Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree with Aaron here. Both elements are important. If there were quite a few more social shares then it would be easier to ignore the lack of links. Do a test for a couple months - rather than posting weekly, post every other week and make the content more substantial - longer form text, lots of good formatting like h2/h3s, bullets, photos, etc. Target a higher value term. Also consider running a small Facebook ad ($15-25) or Twitter/LinkedIn featuring that post, and targeting it towards the exact type of demographics you want to see it. I think you'll get a lot better return from this type of approach.

Awesome. Thanks so much for the help Rand and Lesley.

Are we talking "acupuncture" vs "acupuncturist", or are we talking "truck for sale" vs "pickup for sale"? More context along those lines would help in answering the question. In both situations you'll need to approach it based upon the keyword difficulty combined with a manual assessment of what's going on in the actual search results. If you search for "pickup for sale" and there are results showing for "trucks for sale", then you can be more liberal with your use of synonyms on the same page.

I haven't seen much in the way of data on this. As @ReferralCandy said, I believe that at least some of the comments are indexed and they may count as page content, but I don't think the association with Facebook gives you any particular boost. More likely, the gain would be from crossing your blog community with the Facebook community and possibly increasing your engagement and secondary social signals. I have mixed feelings about the Facebook commenting platform, but most of that's around ownership, not SEO. Seems like some fairly large sites are using it.

That's a good point. The two-way street prevents people from faking the authorship of pages on your site. Thanks! The only issue is whether the expert would want to say they are a contributor to our site if they only have contributed one page (the interview). It may help to suggest that it would give them more authority in their subject area from Google's point of view.

I think the valuable from the release is 100% dependent on the quality of the news / material. If the release is shared and one high end media company picks it up, it's possible that their copy of the content trumps all other publications including the original release itself. When this happens, then the value can of course be significant link-wise. However, its best to focus on releases as a tool in the toolbox with a specific marketing purpose as opposed to link building.

The fact of the matter is that no one fully knows the 250+ signals in the google algorithm or how the 500+ changes a year to the algo affects things. If the press release links are passing any link equity and you decide to disavow them, you're only hurting yourself. Any amount of positive link equity is better than purposely choosing to get nothing from it. If your site, your traffic, your rankings, and other metrics haven't been hurt by the press releases then why disavow them?

Hi Project Labs, In order to better understand the scenario, we would want to know if they received a link warning within Google Webmaster Tool, or just "assessed" themselves as having penalty due to steep ranking drops. The easiest way to answer this is to comment on your points: Over 2,500 linking domains. It is very difficult for even medium size businesses to achieve 2500 unique links, so this number might have raised a flag from Google in their niche - especially if it deviated outside of the aggregate "norm" for this niche / keyword set. Dozens of high quality linking domains like Huffington Post and Mashable. This helps authority, but quickly can be trumped by negative factors.... Some off topic guest post links, e.g. on a SEO site. I would recommend they contact these webmasters and have these ones removed. Guest post anchor text was usually their site name which is an exact match domain. EMD is a more difficult issue now, since EMDs by default do not rank as well. Because people like to link to the site by name, sometimes the exact match can be a serious problem. Is this website owned by a business that has a unique name? Example - Cheesepizza.com - owned by Cheesy Pizza Dynasty. If this is the case, the owner should switch to using the unique brand name. In some cases there is value in creating a unique name, and building business brand signals if they do not currently have this. Lots of top 100 resource pages that received good organic links. Excellent, they would want to check for relevancy, co-citation (shared links to other websites and their main topics) Infographics with links using their domain name as the anchor text. I would remove those EMD anchor texts and move to url only, or Alloneword.com OR the second brand / business option. Relatively few spammy links according to Open Site Explorer. Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized? Anything engineered will be, or has been penalized, or demoted, and I wouldn't expect this to change. Internal links and other areas of SEO / trust signals aside, I would recommend studying the top 20 in this niche and thoroughly analyze their backlinks: 1. Rate of build 2. Exact match vs Commercialized anchors vs brand vs branded vs other? 3. Percentage of 'engineered' links vs natural, editorial. 4. Union of links competitors share in top 5 positions in Google. Hope this helps!

Actually, it is well documented that it does pass link juice similar to a 301 redirect. You can't 301 redirect Blogspot blogs because you don't have access to the server files.

