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If you're really worried about it, why not just link it to a site that has more authority.. like a social media account or an about.me profile.  Let the link juice flow that way.

It's not just about getting links to boost your rankings. Think about the potential referral traffic too. A great blog post on a site relevant to your niche can send you well qualified traffic that converts well. At the end of the day, it's not traffic the site needs - it's business. Also think about your positioning - If you visit a bunch of sites about fly fishing and see guest posts from the same person on just about every site you visit, you're going to think that they are more likely to be an authority on the subject. Just make sure the articles are good! Don't just cobble together a low value blog post just to get the link. Think about your positioning, think about the particular audience of the site and create something worth reading. If you've been offered a guest post then it's not unreasonable to ask a couple of questions about the site's visitors. What kind of thing are they looking for and how many readers of the blog are there? Even if you just get your name/brand in front of your customers, that can be a good thing. If you were given the opportunity to talk to a group of potential customers - how big would the group need to be to make it worth your while?

Quality edu links may be harder to get. But there are a ton of blogs on .edu sites with unmonitored comments. I don't think http://ask.buffalostate.edu/index.php?showuser=13006 will hold much weight in the engines, yet it's on an .edu domain.

I don't believe it will do you any good at all. The google link is better for them because they are linking to google, not to you. Google News uses a 302 redirect But there is good news and bad news too. The good news is that the link should always work The bad news is that eventually, it redirects to an internal google page with a link on it, that tells the reader you are an external site and they have to click that link to get to your story, introducing an extra click The page says: Redirect Notice The previous page is sending you to  (your link is here) If you do not want to visit that page, you can return to the previous page. <- this is a link to google (if the readers put the URL directly into their browser, it is a link to that redirect page)

Exact match on subdomains have very very low weight.  Anyone can create thousands of exact match subdomains without much effort and cost - in fact the exact match weight has been on the decline even on the root domain.

It is a simple Perl program that we wrote.   It reads the feed and writes it in our desired format to a file.  That file is then inserted into pages as a server-side include. We have that program set up to execute hourly as a server cron job. It is an easy read-write program. The category includes are written at the same time.  For each post the Perl program looks for category assignments and writes each of them to a server-side include specific for that category.

Yep! Exactly. Each root domain can link to your page/site multiple times, from multiple pages, and these are all included in the report.

Hey, So I wouldn't worry too much about the consequence of videos on page speed. The only instance it's going to cause problems is if you embed a large quality of flash content on a single page. Youtube videos wont cause much issue at all because they are typically embedded using an iframe. I wouldn't worry about filling pages with rich media too much, it's a good thing to do and wont cause load speed issues unless you have tons of enormous images and hundreds of videos on each page. Use HTML5 players or iframes rather than flash for video and ensure that your code is lean and not pulling in unnecessary files from the server. The most common contributor to page loading times is poor code, particularly badly written javascript. Cheers, Phil

I would use "brand +Broad Keyword" as anchor text and in my opinion you should be safe but seo is a art not a science so do what you feel comfortable with.

Thanks everyone for all the great information!

You can find out by utilizing Google page speed online here: https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

I have used some sources where it costs $200 per 950+ word article.... ...and they are all ranking well. Remember, quality doesn't come cheap.

You'd be surprised. Quite a few forums where I contribute allow followed links, however you cannot set the anchor text. The text of the link is your website address. Google+ allows you to have followed links from your profile to other sites, which is cool, I think it uses rel="contributor" or something.

Would you dominate your competition? My bet is "yes".

Interesting post there Brent, I would say in the case outlined there, it appears that apostrophes are not needed. Google Keyword tool does in fact return no results for the correct spelling for "boy's clothing". Other keywords I would not say that holds true. An example from my industry is an o-ring If you use Google Key Word Tool you'll see (all possible spellings) o'ring o ring o-ring oring all have the same global monthly searches which to me means they are all being treated as the same word. Now take the word o-rings If you use Google Key Word Tool (all possible spellings) o'rings o rings o-rings   are the same BUT orings   is different All this tells me is before I decide on the keyword and spelling of such keyword you should probably look it up. As for the OP question, it is very interesting and I'm sure nobody can say for sure which is correct. Here in the past we tried to optimize for both variants, but I feel this runs the risk of being potentially spammy. So, we decided to spell the word correctly, and let the search engines decide if they wish to return us on SERP's to grammatically challenged searchers. I would also urge you to look at the Google insta results, if you type in boy's clothing you get the "showing results for boys clothing" search for "boy's clothing" instead? message. Though both keywords will give you the same company as #1.

I agree with what has been said here, I do not think there is a "sweet spot" as far as number of words goes but the article needs to be long enough to give useful information. That being said it is difficult to imagine to many articles that are less than 300 words that would be of interest and use to the reader. My suggestion would be to find sites that you think give excellent useful information (maybe like seomoz) and see what the average length of their articles are, but always think what does the reader get from this article and how am I helping them.

Just an opinion... if the page is a weak PR6 or better I don't think that there will be any problem.  That should put enough spider activity into the page.

Check out our SEOmoz LinkedIn Group. People add job listings all the time, and I'm pretty good at keeping it updated.