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Oh!  Don't do it.

Your ebay store will then compete with you.

Also, do not link to your items on ebay from your website.   Huge mistake.  I did that with one of my sites and my site got beaten in the SERPs by multiple pages from ebay.  I took the links down and ebay pages beat us for MONTHS!   We lost lots of money. 

(If you don't care that ebay beats you in the SERPs then you might link to them... but ebay seems to get a huge huge boost for just a couple of links.)

You can link to your site from your "about us" page.  That is OK, in my opinion.

I get a few links from people who manually grab my content and repost it.  But most of the links that I get this way are from sites that I suspect are built from robots crawling the web, grabbing content and mashing it up into a website.

I would honestly don't like getting links this way because the content that they grab and republish is more valuable than the links that I get back.

If your site is less powerful than the sites that are republishing your content then they could outrank you in the search engines and then they would receive the links earned by your content.  Also, if those sites have more traffic than your site they could get links from visitors that you would prefer to see going to your own website.

I don't know the answer to your original question.... but I would be jumping to redirect anything from April 2014.

Nobody really "knows" the answer to this... but I think there is a good chance that google will continue to crawl these connections.  Even if some of them are still good.

It sounds like the Moz elearning site. 

Maybe Rand can get Moz.edu?

Lots and lots of people ask this question... but think about it....

If I answered... "Fifty links is too many.".....   and you listened.....

.... but all of the websites on the first page of Google for your keyword were naturally earning 200 per week.... you could work forever and never make first page.

You need information about relative link velocity and link quality.

It is possible that you and three other people working would never be able to create enough links.

The homepages on my sites have been influenced by what my visitors do when they land.

When each of my sites started, I didn't have much content on the site so my homepage had very few options.  Then as the sites grew I added more content options to the homepage and the persistent navigation across the top of the site and down the side became filled with links to category pages.

As I added more options to the homepage user engagement increased, and as I added still more options user engagement increased again, and again, and again.  Pretty soon, other people who have websites and strong opinions about homepages tell me I have way too much stuff on my homepage.   I can listen to them or I can listen to my visitors.   I picked the visitors.

So, what are your visitors telling you about your homepage?  Are you doing anything to learn how they behave when they land?  Crazyegg gives you the ability to see what they click.  It is easy to find out what they are clicking, what they are ignoring, what returning visitors do, what new visitors do... you can even see what visitors on mobile do and what visitors on tablets or desktops do. If you don't know what the visitor is doing you are just shooting into the dark.

You can use visitor information to move heavily engaged items to prominent positions, you can see what isn't being engaged that you want to be engaged and give it different wording or a better photo to see if that improves.  It is all about giving the visitor what he/she wants and enticing them towards what you want them to accomplish.

What's all of this have to do with your rankings?  A lot, I believe.

If you are giving the visitor what he wants that visitor is more likely to engage your site instead of bouncing, share your site, bookmark it, return to it using your domain as a navigational query or typing it into the address bar of the Chrome browser, click on it preferentially in the SERPs.   So, I think that by pleasing the visitor your site will produce signals that google is watching and that will help it rise in the SERPs as long as you have the basic page optimization and a decent navigational structure.

As for what to show the visitor on your homepage, you can send the message that "we ain't got much" or "you gotta click to find out" or "we have an enormous variety of things".    I have bet ALL of my money on the enormous variety because that has been what generated the most visitor activity.    Maybe your visitors are different from mine, just saying what I believe works on the small number of sites that receive all of my attention.

** just because previous providers  haven't delivered,...**

I know a few people would say the problem is a lack of vetting.

Thumbs up Anthony...  Valid post.  Everyone should give you thumbs up for such a generous (and accurate) assessment.

I do hand-write each one. I am a content man.   You look like a content man, yourself judging by the length and generous amount of time you put into this post.  

I agree with you that the content route isn't for everyone and that even with great content you still need traffic into it to generate links. However, I think that attracting the links can be easier than many people think.  For example... if you write a great article about science or tech it might be successful on slashdot and attract a lot of visitors and links from just a posting there.  For other topics stumbleupon, reddit, digg might work.

Or, as long as you have just a little traffic into your site, instead of spending the time to "market" just turn out another article.  I agree that links accumulate very slowly this way but they do accumulate and they are great links.  Articles might launch without much rankings at all but a year later they have reached visibility without promotional effort (as long as you do have high quality content).

I think that the concerns that you describe are valid and correctly point to my method as being slower to rank.  But at the same time it is building a more valuable site.

