Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This is not "exactly" how google sees your page, but I find the Search Spider Emulator in this tool for Firefox - super easy to read and use

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxy-seo-tool/

It has a lot of other stuff too, that overlaps a lot of other tools.  I use it just for the Search Spider Eumulator part.

You can go viral there, according to Colby.

I am pretty new to SEO (or at least new to being serious about it), so use my advice at your own risk.

My guess is that this stems from situations like this:

Powered by FORTUNE3 • shopping cart software or the other keyword perfect variations of it at the bottom of your customer's sites.  Would they have put that there if you didn't pre-code it into the software and charge them money to remove it?

The sites are also all unrelated.  You might think they are related because they are your customers, but is ray bans, jeep parts, car covers, and homeowners rights manuals, gun lasers, and all the other sites related to shopping cart software?  None of them has any other mention of shopping cart software on their whole site, except for the forced link.

Also, these are effectively paid links, since you put them into the software by default, and you charge people $50 to remove them.  Thinking in reverse (sort of), you are paying $50 to them to keep the link.  It's a forced, or paid link.

Think of it this way, if you offered to your customers to remove it for free, or gave them a way to do it easily and told them how (even for non-techies, like a check box in the admin panel they use for processing orders), what percentage would remove it.

I used to have a store on Big Commerce.  They did the same thing, except I could remove it in the accessible code, and it is one of the first things I did right away.  I really did not want to be forced to advertise for them.

Anyway, I am curious to see how this plays out, as I suspect you are not the only shopping cart provider with this situation.

By the way, here is another example of it, and it is sure to catch them too.  Go Daddy Spammy Link Building

To answer your question directly, I think (my opinion only) that Google would not penalize you for not having shares and comments, but in reverse, I believe they will reward you when you do get lots of shares and comments.

I do like your dragon post, I think you are getting more on the right track, it is more interesting for sure than how to save.  To improve even more, build the interaction right into the post (like what Matt is talking about).  The best thing about getting those other companies involved is that a few of them will really take off and tell people to come and vote for their patch.  I think Facebook has a polling program, but there are other ways to do it if you kept it right on your blog too.

My brother was in a submission contest something like this, and he told everybody he knew, all the time, to go vote for his item.  It was facebooked around like crazy!

Check out points 1, 3, and 4 from this post

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda

Point 1 is that where is the content, your content doesn't even start above the fold - this is my first thought.

Point 3 is that Overlapping or Redundant articles are not all going to be rewarded - I didn't read yours to know how overlapping they are, other than you said above they are "related" you might be fine here, I have to say I am not inclined to read more about these things on your articles...more than I wanted to know!

Point 4 is a high ad ratio (I am not sure if this would apply or not)

I would take these things into consideration when I look at those two pages

Good Luck!