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Using social media competitions to increase search demand for certain queries is very effective.

I was about to suggest paywithatweet.com as well. That does, however, only work if your audience are tech savvy and use twitter.

Other suggestions could be a book reception, getting it reviewed by bloggers, writing guest posts at other blogs and/or doing a webinar.

As long as there is plenty of unique content on each page, adding some redundant content is not a problem. Especially not if it will improve the experience for the users, thereby improving click behavior.

Yes I believe so. When you do a .htaccess redirect with the code pasted below, it should do both canonicalisations

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^petra.at [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.petra.at/$1 [L,R=301]

Oh by the way - there is a similar question here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/link-building-companies-for-super-hard-niches. You might want to try some of the companies.

Well the guide is still very good. However, one might add some sharing buttons for Twitter/Facebook, as these seem to be important rankingfactors nowadays.

The Rel canonical tag is always a good thing to implement. My preferred solution is to do a .htaccess 301 redirect from non-www to www by this code:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

By doing the 301, all users are sent to www url. This means all future links to your site will be to the same URL. Hereby, you avoid the small link juice loss which occurs whenever you use the rel cnonical url to direct from non-www to www (or the other way around).

my experiences are that sitelinks only show up on queries where your site is very authoritative.

Obviously this means that sitelinks are query specific, but also that the only way to get them is to keep building authority - links.

I think Rand usually makes a very good point about non-pretty URLs: That there are some lost 2nd order benefits, because people find it hard to share them / link to them.

There is a great URL rewrite guide here that should help you edit the URLs easily: http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

That blackhat is a really poor long term strategy

Hi there

There won't be any first order SEO difference. But there are some second order benefits to the hyphened URLs. As they are more readable by humans, they tend to be clicked more often in SERPs and gain more natural links.

Best,

Thomas

In my experience, there are two ways to pull off the B2B badges tactic:

1. For B2B badges to work with big brands, you probably need to be some sort of industry leader being able to give out awards that actually mean something.

2. If you are not an industry leader, you can give awards/badges to those companies not receiving a whole lot of attention usually. They tend to be used a lot.

The best example I can think of is Google's AdWords / Analytics certifications used by quite a lot of SEM agencies.

Hi,

If you want fast indexation, your best bet is to promote it via Google+, as Google obviously has direct access to that database.

Facebook and Twitter certainly doesn't hurt, but Google+ is usually faster.

I agree with Robert. The ranking difference between .com / .net and no-hyphen / one-hyphen is going to be minimal. So go for the domain that is easier to read. That will probably benefit you in the long run.

I don't attribute too much value to page-rank sculpting. It's based on such a flawed understanding of SEO - that SEO is about sending PageRank to a few but important pages that will then rank. Good SEO is about making the website easy accessible for users and crawlers. And internal linking is great for this.

Internal linking is a great way of doing SEO, whenever it's done with a user perspective in mind. I'd be thrilled to work with internal linking on news websites, as it is possible to do so much relevant inter linking.

So I guess my advice would be, that all links should be based on relevancy, not PageRank sculpting. That does NOT mean, however, that you cannot optimize the anchor text on the links, or place them strategically (e.g. links to most important pages in the top of the page; lower priority in the bottom).

Hi Rick,

I just needed the same kind of data for a book I wrote, so I know a few resources that can help you, although I'm a bit uncertain if they meet all your needs.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish (update - forgot this one - Rand usually has tona of data in his slidedecks, so if you bother clicking a lot, I'm sure you can find interesting stuff in these ones too)

Hope they can help you a little.

Best,

Thomas

I do that too! Only little problem with that is it often creates some significant bumps in link acquisition rates.

Here is a Facebook question: I would like to hide some content behind a Facebook wall - i.e. only make it visible to users who press the like button.

Something like the New Yorker did with a Jonathan Franzen story.

My question is: how do I do that?

Thanks!

Thomas

Yes, it seems like Google has penalized a bunch of sites with unnatural link profiles.

Patrick Altoft has written a good post on it yesterday: http://www.branded3.com/seo/the-new-google-link-algorithm/

And both Alan and SEOclient12 are right: Do not send reconsideration request before cleaning up.

Best of luck.

Thomas

Interesting question. I have tried several top SEO companies for link building. And none of them have really delivered anything. As Tom Critchlow usually says, the problem is "you can't outsource giving a shit."

What usually happens is this:

• You pay premium for a reputable SEO company

• They pass you on to a junior level SEO to do the link building

• They send a monthly report with all sort of on site metrics and keyword tracking you probably don't need

• They send a list of links- Turns out that the links are sidebar links from irrelevant websites (or worse) with way optimized anchor text.

Sorry about being so pessimistic on this one. But after trying multiple reputable companies, I have given up on outsourcing link building. The risk of receiving low-value-for-money or a penalty is too high for me.