You have done a great job explaining your position and I agree with what you say.  I hope that you will link to this thread frequently when you think people need to see the alternative point of view.

I'll close with adding one more point in favor of your argument.... The type of content that succeeds with passive linkbuilding needs to be above and beyond what the typical author produces.  You need best-on-the-web writing with media such as great photos, data, references, and maybe some graphs.  A big investment and expensive to produce.  Most people don't have the resources or desire to produce it.  If you don't have that then this method isn't going to work at all.

Nice post.  Great debate is what makes a good forum.

Great story.

That reminds me of one...  I know of a small adsense site that went offline and the owner didn't realize.   A few months went by before they realized that the hosting was not responding.   The site was brought back online, popped back into the SERPs and resumed making money.

"If you do, then you can change the nameservers for that domain to your where your new website will be hosted once that website is ready to go live."

Crackingmedia nails it.

Get control of the nameservers - by getting exclusive access to the domain registration account. If you don't know how to do that then hire an experienced webdeveloper or SEO to do it for you.

The problem can be... that the current developer registered the domain in his name.  So you might have a legal fight to get it.

In my opinion, 301s must be held in place for a long time. You don't want to trust your current weasel to do this for you.

Take control of the domain.

If I was producing content that is a "big hit"... I would  be posting it on my own site (and nowhere else) and building links into it there.

These links could be helpful or harmful.  Google says that they don't like site-wide links, that they don't like keyword links.  You can listen to Google or take your chances.

Some info here...

http://moz.com/community/q/creating-a-scholarship-for-seo

We've spun out content from a single finance related news/analysis site (running for about 2 years) into several topic-specific sites on individual topics.  Anything to bear in mind when setting up a related 'family' of sites with linking between them?

Yes... the links between these sites will be nearly worthless.

The hard bit is that nobody on mobile devices are using sidebar and that means people visit one page and leave without exploring any additional resources.

Go to a few of your pages and find opportunities to link to your own content.

• As the hypertext that wikipedia overuses in some people's opinion.
• In little boxes that float to the left side of your mobile pages (use images and text that elicit clicks)
• As a large menu of related articles at the bottom of your page (look at the provocative images presented in the Outbrain, Taboola, and similar widgets - you don't have to be nasty or naughty like some of them - there are many other ways to earn a click)
• in a search box at the bottom of your article and invite readers to use it
• you don't need a sidebar to entice people to visit another page... just show them what you have that is relevant, what is popular, what is new, what is outrageous - depending upon your audience.
• duplicate your menu at bottom of the page

We do the same approach as Gregory.

Articles about how to do things, how to select things, comparison between products, history of products, etc.  These are substantive articles usually over 1000 words, always with several photos and maybe a video.  Time consuming to produce.

However, these article pages pull in lots of traffic and almost always outrank our ecommerce pages and category pages.

Gregory seems to be using text links to move traffic to higher value pages.  We have house ads in standard formats (300x250, 160x600, etc) to route the traffic to our sales pages.  We also run adsense on those pages.   We can tell from analytics that lots of people who make it through our shopping cart enter the site through these pages.

We use Google's DFP on these pages to compete Adsense and an ad netork against our house ads.  Our house ads are valued by determining the number of people sent to our sales pages, their conversion rate and average shopping cart value.  We also have multiple creatives running and DFP picks the one with the highest performance.

Gregory... think about putting a few eye-catching ads on these pages with value propositions.  I bet that a lot more of your visitors will convert.

Lots of people who have kickass traffic from sources outside of Google are getting that traffic from subscriptions.  If you have a blog that has, say 20,000 email and RSS subscribers and you post every day, then you could easily get x00,000 visitors per month from your subscribers.

You could also get a lot of traffic by having your blog feed posted out to your facebook and twitter accounts.  If you have a lot of friends and followers it will get passed along.

The key to getting big traffic outside of search is developing an Audience.

If your freelancers obtained "royalty free" images then they will likely have a receipt proving that they paid a fee for each image that was granted a royalty free license.  If they obtained other forms of license or permission they should have that neatly logged in a spreadsheet or in the form of email messages.  That is where I would start with this.

If you don't have any documentation then it is going to be really hard and really costly to go backwards to determine where each image came from and if proper permissions and licenses were obtained.  That might cost more than doing the work over again.  If I was in this situation, I would start over on this project.

