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I'm also seeing it in position 10. However in a scenario where this would be outranking another domain some things to consider:

1. Facebook is a high authority site. That gives it a nice initial bump.

2. The page appears to be liked some 500ish times. If a portion of the users who like that page have thier profiles set to public, google can see those internal links from thier pages to that page. Facebook does not no-follow internal links. So if a portion of the public pages linking in also have a decent amount of links going to thier page (ie they have a lot of friends on facebook or they've heavily linked to their facebook page from a decent blog or something like that) you get a ton of juice flowing into that page all with exact match anchor.

When we do reputation management for some of our clients we actively use some of these exact things to boost pages on social platforms but we learned the tactic from observing this as a natural phenomenon.

I think you may be misunderstanding what PageRank is. But moving past that for a moment. No, interlinking within your own site is not going to hurt you, generally speaking. However this is assuming all the pages reside on the same subdomain (www for example).

If you have every metro on a subdomain e.g. "seattle.yoursite.com" and interlink all of those... THAT could create a problem.

Recommend you stick with:

www.yoursite.com/state/metro/ instead.

hmm. Tough call. Depends on the authority of your domain honestly. I've seen absolute garbage + duplication rank given the right link profile. That being said you might do better to pull in some local data with APIs and scrapers and mash it up to bring extra content to the page that is more localized. Then find a way to incentivize UGC for further diversification.

301 is going to be the way to go here. Not only is it going to pass a little more juice but chances are if you have a new site the likelihood that much of the content is identical... well you get where I'm going with this

I would say its all a matter of implementation. Many media sites do full page ad overlays without issue. Cloaking only becomes an issue when you are showing the engines one thing and the users another. To solve this you COULD no-index (assuming you dont need the pages to be indexed) or you could simply show google the same overlay as you show the user. You could possibly even use an intermediary page.

Easy

Cheap

Safe

Pick any 2.

you really dont need very many "branded" links when you have EMDs to rank #1 for your brand name. Just seek links with context to the subject matter rather than links with the anchor "arse"

I imagine very little of your traffic is going to be branded traffic anyway

Also for places that you are sending actual link request emails (which I almost always avoid like the plague anyway) I am going to assume that if your site is a bit cheeky as the name would suggest, the places that are most likely to link out to you are going to be the types with a sense of humor so I doubt it'd be an issue.

No it wont. Easy way to test this is with google instant turned on simply type arse and hit the space

if it displays something its ok, if it displays blank its filtered.

I've already tested this for you and it displays all sorts of sites. Clearly google is ok with the word arse

Well we are just south of seattle so SEOmoz events are definitely something we like to send our people too. I dunno if the Moz crew would go for it but a fieldtrip to the mozplex would certainly be something we'd be open to (in reference to your bit about a visit from rand)

As far as Mac vs PC we pretty much give people whatever computer they want! To us its a bit of a no-brainer to let people pick out their favorite computer as its their primary tool.

I love all these suggestions!

Go on!

Fantastic ideas. Really like the napping room!

Why stop at 3 monitors when you can have 6! Pics attached are my actual computer at the office.

6x 27in LED monitors on articulating arms.

k5sW3.jpg IC3R7.jpg

Most of the time.. if its worth linking out to, its worth leaving followed. No-follow really doesnt help you save any juice these days it just tells google you don't trust the site you are linking out to. I would say if you dont trust a site you are linking out to... maybe just don't link to it at all (unless its for a blog post were you are poking fun at the site in question and the link is for reference purposes)

My company Click2Rank is building a new office we are opening around June. Since we will be hiring a bunch of SEOs and Programmers we want it to be basically the perfect geek hangout spot. Knowledge workers need a great place to hang their hat. So I thought I'd reach out to the community and ask.. if your office could look like anything... what would it include?

You can pretty much ask for anything... xbox360? Unlimited supply of energy drinks and food? A nice big couch? Accent wall? plants? fountain? desks shaped like your favorite animal? a pinball machine?

Lay it on me. Your dream work environment what does it look like (think office obviously we know for  a lot of people your dream office is netcommute from home but thats not helpful in this instance)

Think about both your personal workspace as well as the total office/community space in the office. Thanks in advance! Feel free to attach pictures as well!

pretty much all the of the onsite stuff you have done has no impact on domain authority. Domain Authority (at least the way I think of it.. SEOmoz may calculate in some other factors) is entirely derived from the types and quantities of links pointed at your domain.

Some possible reasons for it going down would be either Moz making adjustments to the algorithm that calculates it, a change in their index size or index content (maybe they stopped including some stuff that was previously in their index), or the more likely senario that some site or sites that were linking to you arent passing as much authority as they used to and your score is reflecting that.

You may also want to think about slapping a robots noindex on the individual pages as well.

Like david said it'd be helpful to see the stats and what you've done.. that being said... SEOmoz does play with that metric from time to time as seen here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscapes-august-update-better-domain-authority-numbers-new-partners-and-more

It may be a situation of "Its not you, its me" if you know what I'm sayin.

Absolutely not. I think matt puts out a lot of great information and respect the man immensely. HOWEVER, he works for the head of the google webspam department and google chose him of all people to be the primary interactor with SEO's. That alone should tell you something.

Policing the internet from spam and manipulation is a full time job. I imagine its hard to the point were a little misdirection acts as a great temporary prophylactic against many otherwise-would-be serp manipulators.

This is of course just my opinion.. but a lot of people seem to share it.

Define smaller budget. The term is really subjective. Some companies consider $5k/month to be small. Some people think $200 is small.

My company offers linkbuilding and I like to think we are some of the best out there but our monthly minimum is $2500 and requires a multi-month contract.

I know of a few great freelancers that do a lot of local SEO starting at just 500 a month.

Another option would be to snap up the individual things you want done sorta ala-cart from places like freelancer.com, odesk, wickedfire and digital point.

I may catch some flack for this.. but this is EXACTLY what software like thebestspinner is for.

Keep the original on your site, then plop it in the best spinner and spend 30-45 minutes doin up the spintax on it. submit the variations to the article directories.

This has 2 benefits:

1. you aren't putting exact duplicates of your content out onto other peoples domain

2. your article subs vary from directory to directory, increasing the likelyhood that more of them will stay in the main index and perhaps pass you some visibility and traffic in addition to link equity.

Another thing I would recommend and this is just a personal preference.... don't link your distributed article back to its twin on your site. instead link it to a different article on your site that may be related... or to a category page of related articles.

This is mainly a UX thing. Why would someone want to read the same article twice? If they just got done reading it they arent going to follow a link just to read it a second time