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I have a start-up website. It's a niche market that's not all that competitive. I'm trying to get going with some basic link building, and I'm trying to focus for the time being on some recommended directories: BOTW, yahoo, business.com, etc.

I already have a regular BOTW directory listing, accepted a few days ago. I'm wondering if it's worth also getting a BOTW blog directory listing?

So two BOTW listings, the first pointing to the homepage, the second would point to the blog.

If there is meaningful link juice to be passed, would there be an advantage of having two links? Or will the one I already have suffice?

Also, since the site is new, I only have a few blog posts. Is BOTW likely to reject me because my blog is too thin? The posts I have are content-heavy (1000-2500 words per entry), but there's just not a large total quantity yet.

Normally I wouldn't consider it, but they're having a cyber-monday sale today where it's 50% off the regular price, so it makes the decision easier.

Thanks.

Thanks Dana. I've been thinking about this for a while and it's nice to have some clarity on the subject.

SEO5, do you think it's best to simply not have any "read more" links at all and just let the blog title link serve as the only one? Or am I overthinking this and what I'm asking about doesn't make any real-world difference?

I have a standard blog index page with entries formatted as such:

• Blog title
• Blog excerpt
• read more link

The blog title is linked to the blog post (duh).

The "read more" link is also linked to the same blog post, but I put a rel="nofollow" tag on that link because I don't want the SE's thinking "read more" is relevant anchor text.

Now, is what I'm doing right? Won't having the read more link as nofollow result in some sort of conflict considering the blog title link is set to follow? Will a nofollow link have a cascading effect on any matching "follow" link?

I've frequently read that "read more" should be nofollowed, but I've never once seen anyone address the conflict of having a follow and nofollow link on the same page pointing to the same link. Which one wins?

Thanks.

Thanks. What do you think about eliminating the password and retype password fields and just emailing the user a password? Looks suspicious also? Goes against user expectations?

I've frequently read that the shorter the checkout form the better. My checkout form has the following fields:

• First name

• Last name

• Email

• Username

• Password

• Retype password

• Card number

• Card expiration date

• CVV code

• Billing street

• Billing city

• Billing state

• Billing zip

Here's the thing. Since it's a web-app, I don't need the "billing address" as I'm not physically shipping them anything. Should I remove it? The no-brainer answer seems to be "yes", but I'm wondering if folks don't see any billing address fields, it may look suspicious. Conversions for having it and not don't seem to make much difference, so I suppose I'm looking for some tie-breaker opinions.

The "password" and "retype password" fields could be eliminated by emailing the user's a system-generated password. But once again, could a user see this as odd or suspicious and then abandon? Even if I tell them I'll be emailing them a password? They could be sensitive thinking we'd email the wrong email address due to system error or their own typo.

I could also eliminate the CVV and not validate against that. But once again, could a user seeing the CVV gone become wary?

As much as I'd like to have "guest checkout' it's not feasible. The app is tied to a logged in account, which would also make eliminating the "username" impossible.

Based on all the above, I could trim down the form considerably, but would I be doing more harm than good? I could A/B test it, but I don't believe I have a sufficient number of users to test against.

Everything I buy, physical or online app, has an address field, so perhaps folks are accustomed to filling out this stuff and I should just keep it to align with user expectations?

Thanks.