If you are getting into the business of using the images of others then a good education in copyright, fair use, licensing, permissions, and proper documentation is essential.  In addition to you having this information and knowledge, anyone who works for you must have it because the problems of infringement will be yours and not theirs.  Lots of people run wild and rampant when collecting images for their websites or client websites.  They simply don't understand copyright law or the problem with ignorance.

Will people get in touch with you before filing a DMCA or filing a copyright infringement lawsuit?   They might or they might not.  If they think that your website is run by scofflaw organization with few assets then they will probably just file DMCAs with search engines and hosting companies.  They might also file complaints to Adsense and other income sources.  Successful DMCA and Adsense complaints will put the infringer out of business.  I make lots of these complaints against infringers and have a system in place to do them quickly and efficiently.

If your website appears to be run by a substantive company and the person who's images you infringed is a decent and patient, they might send you an informal infringement notice, give you a chance to fix it, and then file DMCA and income source complaints if you don't respond quickly.  Or, they might send you a bill for your past use of the image and a license agreement for use of the image going forward.   If you have stolen a lot of their images or you have a person who stands firmly on their intellectual property, they could go straight to a lawsuit or other legal remedy.

The owner of the images enjoys the ability to chose their methods of dealing with you.

Actually, these articles are "posts" on a wordpress blog, but I am not using category pages or monthly pages or other things that would make them look like a blog.

Instead they are linked into my website through the homepage, through category page, and every product that they are about links to these article pages.

Really there is no difference between a blog post and an article. The difference is that a blog usually integrates its content into your site in a way that is both dumb for your visitors and for SEOs.  So, use the posting ability of wordpress for its convenience, but build those pages into a website using the traditional methods that serve visitors and SEO.

a little off-topic, but relevant

A post made by link trader Maluk nearly ten years ago but still relevant today... (today you would add "nofollow" and scripted links to his complaint....

http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/warning-ref-link-partners-5513.html

To me, it makes complete SEO sense to combine multiple practice areas into a single site.  The larger site will probably become stronger over time than a small single-practice site.   And, clients who receive good service with their traffic tickets might recommend him to their friends who have DUI problems.

The only problem that you might have is client acceptance... if he is trying to help DUI clients get their charges dropped then personal injury clients might be highly offended.

It is supposed to be used on exact match duplicates.  However, I know that it works on less than exact match.  How far it can be stretched, I have no idea.

hmmm......

I don't know how carefully you have thought about this.

**I want to know how I can identify the top bloggers? **

It does not sound like you are very familiar with the bloggers in your area.  Maybe you should get to know them well before you count on them to attend something and blog about it twice.

Are there 20 bloggers in your area?   Have you ever been on their websites?

If you invite 20 bloggers will they attend?  Some might be busy on your open day... some might not like paintball... some might be too old for paintball... some might... you get the idea?

So if you identify 20 bloggers you might get 2 who will show up and that will not produce the kickass blogger gathering that you are planning.  If you invite 20 and only 2 show up they are going to write on their blog that nobody cares about your paintball and zorbing.

If you expect to get 20 bloggers you should invite at least 100 and entice them with free food, free beer, gift of paintball guns, free swag and $100 gasoline cards.

There are many ways to hide things and Google's response to them can be different.    If you want to learn if Google is viewing and indexing, then place some unique text in the hidden area and search to see if it is findable.

Also, if content is hidden, google might decrease its value in search.  We had visible content that was placed behind a hidden... Google still indexed it but it was almost worthless for pulling in longtail traffic.  We brought it back out into the open and it (after many months) returned to its former SEO value.

Are you willing to turn over your entire site to the "SEO provider"?

That is a good idea.  If I am going to do SEO on the basis of performance I will start my own website and sell the leads or dump the shopping cart to the highest bidder.  Then I get paid for everything that I kill and can move the business to Company B if Company A does not perform.  I would also then have complete view of the activity on the site and the transactions that occur there.

Just like being an affiliate or having a drop shipper - which I currently do.

1. Does having the label "guest post" devalue the links at all?

Probably not.  Why should it?  Bill Clinton might write a guest post for somebody's blog.

2. Does the fact that the sites often allow for guest posts devalue the links?

Maybe.  If they are accepting guest posts that link to trashy websites in bad neighborhoods, then YES.

I would keep the "daily deals" at MyBrandName.com/daily-deals

Registering a new domain and redirecting it will accomplish nothing.

Great generals will tell you that "divide and conquer" is a great strategy to use.  So if you post your deals on a second domain you will then have two sites splitting the value of your incoming links.  You divided yourself for the enemy!

