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These are good ideas. I was thinking too small. I'm talking #RCS but still thinking about the number of Facebook likes. What you've suggested really is #RCS. Getting customers involved definitely seems like the way to go. Thank you.

Thanks for your response. The general manager is very involved with animals and rescues and adopts them or finds them homes very frequently. If local people find baby kittens in a sewer, she's the one they call. That is a good added bonus, but my main objective is to add a human element to the company. I would dare to say we're the most popular embroidered patch company in our industry and are one of the only ones putting out loads of quality content and helpful information about patches. But it's always about patches and i think it's getting a little old. There's only so much you can say about them, and it seems as though people don't care anymore. A lot of times our social counts and shares on these types of posts are in the single digits. I don't think we've acquired any links in months. Sure, patches are what we do, but whenever I do a blog post about a charity or a company we've worked with, they are always more popular. I just want to try something different, put a different spin on things, and add a human element to our business.

I'm looking to do a bit of #RCS so I thought we would sponsor an animal from the Woodstock Farm and Animal Sanctuary, which is less than a mile down the road from our business. Here's the sponsorship page. http://woodstocksanctuary.org/join/sponsor-an-animal/

I figure we can post pictures of the animal, blog about it's story and what it's up to that month, and people will find it interesting.

The real meat of this will be getting more 'likes' perhaps, or more social shares, maybe? I'm not exactly sure what to do here. Should we do something like: the person who shares/tweets our story the most will get an animal sponsorship in his /her name? Or for every new 250 likes we'll sponsor one additional animal? If we can get to 1000 Facebook likes we'll do "The Sanctuary Seven" where we'll sponsor one of each animal? (you can see that info on the page as well). I just don't feel inspired in the area of how to best implement this.

Any ideas?

We do already have 516 Facebook likes: https://www.facebook.com/StadriEmblems
Our Website: http://www.stadriemblems.com/

I'm excited to hear from all the marketing geniuses I know are members here!

As the current state of Google lies right now, I'd say no, it wouldn't hurt you. I (ashamedly) admit that up until a few days ago, I still had a page that had a long list of links from link exchanges--I know; I know--bad. But my point is, even with that in place, every algorithm update thus far has benefited us. Considering the fact that the next Penguin refresh is supposed to be major, impactful, and "jarring", I've since removed this page of links, even though it means some of those sites will find out and remove their links to us as a result. OK, I realized I've done nothing to answer your question and have just provided you with a random anecdote, so I guess my question is: why do you want to have this list of guest posts? Is it for the purpose of displaying your work so others can read it?

I do like Oleg's suggestion of noindexing the page. Then you won't even have to worry about what Google thinks of it.

Well, that could be your easy solution. Make sure they're all set not to be indexed, then you'll be able to (mostly) ensure Google won't crawl them, and they'll probably disappear from your moz crawl report as well. As far has how moz is finding them to begin with behind your login wall, sorry, I have no idea.

This may be an obvious question, but to you have those pages set to noindex?

Here's the real question: Do you WANT Google to see all these pages, or is SEOmoz crawling unnecessary pages?

Don't forget that SEOmoz shows the too many links thing as a warning rather than an error. If you need them there, that's fine. The focus should always be on the user first. Having too many links isn't necessarily going to hurt you; it's just been speculated that Google only crawls the first 50-100.

It seems as though combining the sites is your best option. If that is your long term goal, then spending countless time writing new content for one of them seems like a waste, especially if their rankings aren't suffering. However, that could change overnight, so I'd suggest to try to find a way to put combining them higher on your priority list. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but that is what I'd do if I were in your situation. I know you say it's not in your budget, but what's your budget going to look like if your site gets hit by the next Panda?

Coincidentally, today I just came across this page for the first time and I remembered your question.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

The key takeaway I picked up on:

"We constantly refine this model over time. This means your website's Domain Authority score will often fluxuate. For this reason, it's best to use Domain Authority as a competitive metric against other sites as opposed to a historic measure of your internal SEO efforts."

Do you have access to the root directory to set up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file?

OK but be careful. Read this: http://pointblankseo.com/type-of-links

In an effort to update more often, SEOmoz/OSE are crawling fewer URLs. Likely, it's not that something happened to your domain; it's the fact that fewer of your backlinks have actually been detected by Open Site Explorer.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update

FYI: My DA used to be 45 and now it's 41. I noticed that was because OSE wasn't detecting some of my backlinks that I know are still there. My advice would be not to worry too much, especially if your rankings haven't be affected.

Thanks for expanding on that!

a) There are no pages in these folders; they're just directories full of Wordpress config stuff

b) I already have Yoast and have tag pages noindexed. All the directories I'm referring to are similar to the path I showed above.

c) If I request removal of specific folders, will it also remove all the files within the folder?\

Thanks!

Not necessarily. Remember, Page Rank is about pages, not websites. If  those inner pages have little or no authority links pointing to them, the only factor that would give them a boost (besides good onpage SEO) is if your homepage is of high authority and it links to all those pages , thereby passing along some if its page rank. Still, this only helps just so much; therefore, it's not all that surprising they aren't ranking.

I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as:

Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins

Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those?

Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)

It depends on whether or not your other pages are in the top 50 for any of those terms. It's as simple as that. Have you checked?

I think you have to show us what you're talking about.

While the SEOmoz industry survey states that the majority of us are in-house, it seems that the individuals who work for agencies and the entrepreneurs are the most active in this community, especially as far as blog posts go. I was shocked to learn the real ratio.

I'm in-house, by the way.

It's hard to say whether they'd be bad links, but I can say with some confidence they'd be useless links. It seems the research and reading you've been doing about link building may be a bit outdated.

Give this blog post a look:
http://pointblankseo.com/type-of-links

And this post has become an invaluable resource:
http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies