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Phew, what a relief.  I was half-expecting an angry mob to bust my door down.

I completely get your point, and you're right, best-on-the-web content does rise to the top, even if you don't necessarily give it a big nudge in the right direction.

I agree too that if you've got some traffic to work off of already, your time should be spent focusing on your content.  The problem here is the have-nots.  If you've got some traffic, you can put up a post, blast it out to Twitter, and move on to writing.  From a small business perspective, it's just never that easy.

Interestingly enough, in the back of my head, all I kept thinking was that while my response is how I truly feel, I could definitely be creative enough to get Joe the Plumber's website to blow up on Reddit if I had to.

Thanks for being cool about it!  I'd love to see this quality of debate on these boards more frequently.

Note: I edited out the first two lines as they were sort of disrespectful.  I originally put them there to get a rise out of people, but on Dr. Pete's advice, I removed them.  I didn't want people to read my response and get a bad taste in their mouth from the first couple of lines and have that taint their opinion.

I'd buy that wristband.  Just sayin...

I have nothing but respect for you and your opinion, EGOL.  I've said that countless, countless, countless times.  And obviously I believe in the power of content, and that's always the first recommendation I make to anybody - as I did above, by recommending content-based link building strategies.

Don't get me wrong, your response is not bad advice - not by any means.  But I do have my qualms with it.

A.  It's kind of misleading.  We get it - your content is amazing and it attracts back links.  My qualm here is that I don't think that's something that everybody can replicate easily.  In order for that to work, you need either a strong community, significant influence on a social network like Twitter, the good fortune of working in an industry that really embraces social bookmarking and blogging, or a lot of elbow grease.

Even if Joe the Plumber writes an amazing resource guide to fixing any plumbing problem in the world, he's still going to have to market it to bloggers (that he doesn't have connections with), on his social media profiles (that nobody follows), and on social bookmarking sites (where nobody cares, because it's not a picture of an adorable kitten).  He's still going to have to work hard to get links to that content, by networking - which IS link building and IS hard work.  Just creating great content isn't quite enough, and to suggest so is misleading.

B. It's kind of lazy.  Take the above poster, for instance.  We both recommended that the right approach here is to write great content - you by saying so directly, and me via recommending content-based link building strategies and linking to the Professional's Guide to Link Building.  But as you can tell, speed of link acquisition and cost minimization are key concerns for the original poster.  Whose response do you think provided more value here?

I just kind of feel like if all you do is recommend that people write great content, and you don't qualify that by saying that you're still going to need to market that content, or by tailoring your response to fit the concerns of the original poster, at what point does this advice lose its value and just become more noise?

I don't mean to disrespect you in any way.  I've seen you give amazing, amazing advice more times than I can count.  And I know your time is valuable, and like the rest of us, you do this for free.  And I respect that.  I just felt as though I should share my opinion on this, because I know that for every thumbs down this post gets, there are going to be 20 people who completely agree with what I've said, even if they don't have the balls to say so publicly.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, OP - I just can't help but speak my mind.  And for those that don't know me, I'm not some random jerk off the street that's complaining about writing great content.  I try really hard to help out everybody I can on these forums, and I mean well.  All I'm trying to do is make the SEOmoz Q&A boards a more helpful place.

This is an extremely difficult question to answer without spending some time on your website and figuring out exactly what you are doing wrong, so the most I can do is point you in the right direction with some articles that have proved very useful:

• Understanding Panda: Why Panda Is More of a Ranking Factor Than an Algorithm Update (SearchEngineLand)
• **Recovering From Panda: **10 Tips For Beating Google Panda (Pocket-Lint)
• **Life After Panda: **Link Building in a Panda's World (Blueglass)

In general, the biggest issue causing problems for most websites is duplicate content.  Not external duplicate content (your content on someone else's website), but rather internal duplicate content (multiple versions of your content on your website).  The rel="canonical" tag is going to be your best friend if this is the case.

Generally speaking, there is no way to automate linkbuilding and get high quality links.  The links that you really want to be getting are from relevant, authoritative websites in your niche.  There are a number of ways to get these high quality links, particularly content-based link building strategies.  Any links that can be automatically built, such as directory submissions, forum profile backlinks, and blog commenting, are typically of minimal value.

That's not to say that you can't scale high quality link building, however.  Ross Hudgens wrote a great post a while back about scaling SEO by eliminating pain points.  Some of the advice in that article is greyhat, or borderline blackhat, but the general message is very valuable.  Obtaining high quality backlinks is always going to be a time intensive process that requires hard work and creativity, but you can certainly make the process smoother, easier, and more efficient.

There are a number of other great resources around the web that discuss scaling link building:

• Scaling Link Building - Whiteboard Friday (SEOmoz)
• Scalable Link Building (Distilled)
• How To Scale B2B Link Building Across An Organization (SearchEngineLand)

Ana -

Great question.  You certainly want to address this issue, especially in the post-Panda world we live in today.

If you have the ability to re-write your product descriptions and make the pages as unique as possible, this is the most attractive option.  Think of it as a way to re-target your product descriptions to sell to wholesalers.  The only downside to this is the potential for keyword cannabilization, although you could theoretically target different keywords for wholesalers than you do to individuals.

If you don't have the means to make that happen (read: thousands of products), you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag.  This will let Google know which page is the "right" page for them to be looking at.  If the majority of your web conversions from organic search are retail, then perhaps the retail pages should be the "canonical" version, or vice-versa.

Your competitor probably built this expressly for SEO purposes.  For that reason, they're probably not going to link out to you, no matter how smooth your link request approach is.

Competitive link research can be a great way to find links, but you don't want to go after all of them.  Go after their highest quality and strongest links - the ones earned not by any specific linkbuilding action, but by editorial accumulation.  Aside from those, go after the easy targets - directories, blog comments, resources or links pages, and blogs.  If they don't have any of those, and they're all manually built crap like the example you sent, then maybe your competitor's backlinks aren't the right place to start.

BONUS TIP:  To maximize your competitive link building success, use SEOmoz's Competitive Link Research Tool to find websites that link to multiple competitors.  The idea here is that this weeds out websites that are affiliated with any one specific competitor, including links like the above example that were built manually.  What you are left with is a list of websites that are known to link to websites in your niche and typically aren't commercialized so there's no real incentive not to link to your website.  These websites are a great place to start.

The best way I know of to truly research your market and figure out which keywords will convert well is to use Google AdWords.  Aaron Wall wrote a great post a while back about this topic: Market Research Using Google AdWords

Aside from that, you can also look at whatever traffic you are currently getting in your analytics.  Although this will obviously not be a complete picture of all of the opportunities available to you, you can certainly mine the data for some sort of actionable information.

Oftentimes, the short-tail keywords are not the ones that will work best for promoting your website.  There is frequently a tradeoff between traffic and conversion rate.  Short-tail keywords get tons of traffic, but they don't always convert well.  Conversely, long-tail keywords might not get much traffic, but if you choose specific targets, they can convert exceptionally well.  Obviously your strategy is going to involve targeting a mix of both.

Why give that link juice to YouTube?  Lord knows, they've got plenty of it.

Take advantage of the links you received and make them benefit your main website.  Create a landing page on your main site featuring some of the best submissions embedded on the page, and include a link to your channel if visitors want to see even more videos.  Then, 301 redirect the microsite to the landing page on your main website in order to get the link juice to pass through to your primary domain.

The only reason you'd want to redirect your microsite directly to the YouTube channel is if you don't have a main website and your YouTube channel is your main presence online.  Even then, though, I'd generally opt in the direction of leaving the microsite up and embedding some featured videos on it.  You can certainly make a page on YouTube rank decently well for a keyword, but given the lack of control you have over on-page elements, it's much more difficult than optimizing a website that you own.

