Welcome to the Q&A Forum

"What do you check first when you get into the office?"

That I'm in the right office. Once we've got that nailed, I reckon it's going to be a good day.

As someone who has also been pecked by the Penguin Thomas, I can relate. The best advice I've read on this topic is here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/penguin-strategies/

Good luck!

Roger

After being hit by the Penguin stick, like good content marketers we are trying to focus on improving brand signals for our site. But I keep coming up against what exactly brand signals are.

I can understand that if you are called 'Ziggle' and someone links to you with that in anchor text or mentions that name, that would be a brand signal. But we're on a generic domain (descriptive of the produt type), so what would constitute brand signals in our case?

I remember that post by Rand too, and using hashtags certainly didn't hurt us.

In the post-penguin era though, I might be a little cautious about those affiliate links because if your program is of any size, you are likely to fairly quickly create an unnatural linking profile with them.

Despite (or because of) our hundreds of thousands of affiliate links, we are making them all nofollow now.

That's an interesting idea riplash, I had thought before that a search for our domain with or without the .com might be considered a brand signal - that is, rather than the search being 'keyword1 keyword2' the search is performed as 'keyword1keyword2'. It seems that if that is the case, encouraging search in offline could feed into that.