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Here's some free ones we've used before;

www.prlog.org

www.onlineprnews.com

www.ukpressreleases.co.uk

www.free-press-release.com

bignews.biz

pr-inside.com

pressbox.co.uk

Was it any of them?

It's probably not a good idea to do this sort of thing. Google can check place pages and descriptions and if you abuse the system, you'll get shot down

We sometimes use PRWeb for any company news or press releases and they're generally pretty good. They then submit to Yahoo News, Google News, etc.

Although it's a paid service (although not that expensive) We achieved the most visits and clicks through them than using any others.

There's a lot of other sites and PR sites about that do it for free, such as freepressreleases.com (I think), so you might want to look them up.

Activitysuper - Are you able to give us the URL of the page in question and the term?

Generally new sites bounce all over the place in the rankings for a couple of months at least before settling down to a position, but omitted results could be for numerous reasons.

It took 2 weeks for us a few months ago, but we were simply told that the site did not have a penalty.

We made some changes both internally and created some better links and we were back up the rankings,

Just got the crawl report back and strangely that site is 302ing the Mozbot on some sections of the site to elsewhere, but when you navigate by browser, no redirection at all.

I smell something fishy afoot

302 re-directs are a temporary solution. If the re-directs are permanent then change them to 301s

Thanks Tim. Rather you than me with your Cold Fusion solution!

We've got several blogs running by themselves and embedded in other sites at the moment, but they're all done on word-press for convenience and time.

I suppose I'm looking for something that combines functionality with speed and generally good SEO functionality and tools. I think Drupal a bit heavy for our requirements, but I'm getting the sense from you also that Wordpress is still the way forward, so I'm happy with that.

It looks like when archive.org tried to crawl that site the crawl bot met a 302 error, which is a temporary re-direct which was either enforced just on the crawl bot or on the site on whole at that time.

It's strange, the site seems to just be carrying the same Page Rank as the site it was re-directing to which is http://www.withcauses.org/. So my guess is either that it's a coincidence and what Ryan says carries for this site as well or some method of re-directing the crawl-bot was instigated which meant the page rank was retained by the 4causes.org page or something else fishy is going on.

Browsing the site posing as a googlebot doesn't make much difference, but i'm intrigued so I've asked the Mozbot to crawl it to see what results are returned.

Whether the PR is valid or not, who knows. As Ryan correctly says, the PR indicator can't be fully trusted and although PR is calculated on pretty much a daily basis, it's only updated to the toolbar cache every 4-6 months (and this isn't always accurate).

Ryan - Nice, I'll give Joomla a look in

Thanks

I've always used Wordpress without really giving it much thought, but I'm open to trying out a different platform for a new blog.

Can anyone give me some advantages or reasons to move to a different platform?

Thanks!

Umit - very good question!

Either it's magic or it's got some awesome links from domains that only google seem to have crawled!

The brand/site in question is a very straight forward loan site and at the moment there's not much reason for people to want to go on the site for content purposes. It's more they need a loan and that's all they care about.

The content part is something we're working on for this site, but at the moment, it's hard to get twitter followers via this route.

I was more looking to get twitter followers first who could then be driven to the new content to generate traffic and then re-tweets... reverse logic

Storitz - nice, I've never heard of it, but it looks good.

Thanks for the response

Yeah MozRank to PageRank is a reasonable measure to use. MozRank should usually be about the same as PageRank, so if PageRank is a lot lower, you can infer that Google have applied an penalty to that site and reduced it's page rank.

Because page rank isn't updated often, there are times when it's not always accurate, but usually it's a good indicator.

Tommy,

I saw that and it's good, but it doesn't really tell you how to go from 0 followers to a sizeable number. It's more based on the fact you've already got a base of followers.

Say we had a toilet cleaning firm. Where would you find suitable followers for that without harassing people

Maybe I'm looking for something (Although preferably not) with a bit of a darker hat on...

.com is such a broadly accepted TLD that I find it hard to believe anyone in the UK would question it's not a UK site.

As long as the content looks UK focussed then you're fine. If you slap an American flag in the corner then that might cause a problem

Think of all the huge UK brands that have .com sites... moneysupermarket.com, moonpig.com, etc, etc. It's just as normal to have a .com in the UK as it is to have a .co.uk

What does the forum think the best way to get Twitter Followers is?

I'm talking from the perspective from a fairly unknown brand where there's no obvious reason for someone to follow.

Generally link building from directories and the like can still have a positive effect as long as you don't let the link profile of the site get too spammy. A link profile filled with just spammy links is bound to raise google's eyebrows and you may find your site being devalued because of it.

If I'm building links I tend to look out for the following;

1. If the MozRank of a site is 1.5+ points higher than the page rank, then there's probably something fishy going on and you may want to avoid getting a link from that source

2. If the site has many, many links coming in, but only from a small amount of domains then again, probably something fishy there, which google could easily pick up on.

3. Gut instinct. If the site looks spammy as hell and has a rubbish human editing approach then you may well want to avoid it.

Remember there are plenty of decent directories about such as Yahoo! directory and Best of the Web.

Also, you're less likely to create bad links if you find directories and blogs that are relevant to your site. So if you find household directories or money saving sites, then google will have less reason to devalue the links.

Lastly, check out SEOMoz's beginners guide http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo - Don't let the 'beginners' part put you off, there's some great up to date tips and links in there that will help any SEO.

Have you tried this;

http://www.check-seo.com/InternalPagerankChecker.php

I haven't used it myself, so can't offer feedback on it, but it looks like it serves the purpose.