Most SEOs have the opinion that exact match domains are a bit too powerful in Google's current algorithm, and I think most of us would bet our money on this tactic falling out of favor in the future.  Although admittedly, it has stuck around for longer than I think most of us would have expected.

Branded traffic, on the other hand, isn't going to be affected nearly as much by any sort of algorithm change in the future - and it converts insanely well.  This should be the primary goal of anybody with a business.

Of course generic traffic is important, but in my opinion, it's not important enough to put building my brand in the backseat, or to affect the way I choose a domain for my company.

Now if this was an affiliate website or some kind of blog that I was launching in order to gain traffic from advertising, my opinion might be different.  But because this is a company, and presumably one that you intend to be around for a long time to come, I think branding is the most important consideration.

If I had a sweet generic domain name in addition to my company domain, I might consider making a small microsite expressly for linkbuilding purposes, although I have to emphasize here that the vast, vast, vast majority of your effort should go into working on your primary domain.

T - Just like Gyi, I do my best to keep all of my clients in the loop about what our options are, exactly what we are doing, how it is being done, and the results we have achieved (yes, even when they're negative, although thankfully those situations have been few and far between).

A - Quite simply, I just be myself.  Yes, sometimes this means that when I'm explaining something to a client, my response might be a long, drawn out extended metaphor about fantasy football or hip hop, but either way, at least I'm being me.

G - This starts with my time here on this Q&A board, and on other outlets like Quora or SEOchat.  Likewise, everybody in the industry has that friend or family member that has a billion questions, and I do my best to be patient with those requests as well.  I can't tell you how many times an innocent happy hour has turned into a full blown SEO strategy session.

F - I try to get to know all of my clients personally.  I don't want to be the guy that drops in once a month with an invoice.  I'm the guy that's invited to the company holiday party and drinks the Vice President of the company under the table.

E - I try to be flexible.  This is a big one when it comes to working with the team members of my clients.  The last thing you want is to have a client's programming or PR team think you're stepping on their toes, so you need to remember to see their viewpoint, and consider their job.  The world doesn't revolve around SEO (as much as we would like to believe it does), and in the business world, sometimes you have to make compromises and work in situations that aren't ideal.  At the end of the day, we're all just people on the planet Earth, and you need to be able to have some give and take.

E - I try to go above and beyond, be it with the information I give out for free on forums like this, the blog posts I create to help educate people, the work I do for my clients, or even the proposals I create when I'm talking to a prospective client.  Being exceptional pays dividends through and through.  I've converted people I gave free advice to into clients countless times, and by working hard and offering a great product, I've managed to enjoy a high customer retention rate.  Work on every campaign as if it is your own!

I would certainly say it's achievable.  Whether the score is 40 or 70, you're going to need to have a well-optimized website and execute a strong linkbuilding campaign, but the keyword difficulty score can be a good measure of the relative difficulty of any given keyword to another.

SEOmoz pulls its traffic data from the Google AdWords API, but as you rightly suspected, the rest of the data on the page includes the top 10 ranking websites and their link data.  Page Authority and Domain Authority are scores that SEOmoz gives webpages/sites based on their own internal algorithm.  These scores are based off of link data and other factors - they are discussed in depth here.

I couldn't find it anywhere in the settings.  I believe you just have to start a new campaigns.  They're going to have to re-crawl everything, but they have a starter crawl that works pretty fast nowadays, so you can get going somewhat quickly.

It's not the prettiest blog, but I've always found Matthew Umbro's PPC advice to be solid.

Other PPC-related blogs that I like:

• http://www.gordonchoi.com/
• http://www.semgeek.com/

Also, don't forget about the PPC categories at SEOmoz and YOUmoz.

I'm not above re-visiting an old blog post, but like PeterM22 said, make your comment useful and relevant.  Sure, you're kind of using the blog for a backlink, but in exchange you're giving them some content that will pull in a long-tail visitor one day.  Or at least that's how I justify it in my head.

