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What I would like to know is how valued a link from the BBB is. I've searched various forums and websites to try and put a value on it, but I can't find a whole lot of useful discussion on it and how it can affect rankings. My ecommerce company has been approached by the BBB for Accreditation, which is something I've always been somewhat interested in. I realize many business owners either love/hate the BBB, but so far I have had several claims with them and they've always sided with my company, despite not being accredited. The BBB rep immediately started spouting off the benefits of having the BBB link to you, and I could see that as being true. They have a DA of 96, and obviously not everyone can get a link on that website (money and good reputation required). However, he probably exaggerated when he said often times businesses skyrocket in the rankings because of this backlink; he also seemed to think having the BBB code and badge that link to the BBB website seemed to affect rankings, which I don't think is correct. I also think that having their badge on our website could increase sales conversion (and maybe even increase the number of people that complain to the BBB). I'm not too worried about the complaints since we don't have ethics problems. The accreditation is $750 (seems high) and I'm not sure if it's really worth that amount, but I could be wrong. Would love some professional insight on if the BBB is worthwhile link or if it's overhyped and the money would be better spent elsewhere. At face value, it certainly seems like a good investment and I'd love to hear some insight as to how much value their backlink truly has to a company or if that money is better spent elsewhere.

Earlier today, I received a $50 off coupon for a Business.com listing. Back when I was really learning about directories, lots of people recommended getting one of these listings because editors actually review it to make sure the website linked is of good quality. Even the SEOmoz Directory Guide regards it as a good link. Now, it seems like every outbound link from Business.com has a 'nofollow' tag right when they link to the target website. Furthermore, the actual business listing doesn't even link to the website! Let me take, for example, web design companies: http://www.business.com/internet/web-design/ This directory has tons of 'nofollow' links. On top of that, if you take any of the companies listed and do a search for their business page, the business page doesn't even have a link to their website! That doesn't exactly seem like it's worth $300 a year... Any chance there is something I'm missing here? I'm not fully understanding this, it seems.

To begin with, please pardon me if this question is ignorant. I'm completely new to this whole social media thing, and somewhat feel it is overhyped. I find it really difficult to believe that social media will actually help the majority of small business owners out there like me, and that most of them are probably being misled about the powers of social media to increase sales. Because it's mentioned so frequently, I've decided to delve into it a bit more to see how this could possibly help me business. Over the past few weeks, I've become familiar with a company that sells Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, as well as YouTube and SoundCloud plays. Since my official Twitter and FaceBook accounts really didn't have that many followers, I decided to buy a few thousand followers for each account. Initially, I bought them because I wondered what would happen if a customer that visited my online store happened to go to those Twitter and Facebook pages. If I personally see a Facebook page with few followers, I probably wouldn't give them my business. I would want to go with a company that seems to generate a bunch of traffic to their pages. Originally, I only had about 200 Facebook followers (now called Likes, it seems) and maybe 25 Twitter followers. I now have over 12,000 Twitter followers and 2,000 Facebook Likes. I may end up buying more since the service was pretty quick and affordable. I'd like to know if Google factors Likes and followers into it's formula for creating SERPS. Will my website rank higher if I have 10,000 likes, rather than only 200? If so, would it be a notable increase? FWIW, I found that more people organically started following my Facebook and Twitter accounts once I had more followers. I didn't change anything about how I maintained the page; I just had more people following them. One other thing of note: these companies are almost certainly using fake/hacked accounts to like various pages around Facebook/Twitter. You can tell because my Facebook page says some city in Croatia has the most amount of 'likes' of my page. Do you think this might come into play at all? Thanks for any and all help!

Like the title says, about 3 weeks ago several websites linked to me. Those websites have very high and probably 100% of this board has heard of them. I'm wondering how long it takes for OSE to recognize these links, and if my website's DA and mozTrust will increase as a result?

Amateur hour over here, and I'd appreciate a kick in the right direction! I've done a fairly good job link building organically, but I need to start ranking better so I can actually have a good shot at catching up with my competitors. I've contacted companies that perform SEO work, and each one of them has said that link building is one of the most important things that can be done to increase page ranking on SERPs. For a set amount of money each month (in one instance, $6,000/month), they promised me many quality links with keywords in the anchor text and on the first page of SERPS for those keywords against competitors who have Domain Authority of 65+. How can they possibly do this? I've tried doing research into how they can get so many quality links, and I have a theory: these SEO companies have a very large network of websites they work with. The SEO groups charge me money, and in turn pays this network of websites to create pages that link to my website using desired anchor text. Additionally, perhaps the SEO companies have a network of websites that they actually own and simply create new articles about your company and link to it. Is this how it's done? Is this how SEO companies actually operate? And if so, isn't this technically black hat SEO seeing as the customer is paying for links (from what I've read, Google hates this). Could it be possible that if I pay for these links, and Google somehow found out about it, I could really pay the consequences later on? Appreciate any insight you can give me before I spend any money on SEO work. Thanks so much! I'm a new user and really, really like this community!