown in (you even have a similar keyword to "Compare Travel" in your title, not helping your Brand Distinction (in my opinion)

Shane

Please take what I say below with a grain of salt, as I am very good with .htaccess, but not so great when Frontpage is in the loop. Also back up ALL files before making ANY changes for quick replace if creates a "Internal Server Error"

_vti_bin/
_vti_adm
_vti_auth

Should be in your structure, each with an .htaccess

add the line

Options +FollowSymlinks

to each one

Now the just add everything streamline metrics has suggested, to the current .htaccess and test

You can try adding what streamline metrics suggests, without the above steps, as .htaccess is not dependent on Frontpage, and the Frontpage extensions have nothing to do with .htaccess (from research i found on the web)

http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com/

Now resolves correctly (it appears)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK => Date => Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:48:30 GMT Server => Apache Last-Modified => Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:25:14 GMT ETag => "2df65ea6-2f72-4cb2aebef67b8" Accept-Ranges => bytes Content-Length => 12146 Connection => close Content-Type => text/html

Sorry I can't be much more help, but without being in your server I am only guessing as how to fix your exact issue -

But http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com/

is still 302 redirecting to http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com/xampp/

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily => Date => Wed, 03 Oct 2012 16:51:47 GMT Server => Apache X-Powered-By => PHP/5.3.17 Location => http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com/xampp/ Content-Length => 0 Connection => close Content-Type => text/html

I am almost 100% sure your issue is either in vhost or .htaccess

There is a chance, if you use Cpanel, that a domain pointer was used to point to this now deleted sub-directory - but again I do not know your setup

_should I still avoid an anchor text link from the first paragraph of this page: http://www.tutorialchip.com/inspiration/20-most-famous-round-corner-business-cards-designs/_

For this page, specifically yes - The page is almost a year old, so adding an anchor text link to this specific page, without a major content revision would provide almost nothing in my opinion (from SEO perspective)

If you are paying to have your product on there like the others, then this would need to be No-followed per Webmaster guidelines (if no indexed no SEO benefit would really be seen if left indexed  you run the "risk" of violating Google Guidelines

Would a few links from blog networks be harmful if we had a lot more "white hat" links to offset them?

Depends completely on you link portfolio, as even "white hat" these days is sometimes "Grey Hat" so one more link could be all it takes to push you over the edge, of course I am only playing devils advocate, but when giving advice I try not to give risky advice.

Specifically for the link given above -

I would not....

There appears to be 2 options

1. Impression based ad service (which is cool, if you think you will see ROI from the people who would be on this site, but I have no idea what you are promoting/selling)

2. Linkroll or "Friends"  which again, if you think you will see ROI from being in a 20+ list of varying services... Sure go for it.

But from an SEO perspective, a cautious approach would be NO - On the other hand, if you are a risk taker ----- who knows what Google does or does not penalize these days.... (I am not sure they even know anymore)

Shane

PS Option 3 is your links embedded in text or others articles, which sounds like a blog network to me... Which would change to NOOOOOOO

Hi,

xampp is your server technology, I am assuming.

(XAMPP is a WAMP'ish type stack with added Module support for windows and TOMCAT)

You would usually only see it like that, if your were calling it locally and it would be something like

C:/xampp/directory/index.html  (given your structure is like this)

Currently

http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com is 302 redirecting to /xampp, which is your current issue, and is actually impossible as XAMPP folder would be at least a directory above document root - or it would be document root, so no need to call it after domain.

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily => Date => Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:30:51 GMT Server => Apache X-Powered-By => PHP/5.3.17 Location => http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com/xampp/ Content-Length => 0 Connection => close Content-Type => text/html

I am assuming /xampp is not your dcoument root though or it is missing an index, or somewhere you used incorrect syntax in a redirect, or your httpd.conf or virtual host file is misconfigured.

The first thing you need to do in my opinion is search your .htaccess, or vhost for the 302 redirect of "/" to "http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com/xampp/"

would look something like

_redirect 302 / http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com/xampp/_

Kind of, off the subject of question - but I looked at your site, and from the description - What you are doing skirts the lines of legality in many different countries as with what happened to megaupload

Just a note, maybe you have already satisfied all legal requirements to file hosting and sharing