So, posting the "deals" in a folder on your site might attract links that will benefit your entire site.

This is going to sound off topic at first... stick with it....

Two years ago you could easily get double listings by having two or more pages about the same keyword on your website.  Now those are really hard to get.

Two years ago it was easy to have a page of your site on the first SERP and another page of your site on the second SERP.   Now those are really hard to get.

Google has really cut down on the ability of one website to get two listings in the top thirty positions of the SERPs.  They have successfully increased the DOMAIN DIVERSITY of the SERPs.  (Yes there are some exceptions - but well deserved or in low competition.)

Now, it is possible that Google is trying to increase the COMPANY DIVERSITY of the SERPs.

One company having multiple websites on page one of the SERPs is not showing searchers much company diversity.  It would not surprise me if Google started making it very very difficult for the same company to have two sites competing.

I watch some websites owned by the same company and many of them have been struggling - for no good reason that I can see.  So, I am starting to think that Google has some company diversity happening.   I don't have data to publish about this, just my gut from what I have seen and I have been watching this alot.  If you link your sites together I think that this make you a real target.

Just opinions...

The first three sentences are not linkbait... they are a combination of chest thumping (we are gift-giving authorities) and  marketing (buy our F-bomb).... then some BS (we decided to visit every city in the country),

I agree with Philip.

If you place a press release on your site and also place it on a popular press release site there is a very good chance that the press release site will outrank your site in the SERPs.  Your site could also be filtered from the search results (google does not like duplicate content.)

Also, part of the Panda update was about sites that display dupe content.  If your site has a lot of dupe content it could be demoted in the SERPs across the entire domain.  In these situations duplicate content can harm you big time.

Also, the best way to inform Google that you are publishing duplicate content is to place a link in the press release to a duplicate copy on your own domain.  Google has been exterminating linked duplicates for a long time.

Finally, the best way to get your rankings lowered is to give content to other powerful websites that competes in the same SERPs as your own site.  Its not a good idea to feed your competitors and create new competitors.

I have adsense on niche sites that are on same topic as small portions of much larger sites.

I don't see any problem at all with adsense.

Do I have anything to gain by allowing these comments to stay on the page?

Probably not.... and if those links are going to bad neighborhoods you can expect your blog to tank.

running out to register FourLeggedFriendsSupplies.com

We decided to list replacement parts for some of the products that we sell.  The response has been fantastic.  About 1/3 of our transactions now include at least one replacement part.    Many people who buy replacement parts, also purchase other items.  Replacement parts are willing us new customers - mainly because competitors do not mess with them.

It was labor intensive to photograph these parts and and write descriptions for each of them with measurements and sometimes diagrams.  But looking back was well worth it.  If your competitors are not selling these parts and they are something that a typical owner might purchase once or twice during the lifetime of his item then you might get a fantastic amount of sales.   One of our manufacturers said... "We can't believe how many parts you are selling!"

Hang in there!  Keep working!

If your site has better content than theirs by a obvious margin I think that you will be gaining on them every day.

When other sites rank above you do your best to use kickass prices, free shipping, great deals, value propositions, provocative messages and free beer in your title tag to pull traffic into your site instead of into theirs.

We simply have the .pdfs on our own site and many people link to them.  We are happy to have those links and those links make these .pdf documents rank in the SERPs for important keywords (you can edit the properties of a .pdf document to produce a "title tag" that will optimized them and display in the SERPs.).

We could add a notation to our website that invites people to post them on their own website or add customized branding (still keeping the embedded links to our own site).   Or, we could contact webmasters who link to them on our site and offer the custom brand if they host the document on their own server.  That would get us some additional backlinks.

If you have been in biz for any amount of time you get returned items.  REI has a separate store for their returned items (extremely interesting article here).  So do lots of other very high end businesses.  But they frequently sell them in dedicated stores or in outlet shops.

When I have an item that was purchased and returned.  I check it out to see if it is still good, then list it on ebay as "used" - and they sell immediately.  I also just took a lot of stuff to my local Goodwill store.  It was not selling and I just wanted to "get it out of here".

I do have a "clearance" page on one of my sites, just to give deep discount on some items that I want to move - but if I get impatient they go to Goodwill.

OK... I understand now.  Thank you for repeating.

Yes, if someone removes articles from your site and copies them to another site the same problem will occur.  However, if they steal from you and you are motivated to do something about it you can file DMCA actions against them or sue them for copyright infringement.

