Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We are just getting into guest blogging for our real estate clients and have found it to be very helpful.  I had an additional question that I was wondering if you guys could help answer.  We were kicking around the idea of adding a guest post page on our clients' sites to attract potential partners with which to work with on content creation and guest blogging.  Have any of you ever used this tactic? We would obviously have to have strict guidelines of content quality to allow guest posts on our sites, but it seems like a potential link building opportunity if the arrangement is that we get to guest post on their site.  Seems that Rand has stated that you would not get penalized for reciprocal link building as long as the two sites linking to each other are topical and the links are in related content and not on an external links page.  As opposed to manually building a list of guest post opportunities alone, this seems like a good way to attract potential linking partners.  Thoughts?

I highly recommend NOT using GoDaddy, their service is okay if your lucky. The problem is that they max out all of their servers with as much clients as they can which can effect your performance if your on one of these. At least thats my experience with their shared options. I would check out Site5 or Host Rocket if you want to get rid of Host Gator

There are a few different thought processes here... If I understand it correctly social signals are not really at the domain level, they are at the page level. Social signals are to signify trending or popular items. So by doing this you are trending a page on your site with little to no content (or purpose) other than a photo to gain likes. This MAY give the overall domain credence, in the Social World, but not sure it actually will affect the process of SEO to much. Also the photos are smaller and worse quality when they are attached as a web link instead of uploaded to your wall directly so you may get less likes, not to forget that the CTR of links on FB is VERY LOW! Of course you want positive social signals to your website, but is this really the way to achieve it organically and with overall user experience in mind? Keep in mind as well that SEO/SEM are more and more everyday becoming online about brand building and Sharing the item that gets alot of likes on your Branded Facebook page can increase your brand power online. In my opinion this strategy has merit, but employing under the idea of just gaining rankings is not really a strategy it is just another "SEO trick" that will get picked up and devalued as a webpage with little to no content so the Social Gain you made will proabably be devalued in the end, so you might as well retain the power in your Social branding. w00t!

Try to get the cartoon published on other sites. Make it an explicit requirement that any such publication also include a link back to your site -- and preferably to a page on which users can take a further action (e.g.. subscribe to a newsletter). If can make the link one of the keywords you are trying to rank for, so much the better. So if the cartoon were about the crazy world of office furniture: the cartoon would appear on the other site It would include something like: Courtesy of Mac's Furniture Warehouse. Check out their blog about office furniture for the inside story about how this cartoon was created this leads to your blog, which includes the cartoon and the details about how it was created your blog page might also include an email capture field at the bottom (or perhaps a discount offer) This is quite a bit of work. You will have to contact the sites individually with a well-crafted and polite invitation. But it sounds like the effort may well pay off in this case.

Thanks Sha, but I still don't get it.  What's the benefit of having ten thousand social mentions on a domain that will never get used for anything else?  Or do they eventually build something else on that domain and then create a backlink to one of their sites?

I find that Facebook can be buggy like that sometimes. Usually if you try back a bit later or the next day you'll see it. I agree with Nick, it's interesting but not data you can do much with. It's cool to see how many times your brand has been talked about, but you don't get much more information than that. At least Facebook is trying to improve and give us more info, maybe the next phase will have even more data. For now I wouldn't worry too much about it not working, give it a day or so and try again.

Thank you!

There's also a problem that's happened in the last couple of days for third-party reporting of toolbar pagerank that might be affecting what you're seeing. Check out the post at http://mz.cm/rjPAwc.

I think that the answer to this question is highly related to the value that Google would place on --- hotlinked images --- domain mentions --- social media "likes" Just seeing what others think of this.

Hi Ryan is exactly right about this.  Go to the facebook developers page to create the OG meta data. Specify whatever page you want to show up as shared within the OG meta tag. -Dan

How are they Reddit pyjamas? There's no up or down arrows Pictures will almost only do well if it's a comic or hosted on imgur. AmAs are good because of the reason you mentioned. If it's a popular AmA then you can get a lot of traffic. News stories that make the front page can send hundreds of thousands of visits, but Redditors hate marketers with a passion, so you have to have a genuine story. Posting any old nonsense will just get you downboats.

It's not new. You can read some more information about when it first was reported in late 2008 over at Search Engine Roundtable. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018996.html.

Hi Dunamis, Check out the post Justin Briggs made about How to Build Links with infographics. He does talk about the landing page for an infographic, and mentions this in relation to one specific example. This landing page removes almost all distractions, except for engaging with the content via social or embedding. It links back to the post and the site’s homepage. There is this wonderful share bar at the top, which allows visitors to easily share the graphic. It even sticks at the top as the user scrolls down the page. If you look at the link for this example, the link goes directly to the infographic with almost nothing else on the page except for social sharing. It does link back to the infographic in the context of a post, where the site looks more like a regular page on the site. Hope this gives you an idea of how other people balance the layout options you have.

I'm interested n seeing your infographic. Can you post a link to it or send it to me?

While the topic is hot in the news, that is the time to submit to reddit, slashdot, digg, etc... Your idea of commenting on newspaper sites is a good one... pick the highest traffic ones. =========== Do this with all of your content... watch the news carefully... swiftly draw the proper sword at the proper time. Its your sword.

I use Majestic SEO's Site Explorer to show clients and my managers direct results. Now you won't see the origin of every inbound link but you can see how your links are getting found. You can sign up for a free account and get some basic info. While their tool doesn't provider nearly as much data and insight as Open Site Explorer does, it is good for some raw, new numbers.

This is really exciting!  I've configured the code to put a line after the video that says, "Want this video on your website? Here's the code:" and then if they use the code intact it will show the video with a line underneath that says, "Courtesy of mywebsite."

Just make sure that you're not violating copyright when you repost these. I've seen some posts that were compilations of copyrighted images found on the web, with some nasty comments on the post from the original artist.

Was the post up long enough to get cached? If so, I'll be looking out for it  

You know you typed that out load.  Yet another political fail. #WeinerClub