Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am starting a Google doc today, and will start populating directory links with information.  Anyone that wants to help put the new list together, shoot me a personal message from my profile here and i will share the doc with you!

I will probably start a new Q&A post specifically for this so we can collaborate and have a dedicated section- so keep your eyes out and join the discussion.

Welcome to the tough world of link building.  Here are some specific insights from my end:

1. I typically see about 1 response to every 15 - 20 requests.  If its a straight-up one way link request, its much worse.  More like 1 response in 50 requests.

2.  For blogging specifically, I have seen success in two ways: blog rolls and sponsored content.  Social/blogs are a bit different than websites.  Interlinking is viewed a little better, so I love to include the other blog first in my own "blog roll", then reach out to them, let them know "you added them to your blog, you like what they have and are following them.  Would they include your blog too on their roll".  then throw out a useful comment or two on their blog, and usually the combination of those two things gets you a link.

I will also sometime ask relevant blogs to "sponsor a post" for them.  Basically, write a nice article or post, and pay them $50 to post it on their site. You just say you want to get the word out to "their audience", and $50 is not bad for little effort on their end.  Of course your link is in the post

hope that helps.

Miriam-

I think you are assuming that I want to game the system, which is not the case.  There are plenty of scenarios where securing a local address in a partnership with someone would be a great idea.  i liked your post by the way, but in my case it actually strengthens the purpose:

I will have a local listing that does not accept customers at the location- hide the address and partner with a trusted source in areas that I do service.  This is a perfectly legit plan, but need help executing.

I second this opinion.  folders are the best way to go here.

Technically this just creates a link farm, of which the search engines can easily draw the connections.  They know that you, linking to them, and them linking to these other sites are all connected.  Give them 6 months and they will have all the lines drawn between your dots

Not the best long term strategy.... but I also know that this still works in the real world (so I've heard.....:)  Short term you can get some valuable link juice there, and will probably see some benefits.  But know that you could get smacked down one day.

Should have been more clear- usually for straight link building its 1 successful link response in 50 requests.  For bloggers its much better, usually about 1 successul link response in every 15 - 20 requests.

Another great secret for link building on regular websites (sometimes blogs as well) is to pay for a "text ad" on their site if i see that they have stuff like that on their site already.  They will come back with some sort of advertising rate (should be pretty cheap for small websites) and you should agree to "try it out".  Pay the advertising rate, they put your link up, and half the time they forget about renewing.  The other half try to renew, and usually at that point i tell them that they arent sending me enough traffic to justify paying an advertising rate, but i will give them $100 to just leave my link up on their site.  Works well.

Good question.  You are in a unique position of starting from scratch and expanding, but the SEO and branding principles would remain the same in my opinion:

1. Do not 301 or rel=canonical anything.  Your homepage is your brand identity not only to consumers but to search engines as well. If you start doing funky things like redirects or other markup to "point" google in a direction to maintain some sort of rankings, you will regret it moving forward as your company grows.  Its harder to go back and fix those type of permanent decisions.
2. Don't worry about the homepage rankings for product 1 vs. product page.  Just make sure your site is flat enough that your main product pages live off of the homepage/root from and information architecture standpoint, the homepage will carry enough authority to carry the product 1 page and maintain its rankings. Google is smart enough now that putting that product one level deep will not change much.  Internally link to it properly, mark it up, utilize breadcrumbs and eventually the homepage ranking for those specific keywords will move over to the product page and your rankings shouldn't see a dip.  I have done this a handful of times without negative consequences.

The sooner you move it, the better and let it start sitting with the search engines.  You will be fine.

Joe is right.  Its a volume/popularity game at that point.  If its a hot topic, with lots of different views going on, Youtube and Google will do different things with the content.  I have also noticed that these videos will get on the first 3 results in google (they get promoted above other content).

All you can do (as far as I know) is set up your own custom page on youtube.

Domain authority can have a big influence on page authority.  Its not a direct correlation, because page authority depends on a lot of different inputs on a page level (internal links, external links, information architecture, perceived value).  But just because a site have good DA doesn't mean that all internal pages get a nice PA.

Depending on the value of those three backlinks, three could be all you need to boost a PA.