Strategies for dealing with external duplicate content are overviewed here.

A much bigger concern is duplicating your OWN content.  I know it sounds kind of silly, but it is a very real issue, especially since Google's most recent update (Panda).  Is there more than one URL for any page on your website?  Does http://website.com direct to http://www.website.com?  Do you have canonicalization problems related to pagination or something similar?

These issues are discussed in-depth here.

If you think that your issues may be related to on-site or site architecture factors, the best thing you can do is hire a qualified SEO consultant that can assess these issues and make actionable recommendations for correcting them.

Maximilian -

If Google has devalued some of your links, there's no way to "recover" these links.  That's the bad news.

The good news is that this happens to websites every day, and it's not by any means a permanent penalization or anything of that sort.  All it means is that the time and effort spent to build these links was squandered.

What can you do to speed up your recovery?  Switch the way you think about link building.  Directory submissions are useful, but they shouldn't by any means comprise the majority of your link building strategy.

I would suggest reading this article cover to cover.  It will teach you the proper mindset you should have when approaching linkbuilding, and it will give you dozens and dozens of ideas to get started with building high quality links from relevant, authoritative domains.

Replace directory submissions with strategies like writing guest blog posts, creating amazing content (linkbait) and subsequently promoting it on social media and social bookmarking websites, and/or creating a widget that would be an invaluable addition to any website in your industry.  All of these are covered under the "Content-Based Link Building Strategies" section of the SEOmoz Professional Guide to Linkbuilding that is linked to above.

Welcome to the forum, Benny.  The answer to your question is that you can probably replace these links and have the value come back, and you may regain your rankings.

I have to caution that this still may only be a temporary patch.  Link buying is a big no-no as far as Google is concerned, and their Webspam team is working every single day to find and bust websites that sell paid links.  Even if these links are still working now, there's no guarantee that will be true in the future.

The REAL ANSWER to your question is that you shouldn't renew these paid links, or any paid links.  Spend your time and money to build good, high quality links from relevant websites for free.  You'll never have to renew these links and they'll stick around forever.  Learn proper link building techniques and you'll never have to spend another dollar on a link and your rankings will be better than ever.

Sound promising?  Get started here, with SEOmoz's Professional Guide to Link Building.

You know what's cooler than selling a million knives?  Selling a BILLION knives.

Micah and EGOL are giving specific advice relating to choosing your domain name, but behind their advice is a much broader mindset: think big picture.

Why do you expect to get most of your traffic from generic search terms?  Why not make it your goal to get most of your traffic from branded keywords?

Make Slycers a household name.

When you get into the link building phase, don't think about the link.  Think about the brand.  Think about the community you are reaching in building a link.  Think about the exposure you are getting for your product.

When you're writing a press release, don't consider the links it might bring in.  Consider whether or not this is really newsworthy content.  Whether or not this could get picked up by national media.  Whether or not your story is interesting enough to get the kind of exposure you're hoping for.

When you're creating content, don't think about optimizing it for Google or Bing.  Write for your customers, for people looking for a better kitchen knife.  Don't think about "keyword density" or "PR sculpting", think about engaging your audience and developing a website that visitors will find useful and entertaining.

When you're running your social media campaign, don't think about the traffic it could bring in.  Think about engaging your audience and building a following.  Think about turning influencers in your niche into brand advocates that are in love with Slycers and are telling everyone they know - not because you asked, but because they want to.

Do these things, have this mindset, and this whole SEO thing becomes dramatically simpler.

There are tons of reasons why your website might see a drop in rankings for certain keywords.  Here are a few:

• Increased competition in your niche pushed your website down as new websites started to rank above you.

• You have been building low quality links and they have been devalued by Google, causing you to lose hundreds (thousands?) of keyword-rich backlinks.