Hello there, Just to be clear are you calculating 'total links for every linking domain' as follows - total links divided by linking root domains? EG if you had 1000 links from 10 linking root domains you'd have an average of 100 links from each domain. If so, I'd say that figure might indicate that you have quite a lot of sitewide links from domains. Now this in and of itself might not be a problem, however if those links are from sites which are off topic or low quality and/or those links look like paid links they may cause you problems in the future. I'd definitely advocate taking a look at the link profiles of other site which rank well in your niche to see if your link profile looks anomalous by comparison. I hope this helps, Hannah

I completely agree with Martijn and Takeshi in that whether or not you should make unique pages for each question depends on how in-depth the answers are. I'd like to add that whether you  create a single Q&A page or an overview page, you can easily mitigate the usability issue by using anchor tags. List all the questions at the top of the page and then break out the individual questions and answers(or questions and excerpts of answers) below the list. Link each question at the top of the page to the corresponding question and answer further down the page using same-page anchor tags. This will minimize the amount of scrolling required to navigate the page. You can also place same-page anchor tags periodically down the page that jump back to the top of the page. This FAQ page about CrossFit is an example of using same-page anchor tags both ways: http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/faq.html. Hope that helps, and best of luck!

Yes most likely. Really depends on the keyword though. For example - I work for a SaaS company. Instead of targeting the term "cloud computing," we target more specific keywords with high search volumes. While obviously "cloud computing" is searched for more frequently, the fact is that Google isn't putting many commercial sites on page 1 there for good reason: People Googling that term aren't looking for services, they're looking to learn what the term means/is. I'd imagine that this applies to what you're discussing. Most likely Google is keeping enterprise companies off of their just based on the fact that that isn't what the users searching that keyword are looking for.. They're most likely looking for broader knowledge. Good luck!

I agree with Takeshi. As long as you write for authoritative sites then you can only increase your own authority. If and when Google decides to launch Author/Agent Rank then you would have written a lot of good content on a lot of different authoritative websites. This is definitely a good thing. Don't worry about the long contributor list. Would you think any less of a book writer who has written dozens of books?

I do this in the homeschooling niche.  The only precaution I take is to allow them to write whatever they want, and to not specify the anchor text they use when they link to me.  That way the links look natural, and they're lower risk for triggering any over-optimization penalties. Not that a search engine can read intent (yet), but I don't do this for rankings; I do this for the traffic that comes from the post.  Since we're an education site, and lots of homeschoolers write about us anyway, so the relevancy of our site to the blog is high.  Also, a few sponsored posts don't look unnatural when there are also many natural posts and links about. These blogs often have other sponsored posts and reviews, and a lot of them also do giveaways that I've participated in.  I haven't had any issues myself <knock on="" wood="">.  However, you never know when there could be another animal being released from the Google zoo!</knock>

I think worth domain thing that most people are already doing in the ethical SEO sphere is to write for other quality SEO blogs with the author tag.

Hey There! Just making sure you're all set with this? Some additional resources that might help (courtesy of Rand); Perfecting On Page Optimization - please keep in mind this resource is getting quite old. But it shows the classic SEO process of targeting a keyword. If the keyword you are trying to out beat your competitor with is at all competitive you'll really want a dedicated page for it. That post will show the traditional method for targeting a page. This flow chart (from this post) - shows a method for deciding if you need a separate page to target a keyword. I use those are good starting point guides when in your situation. -Dan

Hey Charles, A spammy link is a spammy link whether it comes from .edu sites or not. .Edu sites don't get any special considerations in the ways of spam. If the links make sense in context of the site that you are getting them from, then I wouldn't worry. However if you're getting a ton of list site links from pages that have nothing to do with your space at all, then I would worry about those especially if they are sitewides or on pages that have other clear indications of spam like adsense or too many ad blocks. -Mike

Basically, you're SOL (siht out of luck), as we said in the Navy.  There was a good discussion on this topic here some months ago here.

John and Rui have handled the technical aspects of how retargeting is really valuable, but with the number of visitors you have in the retargeting list I'm really curious what other settings you have for this campaign. How many impressions have been set per unique visitor?  How low are your bids? I would say keep them at about $1.50 CPC (not CPM) and see how things go. If you're already at this level then you may want to consider increasing your costs a little more. Yes Retargeting is going to be cheap, but please keep in mind that Click to Conversion is not the only way to track retargeting progress. Be sure to use the View-Through Conversion column as well. CTRs will always be low because that is the nature of the display network (sometimes getting a .12% CTR is as good as it gets). Other things you need to pay attention to are how old is your messaging? What is the message you are using for everyone? Do you only have one product and so is one message OK? As John mentioned in his comment - you should have multiple segmented lists from the initial retargeting list. Some people are not ready for a hard sell. Some need to be reminded that you exist first. Also, what pages are you using for your retargeting code? This will also have a significant impact in how you see returns come in. (Hint: start with Confirmation or Thank You pages first, then slowly build out from there and segment the lists accordingly)

You've received some great responses, Project#Labs! Do they answer your question?