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In my experience, links take precedence over content. Mediocre content on a high domain authority site is going to outrank excellent content on a site with no links or poor links.
This is a completely separate issue than Penguin, which is an algorithm that mainly penalizes sites that are actively trying to manipulate rankings with poor links.
Are the comments really slowing the site down that much? If possible, it would be best to load all the comments at once, then toggle display via javascript.
With Penguin, you want to keep keyword anchor text links to below 30-40% of your total link profile, or you might get hit with an unnatural link warning. Directory links are still fine, as long as you use them in moderation.
In general, the stronger your link profile, the more tolerance Google will have for spammy links. Every large site is going to end up with thousands of spammy links pointing to them, through no fault of their own. The question is whether you have enough authoritative links to counteract these negative links.
I'm seeing the same thing too... could be a problem with their broad match thinking that link building is somehow related to auto insurance. Or maybe SEOs don't know how to drive, LOL!
I think it's a good idea, and would be good social proof. Reciprocal linking is only a problem if Google thinks you are just exchanging links to manipulate your PageRank, which obviously isn't the case with news mentions.
If you absolutely don't want to link to them, at least create some testimonials using choice quotes from the news mentions. Or even better, create an image with the label "Featured On" or "As Seen On" and include the logos of all the places you've been featured.
Links from manufacturers is fine. You want them to link to you, those are good links.
Links from sister is a little trickier, but it's pretty standard practice to link to sister sites from the sidebar or footer. If you're worried about Penguin, you can keep the link to just the homepage or about page.
It really depends on what industry you are in, and what writers/news sources you are targeting.
For local news sites, it's often best to get the contact info for their tips/new submissions, and submit your tailored press release to them directly. Meeting the journalists in person will also increase your chances of them considering your news item.
Same with bloggers. Find the bloggers you're interested in, learn about what kind of content they tend to cover, and send them releases that are presented in a way that's easy for them to digest. Many times content hungry bloggers will just copy and paste your press release entirely if it's written well enough.
I would also recommend the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying" for some good advice on how to get blog/news coverage:
It depends on what you mean by "link building".
If you're talking about going out and submitting your site to directories, commenting on blogs & forums, getting profile links, or otherwise manually "building" links in any shape or form, that is probably not the best use of your time (although some of those tactics can still work in moderation).
But there are still plenty of high value link building tactics. Having good content is great, but it won't do anything for your if people don't know about it. Putting that content in front of key bloggers & influencers in order to drive traffic and links is link building, and very much relevant. Forming partnerships with other top sites in your niche and linking to each other is good link building. Guest posting on high authority sites is good link building. Sending targeted press releases to journalists to get news mentions is good link building.
You're right that quality beats quantity when it comes to links, but you still need some kind of strategy to go about acquiring those high value links that goes beyond "building additional great pages". That's link building.
Yes, I would go for the link. Since this is a product review, getting a relevant anchor text link is totally appropriate, but be sure to mix things up when approaching other sites to avoid being hit by Penguin.
When evaluating a link, don't worry too much about domain authority. Having a high domain authority is nice, but just because you have high domain authority doesn't mean you'll rank for your desired keywords, and just because a site has a high domain authority doesn't mean the link is valuable.
Here are some of the factors Google looks at when determining the value of a link:
If a site meets a number of the criteria above, it's generally a good site to get a link from.
The Penguin update just targets low quality/spammy links, so unless these sites were engaging in shady link tactics they likely won't be affected.
There are no easy fixes here. Here are a few things that are common practice among etailers to reduce duplicate content:
Like I said, there are no quick fixes for unique content. You either have to re-write the descriptions, add your own unique content, or both.
I don't know of any quick resources for evaluating directories, but here are some of the things I would look for:
In the case of site-sift.com, it has a PR of 0, so it's going to be pretty useless from an SEO perspective.
Looks pretty good to me. Some other areas of optimization could include:
But like you said, links are the main signal when it comes to search rankings, so focus on building some high authority links.
Given people's short attention spans, I would recommend breaking the article up into a series of smaller articles such as recipes, models, cleaning, etc. That will improve the relevance of each of the articles for those keywords as well, and give you multiple pieces of content to promote via social media and other channels.
Then create a main "hub" page (the "Complete Guide") that links out to each of these articles, as well as to your actual product page. Drive links to both the content hub and to the individual articles.
Paid links are a tricky area, and there are a lot of loopholes.
If a company is straight up selling you a link for money, just to manipulate Google's rankings, then that's a definite no-no.
However, if you are paying for a service Martindale-Hubbard that also happens to include a link, that could be seen as ok. Many directories also get around this by charging you a "review fee" and not guaranteeing inclusion, therefore making the payment about the service rather than the actual link.
A good rule of thumb when evaluating links is to ask yourself "Would I still want this link, even if it had no impact on Google?" if the answer is yes, then it's probably a good link. Also, evaluate the site to make sure it is high quality and in Google's graces, i.e. does it have pagerank, are its pages indexed, do they link to spammy sites or only quality ones, etc.
Most of it reads fine to me, but the line "working together to provide San Francisco video production services that are truly inspired. "video production services in San Francisco" would be more natural. Google is getting smarter at understanding the meaning of content, so it's not necessary to constantly repeat your keywords over and over again in an unnatural way in your content.
As a design suggestion, I would recommend adding your contact info as well as your social media icons to the footer as well as the header. Unless people immediately know they want to contact you or follow you, they are going to consume your content first, then look for contact info. It's easier for them if that's conveniently in the footer rather than them having to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page.
I would personally go with Option 1. The purpose of 301 redirects is to say that a piece of content has permanently moved from one location to another. Therefore the content on the old location should point to the content on the new location, not the homepage.
Google will often not pass link equity if the new page is completely different from the original, which is why redirecting a bunch of domains to a new site isn't going to pass all their link equity to the new site. Like you pointed out, you will also dilute the value of the keyword relevancy.
It's also bad from a user perspective-- if you have a lot of links going to your co-brand, and people are clicking on those links, having them taken to your homepage is a poor user experience, and can result in increased bounce rate. If those visitors are getting to your co-brand through search, it could even be a negative signal for the search engines.
301s should be directed at content that's as similar as possible to the original content, that's the general rule.
Make sure you have the canonical tag in the header of all your pages. It helps Google tell what is the original source of a page:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Also, check in webmaster tools to see if your site has a manual penalty, being penalized can cause other sites to show up higher than you in the SERPs for your content.
As long as the content from the books isn't available anywhere else, then you can definitely get more search traffic to your site by posting that unique content.
Whether you want to convert your books to HTML format depends on how much resources you have. My feeling is that having snippets or summaries of the books online in a blog format would work best, since most web searchers aren't looking to read an entire book when they search for content online. A snippet of the chapters along with a link to purchase the book could both increase search traffic and drive book sales.
If they don't have a physical address, they're not going to show up in Local Search (Craigslist/Angies List don't either).
Your best bet is to follow standard SEO practices and build good links & content. Create pages your site focused around each of the cities you are targeting, and make sure city name & zip code are in the URL, title, etc. Same thing for the individual business listings.
For on-page optimization, you can copy a lot of things Angies List is doing as far as SEO. For backlinks, get links from relevant local sites like local businesses, government websites, business associations, local news, etc.