It is much more likely that your work will be copied if you offer it for syndication.

If you have one website, you will only get one location in google places. If you have more then one website you will split your ranking efforts.

I agree with Alan.

I would be helping my partners rather than treating them as competitors.  Have you considered helping them with great content for your products? Or linking to them so people in their locality can find them more easily?

Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description...

If this information is all you got on a single page - and you have a lot of these pages - then you need to fix this or you will be hit by a Panda problem.

Since about two years ago Google has been demoting the entire site in the rankings if you have a lot of these pages.  I have pages with short content and they have been noindexed.  I am slowly writing substantive content for these (250 words to 500 words) and when that goes live I start getting long tail traffic and rank much higher than they were originally.

This is long boring work.  I have these pages prioritized by potential income and plug away at writing them a few each week.

It all depends on the quality....

... if this content is best-on-the-web then publish it only on your site but promote it everywhere

... if this content is really good then publish it only on your site, promote it there conspicuously, promote it to your closest allies

... if this content is low quality then offer it to your competitor to post on his website

lol.... Brand Stacking... I have not heard that term used before.  Thanks.

In my SERPs I am seeing Wikipedia and .gov stacking.

** 'Landlord's Blog' - written by  landlords, for landlords...**

This is an awesome idea.

You might be able to get a landlord to do just one article... or you might interview him/her and then you write something good from what you have learned - giving them big credit.

Good luck.

Everybody starts as a beginner.

If you work hard five years from now you will be in a powerful position if you work smart.

Does AAAFurniture.com have any existing content, traffic, links, likes, youtube channel or other assets?

If it does not you can  redirect AAAFurnitureStore.com to it if you want to simplify the name of your brand (and you are willing to sacrifice some of the effectiveness of your existing links and anchor text.

If AAAFurnitue.com has existing content, traffic, links, likes, etc then you must study carefully to take maximum advantage of these assets.  Not a simple question.

I run my buttons through forms.  Thus no links and no "product pages" generated by the shopping cart.

This enables me to produce most of my sales from minor category pages with multiple products or multiple varieties of single products.  I believe that these single pages compete better in the search engines that four or more separate pages.  I also believe that they result in more items being added to the cart - because the customer sees the variety.

Eliminating all of those product pages gives me a much smaller and more compact site that I believe competes better in the SERPs.  It also enables me to produce custom product pages that are not possible through the cart's product page template.  They can be optimized like finely crafted arrows instead of being made by a cookie cutter program.

If you don't know how to produce form code, ask your cart provider for help.   My code looks something like this.

<form action="https://secure.example.com/cgi-bin/addtocart?MERCHANTID=EGOL&ADD=id-tool-225" method="post"><input type="<a class="attribute-value">image</a>" src="/add-to-cart.gif" width="<a class="attribute-value">105</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">35</a>" border="<a class="attribute-value">0</a>"  align="<a class="attribute-value">middle</a>"></form>

I agree with Ressler.... publish something that is so fantastically popular that it is tweeted, liked, blogged, emailed and talked about by everyone on the web.

I think that you will need to do this multiple times to rank at the top of google for some of your keywords.

I think that this is more of a customer relationship question than a search engine question.

Most designers believe that designer links are customary in the footer.  Some people think that a "design by XYZ Marketing" without a link is proper attribution.  In any case such links or attributions should be clearly mentioned in the design contract.

Some webmasters simply don't want links in their footer and the designer should be willing to accept that but charge a little more for the loss of attribution.

Some SEOs think that if they do SEO on a client's site that they are entitled to sitewide links in his footer.  My personal opinion is that the SEO should be doing everything possible to help the client instead of sucking his linkjuice.  SEOs should be able to build their own links.

5)  Maybe there's another option I haven't considered.

Here's how I determine the value of my blogs...

A) how many visitors do they pull in (these generate ad income)

B) how many of those visitors are bouncing

C) how many of those visitors buy something

D) how much social action and linklove is being generated

If you ask those questions about your existing blog you might have a better perspective on killing, pimping or cutting loose.   You might also discover what is working on that blog and use that as guide to creating more of what has worked in the past.  In addition, if you find dead wood on the blog you know what to cut loose and what to avoid doing going forward.  The analytics of the old blog can inform your future path.

You could be experiencing soft hits from the Panda algo.

Do you have problems with....

--- duplicate content

--- thin content

--- heavy ad density

--- very little content above the fold

--- slow response