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Hi all It used to be (allegedly) the case that you should have all your sites on different Class Cs or Google would hit you with the spam hammer. Which I guess made some sense because back then they probably didn't have many other ways of detecting unnatural link networks. But today with all their data on who is related to who, can this really matter any more? I'd like to move 3 or 4 of our sites (all long-established with widely varied link sources) onto one server, one CMS install, one less headache but I wanted to check first in case I'm about to shoot myself in the foot. Thanks Roger

After being hit by the Penguin stick, like good content marketers we are trying to focus on improving brand signals for our site. But I keep coming up against what exactly brand signals are. I can understand that if you are called 'Ziggle' and someone links to you with that in anchor text or mentions that name, that would be a brand signal. But we're on a generic domain (descriptive of the produt type), so what would constitute brand signals in our case?

With the recent Penguin update meaning we have to work even harder to get links to our ecommerce site, we are trying to come up with creative ways to make our product and category pages more linkable. The recent Seomoz articles on the topic here and here are brilliant and have stimulated some ideas, but we also have a unique opportunity that I want to make the most of. Some of our eBook products contain original cartoons by the author, which relate to various products on the site. They are funny, and sometimes poignant, and seem to me to be very shareable. The question is how to make the most of these. We have thought about simply embedding the images on the product page, with sharing icons directly underneath. And ditto for categories where the images make sense. Then we were wondering about creating a separate Artwork area in the content area of the site where the image could be downloaded in large format for printing, should people wish. Again with the sharing icons. The other thought was to create a Flickr account with the cartoons in, which would hopefully lead to widespread use of them, but I guess the trouble with that is the link love ends up on Flickr instead of our site. We think there's a real opportunity here, and just want to make sure we make the most of it! I'll happily share the results once we decide what we're going to do with them. (I've attached an image so you can tell us if you think we're woefully off the mark 😉 ayKQX.jpg

Hi We've just had a spanky new design implemented on Hypnosis Downloads.com My concern is over the top nav. While it's nice for users to get those handy dropdowns, it adds a lot of links to every page, and spreads link weight out equally over all sorts of pages. The place I really want the link weight is under the Downloads link - in those categories and so I am thinking about removing dropdowns for everything but this category. Does that sound like a sensible move to you? Is it likely to actually make a difference? Cheers Roger