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On the first question I don't quite agree with Thomas. I think that social signals are an important part of the mix but I don't think that having 73k Facebook Likes will undo the damage caused by a manipulated link profile.

If you've been hit by Penguin - and if you're sure that's what's hit your site - then you simply have to sort out your unnatural link profile. That means getting links removed, or at least making every best effort to do this, and making detailed notes of your attempts, which you can submit to Google on a Googledoc if required.

High rankings would NOT have protected your competitors from a Penguin update. They are separate things. Google does not "think" along the lines of "Oh well, this site may have a crap link profile but at least lots of people seem to like it on Facebook, so let's give it a free ride". Penguin is algorithmic. There is not a committee of Googlers deciding which site to hit on an individual basis.

Social signals are important and they will likely come into play once you've fixed your link profile. But, in my opinion, not until then.

Try Followerwonk.com, now part of the Moz empire. Even if you don't have a PRO account, you can use this tool to search Twitter bios.

So for example you can type "travel blogger" into the search field and it will show a list of people on Twitter who have words "travel" and "blogger" in their bios. These are sorted by followers, so you are likely to see the most influential first (there is also an option to sort by influence).

Click on "more options" and you can add filters. For example, you might want to find travel bloggers in the UK or the US.

A search that I like "Huffington Post travel" (replace it with your area of interest).

In my experience, most bloggers are active on Twitter, so this is a good de facto blogger search tool, and free.

I wouldn't worry. Open Site Explorer (though a great tool) isn't updated as often as we'd like because Moz simply doesn't have the crawl power that Google has at its disposal.

Be patient and OSE will catch up.

In the meantime you could compare the links in Google Webmaster Tools (Traffic > Links to your Site). However, this info isn't great either and doesn't drill down into the individual links in the way that OSE does.

Hi Diane

I suggest you make your postings public. This will help people find you, and know if what you're sharing is interesting, so they can put you in their circles.

One of the most useful things you can do with your Google+ page is verify your site for authorship (so your image appears in Google search results).

To set this up you will need to do a couple more things:

1. Add your site under "Contributor to" section on your About page.

2. Make your +1s public.

3. Add links from your site to your Google+ page using the rel="author" tag. (This completes the circle so Google knows you are contributor to your site, and that your site verifies you as the author).

I wrote a short guide about setting up authorship, though you'll doubtless find many more on the web.

I would also advise you to add a bit more content to your page - images and info about yourself - then publish a few posts and start circling people you find interesting.

Good luck

Mark

also, Google will sometimes replace a homepage title that is full of keywords with the brand name. This is usually fixed when you put your brand name back into the homepage title

Since Google's Penguin update earlier this year, it is generally accepted now that links from within blog posts are more valuable than blogroll links.

This is because blogroll links and other sitewide links, such as footer links, have a higher likelihood of being paid for, or otherwise manipulated. In fact, many webmasters hit by Penguin have requested the removal of blogroll links. Links from within blog posts, on the other hand, look more natural.

There is no real distinction between links from "static pages" and links from posts. If a page has been around for a while it is likely that the page will have accrued more Page Authority than a newly-published blog post. On the other hand, a blog post has the advantage of being current, and may itself accrue authority over time.

If the press release is likely to earn links (eg bloggers treat it as the primary source) then clearly it makes sense to host it on your own site. But - and it's a big but - your site may not be crawled by the engines sufficiently quickly for the demands of today's news media. Once a story is out, it must be findable. Therefore using a PR site that gets crawled regularly makes sense. A smart workaround is to publish the release on your site and on a PR site with a link on the PR site page to the corresponding page on your site. that should ensure your page gets crawled more quickly and the engines should treat your page as the primary source. Of course all this assumes that you have some real news to announce.

Hi Christine

I've used Bluehost a couple of times for small WP sites and found it very straightforward to operate and good value. The one-click WP install makes it particularly attractive for beginners. I can't comment on security as I haven't had any issues.

My best tip: get to know the sales team. I think a lot of SEOs fail to look up from their screens and recognise they are working for a real business - and that it's the sales team that have first-hand, all-day access to your paying customers.

I've just started working for a small travel business with a sales team of three who answer phones all day from clients. I spent a session with them, explained briefly what I'm doing and asked them a slew of questions such as:

• How do people describe the products? How do they categorise types of product. This feeds directly into KW research.

• What do people ask for that isn't on the site? Great for content development ideas / usability.

• What questions do people ask about the company? For instance, if lots of people seem unsure about whether this is a real company or just a website, create a prominent "about us" section.

• At which points in the booking funnel do customers call to say they are stuck ? This is a great way of identifying usability issues. Users don't call the UX guys, they call the sales team.

It's important to remember that sales people don't give a stuff about SEO, so your first task is to explain to them that your job is to send them more leads. At this point you'll see their indifference slowly turn to interest.

Give it a try, it's incredibly valuable. Perhaps a subject for a future YouMoz post?

There is one strong benefit for companies to use press release sites: those sites are likely to get crawled and indexed by the engines much more quickly than the company's own site.

I've run my own tests of 15 PR sites over a period of several months and found that some get crawled very quickly (others don't). I like Pitch Engine for paid services and I've found the best of the free sites to be Prlog.org (if you don't mind competitors' ads on your releases).

It's often said that press releases are an outdated mode of getting out information and, in a sense that's true, because journalists and bloggers don't rely on them for stories (arguably, they never have done).

However, journalists and bloggers do rely on Google to provide news and research material. So if you put out some company news - whether or not you call it a press release - you want it to be crawled and indexed immediately.