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I'm not talking about conjectures or guesses -- but SEO studies that is actually backed up by hardcore data. Which SEO firm produces excellent data-driven studies you always trust?

Some facts: We will probably only doe this 2-3 times a year (we have hundreds of links coming in each year from organic sources). This is for a really prestigious charity website with very nice link profile from other non-profits, news organizations, and even government websites. We will get a logo on their sponsorship page, with a link back to our site. Some articles say Google considers this "buying a link" and will therefore penalize you. Or at best, this will have no effect. And here's a Search Engine Land article saying the exact opposite. $1,500 is a lot of money. So I just want to make sure I'm not wasting it -- or worse -- getting penalized.

Hi guys, I told my extended network that we're hiring an SEO firm to do some white hat SEO auditing, link building, and ongoing seo consultation. Rae Hoffman's firm Pushfire came highly recommended via several sources. They seem to have a good blend of high profile (they speak at all sorts of conferences and write at various prestigious publications) and reasonable pricing. I was wondering what fellow moz members think about this firm. Any reviews or thoughts are welcome!

Hi guys, I'm completely new to PPC. I want to hire a firm to help drive PPC traffic to credit card landing pages. Our starting budget is limited ($2,000/month for everything) but can grow to about $5,000 if we see results. My questions are: Where can I find a list of good PPC firms that fits my vertical (credit cards) and budget? What are the key questions I should ask a PPC firm before I hire them? Is there a "Beginner's Guide to PPC" type of whitepaper, ebook, article, or course I can take to educate myself? Thanks in advance!

Neil Patel claimed in this article that by creating a custom 404 page that links out to 25 to 50 random internal pages on the website, he was able to increase the traffic of Techcrunch by 9%. I'm a bit skeptical about this claim. A couple of questions: Is this theory sound? If you've personally tried this or have read other articles supporting Neil, I'd love to learn more. Would a big site like Techcrunch really have problems with Google not indexing all of its pages? Also, does getting more pages crawled help you get more traffic? Specifically, would it help a site like mine? For reference, my site gets an average of 12,040 pages crawled per day in last 90 days. Currently 28,922 pages have been indexed. Are there any possible downsides to trying this? Thanks!

Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!