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With all the new emphasis on on-page metrics and social metrics, would it be possible to rank well without putting much emphasis on backlinking if your content is significantly better than the rest of the ranking pages? Say #1 to #5 are pages of 500 word generic content. We come in with 2,000 word specific, high-quality content. Can we get by without spending as much time/energy on backlinking? Would the on-page factors make up for it, or has the game not changed that much?

It seems that a lot of the focus of SEOs, especially whitehat SEOs like SEOMoz and Distilled has shifted a lot more towards improving page metrics (bounce, return rate, etc) and social metrics. I'm curious - And of course, I'm just asking for guesses - But what percent of ranking do you think is page metrics, social metrics and other non-link based metrics and what percent do you think are link based metrics?

Hey SeoMozzers, Do you guys use broad match or exact match to gauge whether or not there's enough volume to be worth your time? Take the freelancing niche for example. These are the results for broad match: <a class="aw-ti-resultsPanel-details">how to be a freelance writer [2,740,000]</a> how to freelance [165,000] In exact match however: <a class="aw-ti-resultsPanel-details">how to become a freelance writer [1,000]</a> how to freelance [480] In this niche in particular, there's not really any keyword that gets more than 20,000 exact match searches a month. However, the broad level keywords have more than 2 million searches. Here's my thinking: Instead of targeting highly specific terms to optimize for, I'm just going to optimize for broad terms and aim to capture the long tail. It seems there's a lot of people searching for things, but they're all spread out across different keywords. So my instinct is to go with the broad match results, assume there's enough traffic to support a profitable website and ignore the low exact match results. Your thoughts ... ?

Let's say you own three websites. One is low quality and Google frowns upon it, another is moderate and a third has stellar unique content. Would Google penalize the third website because you own the first website? On a related note - If you were banned from Google AdWords, would registering a site in your name potentially harm your rankings?