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Suppose that Google made a change and all of a sudden a certain type of keyword phrase doesn't show any commercial sites on the first page of SERPs.
Have you ever had this experience? What would you do in this scenario? Would you give up on those keyword phrases and target a different keyword phrase?
Suppose you write a guest post for an authoritative site, is it beneficial to claim authorship of the article by linking to your Google Plus profile and adding the site to your account as a site you contribute to? If yes, would you do this for dozens of sites? (since your contributor list could get really long).
Google wants to keep natural results and paid results separate and does not consider SEO factors when calculating your Adwords quality score to the best of my knowledge.
They could identify if there is a higher than average number of anchor text links with specific keyword phrases. If your distribution of anchor text is very different than the average site in that niche it would be detectable.
I don't think it will hurt rankings for your other important keywords, it will just increase the number of keywords that attract traffic. Links from development sites should help your overall keyword rankings. To me, it makes sense that developers would naturally link to a site that has created a web application.
SEOMoz appears to have taken the approach you suggested with their development blog: http://devblog.seomoz.org/
Other examples:
https://developer.apple.com/news/
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/
https://developer.amazon.com/blog/index.html
You could find opportunities for local linkbuilding like blogs that cover local activities. You could offer local bloggers a press pass to check out the camp for free which would encourage them to write about their experience.
Local newspaper sites often have a local event section where they highlight local events. If the camp is held on specific days you could submit it as an event for their event calendar.
If you hold the camp at a local address you can submit the business to local business directories like Yelp or CitySearch.
You could look at non-profits in your area and donate to them to be featured on their sponsors page. You could also donate a free pass for a non-profit auction in return for a link.
You can pay to be added to the directory of your local business organization. In the U.S., this is typically a local branch of the Chamber of Commerce.
There is a similar article on SEOMoz with some good resources: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/running-giveaway-competitions-for-links-and-seo
As long as the low quality links are relatively low then I wouldn't worry about it. It is natural to have some spammy sites that link to you. Google probably ignores these sites. These spammy sites probably wouldn't respond to a link removal request anyways.
In the case of sites that are not adding the no-follow to advertisements, the most likely scenario according to Matt Cutts videos I have seen is that Google would disable or reduce that site's ability to pass Page Rank. The links therefore wouldn't help you but shouldn't hurt you either.
If you are seeking links from blogs in a niche that is known for having a lot of commercial links from reviews or sponsored posts what precautions should you take? Should you avoid any blog with sponsored posts or that reviews products?
You also need to attract/build links to your site. If other sites are covering the same topics as you are and they have higher link authority they will push you down the search results. Also make sure that the topics that you are covering are not super competitive, otherwise you have little chance of showing up on the first page of search results without building sufficient link authority. If you have the Mozbar installed, you can enable the SERP overlay and see if sites ahead of you in the SERPs have greater link authority (PA and DA).
I'm currently looking for a good social sharing plugin for wordpress. I've tried Tweet & Like in the past and it was decent. I am trying out Tweet, Like, Plusone, and Share which had a good rating.
Many people assume that .org means it is a non-profit but many people use .org TLDs for commercial purposes.
Google's Matt Cutts has said that the TLD (top level domain) doesn't affect rankings.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts on May 14, 2012:
"Sorry, but that’s just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings."
Another thing to consider is that when you move your website to a different domain, you can lose rankings and authority.
Mike Arneson has an excellent Mozinar where he shares some helpful Author Rank tactics. What specific tactics are you doing to boost the Author Rank of your site?
I like this approach and it is something we have tried recently with the goal of being the best page available on the Internet.
There is also data that suggests longer pages tend to rank better, although it isn't clear to me if this is causation or correlation.
I recommend the article "How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions" if you haven't seen it on Quicksprout. There may be some good data that you can show your client to support why you should create the long guide.
If your competitor has a page that is optimized for a keyword (title tag, URL, content) and you target the keyword halfway down a page with an H2 and a short paragraph about the keyword, are you at a strong disadvantage?
The toolbar PageRank doesn't update very frequently so if you moved your content to a new page it makes sense that you don't see any toolbar PageRank right away. It may reappear when Google makes their next update. However, the pages probably do have actual PageRank since the 301 redirect should transfer the authority from the old pages to the new pages. It just doesn't register yet for the toolbar PageRank that you can see.
When you search for the keyword in Google it will show a list of related keywords at the bottom under "Searches related to vacant land." Enter these suggestions to get more related searches until you have built a sufficient list.
You may have to look at alternatives where you can increase search visibility such as targeting keyword phrases that are not triggering local search results. Instead of focusing on popular keywords you may want to focus on longer tail keywords using Ubersuggest or Google's "Related Searches." You could answer a lot of frequently asked questions about the industry. In my experience most questions do not trigger the local search results unless they involve an element of location in the question.
I recently heard someone say that if your site is on a lot of link lists (example "Useful Links" pages) this can hurt you.
How likely is a Google penalty if your site is listed on tons of .edu link lists?
What if someone leaves your company and removes your site from their Google Plus profile (under "Contributor To"). Does that kill all the rel=author on the pages written by this former employee? (Should you use the email verification with employees to avoid this scenario? Email verification is a big hassle for us.)