• Your website has been affected by a Google algorithm update.  For one reason or another (duplicate content?  shallow or nonexistent content on some pages?  too many ads / too big of a "footprint"?), your website is being seen as less trustworthy, and this has affected rankings sitewide.  (Note, some rankings would be maintained, particularly for keywords with low competition.)

• You were logged into your Google account when you saw these rankings, and your website was appearing higher than it typically does because of your personalized search data.  When you logged out and checked your rankings, you noticed a "drop" in ranking that was not actually real.  (Okay, this one is unlikely, but we've all seen it before.)

I wouldn't use spaces in my image names, just because they will get parsed out into "%20", and that will make the URL path longer and uglier.

Option B is the better one of the two.  The most important thing to remember here is to just be descriptive.  You're already on the right path.

Here are a few great articles on SEO for images.  I think you might find them useful:

• The Definitive Guide to SEO for Images (ZDnet)
• Image SEO Basics - Whiteboard Friday (SEOmoz)

I think it depends on the niche and the level of competition.  My intuition tells me that the smaller towns around Portland should be relatively easy to rank for (depending on exactly how competitive your industry is), so option 2 could be pulled off without much trouble.  I think it makes the most sense from a user perspective.  This might take some convincing, and a bit of client education, but it may be worth the effort.

I wouldn't blame you for trying to implement option 1, however, given the concerns of your client.  You don't want to stretch your page too thin in terms of content and the number of keywords you're targeting, and you don't want to go over 65 characters with your Title tag, but if you can make it work, it's not a bad solution.

Option 3 doesn't seem to make a ton of sense from a user perspective.  I think given your question, you've already come to that conclusion on your own.

EDIT: I defer to EGOL.  When this man gives you advice, listen to it.

Are all of these versions of your homepage?  They should be 301 redirected back to your main URL.

The middle example appears to be some kind of parameter string.  It's hard to say what you should do without looking at the actual website, but this could be a case where the canonical URL tag could come in handy.

A good place to start is SEOmoz's primer on duplicate content.  It walks you through all of the potential types of problems and their solutions.

DMoz is definitely still valuable (although you can wait forever to get your submission approved), as are a number of other high powered directories.  This is just a starting point for your link building, however.  The best links come from relevant websites.  Try combing through your competitors' backlinks (or better yet, use SEOmoz's competitive research tool) - it's typically a great way to get an idea of what link tactics work in your industry, and it can really help inspire you to step your game up.

OSE has a tough job - they have to crawl every corner of the web, index it, and make the results available to thousands of users a day.  It's natural that some links get left out, particularly if they are located very deep on a domain with thousands of links (directories, for example).  You may be able to get these links noticed by building links to these links.

A better idea, however, is to just build higher quality links.  Focus on obtaining links from relevant, authoritative websites in your niche.  It's better to build one great link every day than a thousand mediocre ones.

What type of links were you building - directory submissions?  If you're building links that are deep into a directory with thousands and thousands of pages, it can take a long time for Google/SEOmoz to crawl the page, if ever.

Try higher quality link building with websites in your niche - you'll find that these are picked up much faster and way more powerful than lower quality links.  Build a great piece of content and market it to niche bloggers and site owners via e-mails and social media.  Network with bloggers in your industry and set up a guest post on their website.  Find an industry event and sponsor it publicly.

It's better to create one GREAT link every day than to build 100 mediocre links every day.

That's quite good.  The test is certainly no joke.  I'd say they are already way better off than 90% of the "professional SEOs" in this business if they understand the fundamentals that SEOmoz stresses in that test.

SEOmoz's test is by far the best available, so you're already off to a good start.  You may want to look into the Google Analytics/AdWords certification tests.  I know they're not exactly related to SEO, but I'd sure want anybody doing SEO for me to know their way around Google Analytics.

There are also a few good lists of SEO interview questions that you may find helpful:

• http://www.justmeandmy.com/80-seo-job-interview-questions
• http://infolific.com/technology/internet/seo/seo-interview-questions/
• http://www.themadhat.com/search-marketing/seo-job-interview-questions/

Hypothetical situation:

You write a guest blog post for a popular blog about your niche topic.  The post is a hit and sends you visitors, leads, and social media followers.

