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Agreed, I'd approach this as a custom acquisition and brand awareness project as well. Especially given that the website would have a short life span and SEO is a long term investment.

If this was me I'd optimize the website for the competition name and use social networking to build awareness (ie. facebook, twitter, pinterest etc).

There is no SEO benefit in using meta keywords, however if you do use them and are keyword spamming (i.e. using more than 2-3 page specific terms) then you could be penalized.

I always recommend removing the tag completely from the website as it stops the client from spamming the tag at a later date and it reduces the amount of 'useless' code in the source code (Google likes a website that loads quickly!)

Completely agree with Eric. You need to get creative in how you approach your content. This website will help you locate blogs you can post on http://myblogguest.com/

Are the websites that link to your website thematically in-line with your website? It's good to get links that are related to your topic.

Hi Instvan,

What other things can it depend on?

Provided that we submit with all of the correct information (as per guidelines) and there is an editor on the category what else can make the approval take longer?

Much thanks,
Davinia

Seems like a bit of a stretch that there would be a negative impact, but if you are concerned why not create child accounts (individual accounts for client websites) and just link them to a master account (i.e. your business account). That way you can still access them all from one login (after you set up the child accounts).

My thoughts as well, just needed to double check! Thank you.

Great thank you.

Hi everyone,

What's everyone's thoughts on Dublin Core Metadata. These aren't tags I have come across before but a client site is using them. After doing some reading I am leaning towards removing them but would be very interested in the communities thoughts on these.

Much thanks,
Davinia

I use hypens so that Google can recognise the keywords.

I haven't used them but any company listed on that page has made high-quality, public contribution to the community (i.e. you have to be good at what you do, giving and I'd imagine ethical to be listed on that page), so they should be good.

You can use the player location or content location - you don't have to use both.

You are using all required fields in your sitemap so that's good.

The issue could be that your robots.txt file is blocking access, could be something like blocking access to image folder where the sitemap points thumbnails to... etc.
Can you provide your robots.txt information? Or private message it to me?

Ghostery - every time you go to a website it pops up a small box that lists all the tracking tools.

http://www.ghostery.com

It the page has already been indexed and you block via robots.txt file what you will most likely see in SERPs is a listing with no meta description (so just one line). I do believe that ranking placements will drop. If you want to remove from SERPs completely you need to use the noindex tag.

I would block by robots.txt file now while you work out how to add the noindex tag.

With the information provided it doesn't appear to be a fair exchange and the SEO benefit to you, I'm imagine, would be minimal.

Branding benefits and network opportunities are limited to a footer link - who's going to find that? How will it grab peoples attention? Why don't you have a whole page about your business with a paragraph of text, links and images - this would be better than a footer link (for SEO) and better branding and networking. Make sure that the page isn't an orphaned page (i.e. needs to be linked from main navigation or a high level page).

Check out http://myblogguest.com/ - it's a forum where you can request content (for free) by category and people will send you posts. I've used it a little and find it to be an overly good community.

Alternatively you could try www.odesk.com which is a website where you pay for resource (people bid on your job so it's a cheap alternative). I've had good and bad resource from there so when hiring just be sure to ask for a sample of their writing first.

No doubt the left hand real estate will be used for Google's benefit, time will tell if it's for paid search or for semantic results (which keeps a user on Google longer rather than them heading off to another website for information).

The more content above the fold would most likely affect CTR of the top three ads, but if it's more ads then perhaps it will also make the first page ads more accessible for high cost keywords for clients with medium to low budgets.

It hasn't been rolled out in New Zealand yet.... but I'm sure it's coming!

I believe that all links are seen as 'leakage' but by having a nofollow it shows that you aren't trying to spam or sell links for the sole purpose of link building.

Nofollow seems like a good option for you.

While link building I have come across a website that will only dofollow paid links and nofollow unpaid links, when i questioned them (just for my own information) they said it was to give more benefit to the paid links over non-paid but they wanted to keep the non-paid because they offer value to the website visitor.

Why don't you private message me the keywords and I'll run them as well, see what search volumes I get.