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Thanks for the feedback David, that is one that seemed appealing to us ahead of the rest of the pack so glad to hear you've had good experiences with them!

Cheers,

Chris

I'm a bit surprised there doesn't seem to be a lot of info on their already on SEOMoz, so I'd appreciate any insight into this for a client of mine who is a currently a startup

There are lots of options from massive brand names like Google and Amazon right down to countless services I've never heard before.

For a smaller start-up with a technical edge. specifically service subscriptions for the webcam / video camera type of market, what would be an effective and cost friendly options to explore? Any shared experience is very appreciated.

Here is a list that pretty well captures the top 10, so these are all under consideration:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/category/affiliate-programs/

Cheers,

Chris

The ramifications of this would not be specific to myself but to anyone with this type of content on their pages...

Maybe someone can chime in here, but I'm not sure how much if at all site errors (for example 404 errors) as reported by Google Webmaster Tools are seen as a factor in site quality, which would impact SEO rankings. Any insight on that alone would be appreciated.

I've noticed some fairly new weird stuff going on in the WMT 404 error reports. It seems as though their engine is finding objects within the source code of the page that are NOT links but look a URL, then trying to crawl them and reporting them as broken.

I've seen a couple different of cases in my environment that seem to trigger this issue.

The easiest one to explain are Google Analytic virtual pageview Javascript calls where for example you might send a virtual pageview back to GA for clicks on outbound links. So in the source code of your page you would have something like:

onclick="<a class="attribute-value">_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outboundclick/www.othersite.com']);</a> 

Although this is obviously not a crawl-able link, sure enough Webmaster Tools now would be reporting the following broken page with a 404:

www.mysite.com/outboundclick/www.otherwite.com

I've seen other such cases of thing that look like URLs but not actual links being pulled out of the page source and reported as broken links.  Has anyone else noticed this? Do 404 instances (in this case false ones) reported by Webmaster Tools impact site quality rankings and SEO?

Interesting issue here, I'm looking forward to hear some people's thoughts on this.

Chris