Would you consider running a linkbuilding campaign to the blog post in order to help it rank better for its target keyword(s), given that the post has proven to convert successfully, despite the fact that the post is on a domain other than your own?

I know this probably isn't what you're looking for by any means, but I think it's going to be hard to really promote the contest given how small the cash prize is.  It's just not exciting enough to really generate any sort of buzz, and certainly no press whatsoever.  If you had a few thousand dollars in your budget and thought up some unique prizes for the top 3 winners, it would be much more marketable.

But I understand, budget is always an issue.  I would try tweeting bloggers and influencers in your niche or in related industries asking if they can RT the details.  Now is the time to call in any favors you have from personal connections or people you know in the industry.

You might try reaching out to niche amateur filmmaking communities, although I suspect you would have much better luck with a bigger prize.  Though that's not really the audience you want to reach with this contest, it could help get you some better quality submissions, for content's sake.

Yep, going to be pretty tricky without seeing the website.

Time to put that legal knowledge to work!  Glad I could help - let me know if you have any more questions.

I want to say that I 100% agree with Ryan, but I will play devil's advocate.

There is a time and place for everything, including black hat SEO.  If your goals are well-aligned with short term success, then black hat SEO is probably the cheapest and most effective option you have.  To me, link building isn't an ethical consideration, but a business decision.  If black hat tactics fit my goals, or my clients' goals, and everybody is aware of the risk involved and all of the options at play, then why not?

There's no doubt about it - these are paid links, and as Ryan said, they will eventually be addressed by Google's Webspam team, and when that happens, you're going to lose a large share of your link portfolio (at best) or receive a penalty (at worst).  But there is no Matt Cutts fairy that haunts black hatters at night, preying on them as they dream of paid links and content farms.  It's economics, plain and simple.  I don't know what industry you are in or what your exact situation is, so it would be presumptuous of me to completely rule out black hat SEO strategies.

That said, I've yet to encounter a situation where I've needed to resort to black hat tactics, for personal projects or client work.  Just sayin...

• All of your glossary "Letter" pages are indexed (26 pages with content that is repeated on the individual "Word" pages).  Although this is obviously not some intentional or deliberate means at spamdexing, it might appear as low quality to Google.
• Most of your legal definitions on these pages are found elsewhere on the Internet, whether they started out as your original content or not.  Example: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22A+barbaric+form+of+corporal+punishment+meted+out+in+the+middle+ages+where+persons+would+be+permanently+blinded+by+the+pressing+of+hot+irons+to+the+open+eyes.%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
• When you combine the above two bullet points, you have 26 pages that contain content that is duplicated on other pages throughout your domain, and then hundreds of pages that contain content that is located elsewhere on the Internet.  Classic two way Panda action - duplicating your own content, and having your content duplicated by others.
• The Citations pages are really weak.  I know you mentioned there's very little you can do, but really - if there is any way whatsoever to beef these pages up, they need to be.  Even if these are on a subdomain, it still isn't a great thing to be associated with.  It wouldn't shock me if there were negative consequences, even on a subdomain.  (Although given your situation, I think it was a natural first step.  It's a tricky situation.  See how the move to the subdomain pans out in the next month or two - if things don't start to make a comeback, you really need to figure out a way to beef up the content.)
• A lot of your other content is copied or taken from somewhere.  You need to re-write your content or get these websites to re-write theirs.
  Example: http://www.duhaime.org/CrimeandSafety/LawArticle-59/Personal-Safety.aspx
  Copies: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22In+most+cases+you+are+in+control+of+the+circumstances+in+which+you+place+yourself.+Just+by+being+aware+that+you+are+a+potential+victim+of+a+personal+crime+is+the+first+step+toward+prevention.%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

As far as both duplicate content issues and dynamic parameters, you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag instead of the noindex tag.