There isnt a perfect ratio, but for larger sites it is very important to get a large number of backlinks to internal pages.  It helps with the overall "Domain Authority".  If your site is structured well, then the "seo sculpting" internally will help boost the homepage.  You should make sure to utilize internal links back to the homepage or important high-level pages.

For instance, lets say you have 10 backlinks.  If they all go to your homepage, your homepage could have a nice SEO value with a pagerank of 5.  But your interior pages dont have much pagerank or seo value, and therefor the rest of your site doesnt get ranked well.

In contrast, lets say 8 out of the 10 links go to internal pages, and those internal pages all have a small pagerank, and those pages all link back to your homepage with important keywords, it will pass a bunch of that seo value up to your homepage at the same time of increasing the value of your internal pages.  Its a better way to get your whole site ranking, rather than just homepage.

Go to MarketingExperiments.com.  They are the sister company/research arm of Marketing Sherpa.  I have been in the industry for a long time and they are the best conversion/landing page optimization firm around.

You can browse through their library of webinars (100's of them) where they present case studies, tests and results every month from random conversion optimization projects.  You can learn a ton by watching their webinars.

Russ is right on.  you need to ping.  I would also do a bit of marketing to get the blog seen in the blogosphere:

1. Manually submit your blog to google blog search.  http://blogsearch.google.com/ping.  Also submit to technorati and other blog directories.

2. Make sure you have an RSS or Atom feed service.

3. Get on a couple of blog rolls.  This doesn have to be "high PR" type of link building, just some incoming links to help google index and identify your blog.

4. Blog Sitemap to Webmaster Tools.  This will also assist in the process.

I agree that is is a great opportunity.  A directory of sorts would be a great resource to have.  Many professional industries have their own directories (not just a general web directory).  Then you can solicit others to create listings, etc..

Its not a bad idea in the robots.txt, but unless you are 100% confidant that you wont block something that you really want, i would consider just handling unwanted parameters and pages through the new Google Webmaster url handling toolset.   that way you have more control over which ones do and dont get blocked.

Agree with Bill.  The link is still valuable.  Google has said (warned) over the last year or so that they are looking hard at link profiles, anchor text and other things to indicate link quality.  I think they are trying to really dig down and get a "natural link profile" together for websites.  A natural profile will have a good variety of keywords, brand name, website domain name and other stuff (like "click here").

The true value there is the domain authority that cosmopolitan is passing through to you.  Dont be too concerned with the anchor text.

Brent is right on the "directly not passing juice".  however, I think that Google is starting to look at link profiles in a holistic sense now, and having a good mix of nofollow links helps keep a profile natural looking, and I would argue that they do take it into account.

Dont go out and grab tons of them, but for sure sprinkle them in as part of your effort.

You would treat your sub category page the same as any other content page in this case.  SO with schema you would combine a couple of their example schemas.  I havent done it yet for sub-categories, but i was planning on using elements from both:

http://schema.org/SearchResultsPage  and http://schema.org/CollectionPage

The nice part about schema it that you dont need to lock yourself into one of their pre-defined categories, moreso than it is the combination of tags together that interpret the page.

I also think it needs to be more like the first example.  The SE are trying to move towards a more natural language recognition, and i would write in that manner.  Remember too that you can utilize punctuation to split keywords up.  For example:

"Many buyers prefer plastic widgets or paper widgets. Steel and brass widget are increasingly popular..."  This would still hit all the keywords without seeming too spammy.  Notice that the period here grammatically give a break to your content, but google will see the "widgets. Steel" together sometime, ignore the period and recognize it as "widgets steel", and then interpret that as the same as "steel widgets".

Just another small copy writing trick.

Have you verified the impressions served and average position via your Webmaster Tools account?  That would be the most reliable source.  You can see your own organic CTR there for those keyterms, and if its a main keyword, should trigger.

I would say Google either over estimated the search volume (which they do all the time with their stupid tool), or you have a really poor CTR even though you show up high in SERPs.

Yes, the best way is to handle via webmaster tools, and not try to handle via code on the sites.  In your Google webmaster tools account, go to "Site Cinfiguration" and "URL Parameters".  It will show you a handful of dynamic urls it has detected, how it is handling them currently.  Then you can manually add a dynamic parameter that exists on your site and tell google how to handle it.  They have a bunch of new options/features with this tool that makes it really useful now.