Hi Christian,

It's a little difficult to say what might be going on without being able to actually see the site. You are welcome to PM me this or post it here and I will gladly take a look for you.

Should I fear that this will harm my SEO efforts? It all depends. If your site has indeed been hacked, you need to find out what has happened (and how it happened). What did you build the site in?

-Andy

Just tweeted this out because it should be remembered by everyone.

Top notch Tom

-Andy

Just to correct a little something on here, you don't need to have anything in Google news or be in the top 10 for anything.

Google Alerts will trigger based on your keywords / phrase and then mail you based on your criteria as they are discovered. I have a lot of these set "as they happen" and are all related to brand mentions / articles of interest.

-Andy

Hi Tej,

Moz have a best practice guide on redirects here, but the general rule of thumb is that a 301 is used for most scenarios where a permanent redirect is required. This also passes more link juice than a 302, which is generally used for temporary redirects, and passes no link juice.

In terms of SEO, a 301 is almost always the preferred option because of the benefits in helping a site retain a more natural flow of link juice.

-Andy

I would second Justin's recommendation of the attribution builder rather than using URL shorteners.

-Andy

Something to avoid, is the mindset of buying links / sponsoring.

Google values a genuine link that is editorially gained, rather than a side note / footer / site-wide links. These carry very little value and in some cases, can create a big headache for you in terms of penalties from Google.

Good SEO is actually a mix of a great user experience, easy-to-use website, interesting information and closely following Google's webmaster guidelines. This all boils down to best practice. Keep your visitors happy, social media buzzing, content well written and Google will start to value your site more.

-Andy

So Apartment Therapy are selling links? Tread carefully with this, because you have announced that you may pay $10k for writing an article that contains lots of links back to your site. If Google get wind of this, you could spell a whole heap of trouble for yourself.

Just as a side note, $10k will buy you a lot of very good organic SEO and link building that won't carry the risk.

-Andy