• Matt Cutts: Learn About the Canonical Link Element in 5 Minutes
• Google Webmaster Central: About rel="canonical"
• Rand Fishkin: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "high PR networks"?  Are you talking about Web 2.0 websites like Squidoo?  Or microsites / linkwheels?  I'm a bit confused.

Did you follow all of the steps in SEOmoz's Guide to Switching Domains?  It's a great checklist that covers pretty much everything you should do to maximize your recovery speed.

BigDaylight also has a post about switching domains - most of the advice is reiterated in SEOmoz's guide, but it's got a bit more detail.  Definitely worth the read.

If your website was filled with empty pages or pages featuring duplicate content, it is certainly possible that your website was affected by Google's recent Panda update. To recover from this, you're going to want to really focus on cleaning up duplicate content, getting rid of low quality pages, and building more unique content.  It's a tough road back, but some websites are starting to see success with Panda recovery.  Pocket-Lint recently wrote a great guide detailing their successful Panda recovery efforts.

Your low PA and DA, however, would not be affected by Panda, as these are numbers calculated by SEOmoz according to your backlink profile.  To raise your PA and DA scores, find ways to attract or build high quality links to your website.  Building links with keyword-rich anchor text (like the links in my response) will help your rankings for any given keyword.

A quick check of the IP addresses (http://www.seochat.com/?option=com_seotools&tool=35) shows that whoever made all of these microsites intentionally diversified the Class C addresses of these websites.  This suggests that someone with a fairly advanced knowledge of SEO is behind this little link scheme.

Microsites aren't anything groundbreaking.  These are pretty well done - the content seems unique and there has been some linkbuilding work done to the websites.  I would definitely say that these are contributing to your competitor's success.

The question then becomes...is this something you should be replicating?  That's a more complicated answer.  Microsites can be effective, especially if you give them the same level of TLC that these microsites have received.  Are they your best use of time and resources?  Not always.  The effort spent to build content and develop links for these microsites is probably better spent creating content and developing links for your main site.

The flipside of the argument is that creating engaging content and attracting backlinks in a niche industrial market can be tricky, and sometimes manual linkbuilding (like creating microsites) is just way easier.  The "white hat" response to that is that with enough creativity, pure white hat SEO success is possible.  I'd recommend reading Rand Fishkin's post, "White Hat SEO: It F-ing Works" - if you read through, he breaks down some awesome linkbuilding campaigns that have been executed in "boring" industries.  It's definitely worth the read.

WarriorForum, like any other forum, is only as good as the member that is contributing.  Once you're around any forum for long enough, you start to get a sense of who the reputable, intelligent, and honest members are.  Members with lots of reputation points are usually a bit more trustworthy than newer members, or members with negative reputations.

The Q&A forum you're on right now is, in my opinion, one of the best remaining places on the Internet to ask questions and engage in discussions related to SEO.  These parts are policed way more than most forums, and in my opinion, the intelligence level of the average member is much higher than some of the other forums out there.

I also really like SEOChat, but the quality of that forum has admittedly declined over the last few years - in particular, I see EGOL and JV Rudnick posting more on the SEOmoz Q&A than SEOChat, and they were always dishing out some of the most valuable advice.  So...you might just be in the right place.

Google News does not accept individual press releases, it merely aggregates news from a variety of sources around the internet.  I have had good experience with using PRWeb from my press release distribution.  In my experience, all of the press releases I have submitted with their service have ended up in Google News, and they have brought my clients a fair amount of traffic in the process.

Your assumption that you would get a bunch of blog comments from .edu websites is correct.  Most of them will be nofollow.  Many of them will have comments sections ridden with thousands and thousands of spam links.  Some of them will be on .edu websites from foreign countries.  All of them will be garbage.

I know that you already knew the answer to this question, deep down.  It's okay - I think all of us at some point need to be steered away from one of those "too good to be true" link building propositions.  Building great links is hard work, and there aren't any real shortcuts if you want to do it the right way.  As the saying goes, "Money, Time, Results.  Pick two."

TopSEOs is a scam at worst, and a waste of time and money at best.  It's the modern day version of those "Who's Who" books - you can pay to get in, so the rankings are essentially meaningless.

Aaron Wall took the company to task a few years back: TopSEOs.com: A Review of the Top SEOs Paid Rating Service

And if you want the official SEOmoz opinion, here's a tweet of Rand's endorsement of the abovementioned blog post.

Put your best content on your own website.  Have her create an incredible resource section for her field.  Literally, aim to make it the BEST CONTENT ON THE WEB for that topic.

Other high quality content can be shopped around to relevant blogs and informational websites for guest post opportunities, as Daniel pointed out.  But in order to get the most mileage from your content, put it on your own website.  Then, let other webmasters and bloggers know about the INCREDIBLE resource you have created - if your content is really the best on the web, you should have no problem getting people to link to it.

Content selection is obviously really important.  I think if you choose your content well, you can definitely market it to other niche NLP websites.  Because of the nature of the topic, I wouldn't expect it to blow up huge on a social media or social bookmarking website, but you should be able to get some good, high-quality links from relevant, niche websites, which is by and large the name of the game.

I think you can get even more mileage out of infographic linkbuilding if you explore NLP as it related to different topics: management training, specific self-help areas, etc.  This can help you diversify the type of websites that you can realistically get a link from.

For your first foray into infographic linkbuilding, however, I think you're headed in the right direction.

The answer isn't quite black and white.  There are dozens of ways to "buy" links, and not all of them are necessarily frowned upon.

To address your specific question, paying money for directory submissions isn't necessarily a bad thing.  A couple of the bigger directories, like Yahoo! and Business.com, require a fee for listing, and though SEOs do disagree about the value of these links, they are generally not regarded as anything that can get you in trouble with Google.  It's best to focus on the most prominent, trafficked, and authoritative directories - you shouldn't shell out cash to just any old directory out there.

As far as other ways to buy links...that's where things get a bit dicey.  Many SEOs, and certainly most that you will encounter on an SEOmoz forum, subscribe to the theory that link buying is bad.  On the other end of the spectrum, there are a great many SEOs that actively buy links, including some of the biggest-name SEO firms that exist.  Those that have success with link buying generally do not work with a brokerage (like Text-Link-Brokers), but rather negotiate private deals with owners of authoritative, relevant websites in their industry.  When it comes to link buying, the best practitioners put a great deal of effort into procuring links that look natural, are embedded into content (rather than sitewide or footer links), and on pages/websites that have content related to the website they are promoting.

Regardless of what those in the industry do, Google very specifically states that link buying is NOT an acceptable practice in their eyes, and they go to great lengths to find ways to both manually and algorithmically punish websites engaging in this practice.

Aaron Wall wrote a great post talking about "white hat" ways to purchase links, and it demonstrates that with a bit of creativity, one can effectively exchange money for links without necessarily breaking Google's guidelines: http://www.seobook.com/archives/002422.shtml

Basically, the decision is up to you.  Certainly there are very effective ways to practice SEO without engaging in link buying, and indeed many of the websites leading the pack for competitive keywords haven't had to buy links to get there.  The most important thing is knowing all of the facts, and the potential consequences of each choice.

Google certainly recognizes that the phrases are related, but they most likely distinguish these semantically.  You'd probably want to work in phrases like "Pain Management" or "Pain Relief" to optimize for the keyword "Pain".

Moreover, though, you shouldn't really be paying attention to keyword density when you're creating your content.  In fact, you really shouldn't be thinking very much about Google at all when you're creating your content.  The very best content is written for people.  Think of your readers.  Think of what they would find most interesting/engaging/helpful.  Appeal to your readers and write like Google doesn't even exist, and you'll find that you've created the type of content that gets links on its own, and gets shared socially without having to "fake it".