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It has to do with the severe decrease in value and trust that Google once gave article sites like ezinearticles.com.  Once beloved, Google chose to recalibrate their level of importance.  Once this occurred, the value of the content, links, and everything related to such sites plummeted.

While I do not want to go as far as calling them a graveyard, in which if a link of yours is found in them you get demoted, it was and is extremely close.

Links from quality sites are still vital, however the strategy has changed.  This should be a lesson to anyone who puts their eggs in one basket, doesn't diversify their link building, or treads in areas that may one day be considered suspect by the big search engines.

It ultimately comes down to which site has the better content, is ideally optimized for your keywords and phrases, and has the best linkage presence.

All things being equal, its most likely a 1-2 scenario.

Obviously you can attempt to do whatever you want and hope for the best.  The biggest question is can you, your business, or your clients business afford to get caught doing something shady in any way, shape or form.

The biggest issue will be competing businesses ratting out the listing to the major search engines.

I would love some exact clarification on the use of a virtual office, as in my mind it would be in the same category as a PO Box as a person cannot enter the retail space/office to do business.

I've never looked into or considered a virtual office scenario, but it sounds extremely plausible.  It isn't much different than a UPS address, but the benefit is the virtual office company knows the USE of address.  That way there is some protection to being "caught."  Caught is obviously relative depending on how you view the TOS of a search engine or local directory.

I don't see anyway around having a retail space/address when marketing to a local area.  Having an online business with no retail space is what divides local from national/international.

While there are ways of tricking the directories and/or search engines, by having a P.O. Box, or UPS address, or even choosing the address of a currently empty space, I do not believe this is a smart way of becoming a popular local business with a good reputation.

Best of luck.

It is my opinion that video marketing is somewhat ahead of its time, and not worth putting a ton of time, money, or effort into at this point. That includes a service like Tubemogul that ultimately spams social media and video sites with you video.

Unless your video is unique enough to become popular, touching or funny enough to become viral, I would only produce videos that would be relevant for my website/blog and visitors.

Alexander,

I think you may have answered your own question.  If Matt Cutts says they are fine but don't use them to increase your potential keyword percentage, I wouldn't do it.  If you utilize a tag cloud to help navigate your site/posts/pages then go for it.

As always, it always comes down to quality, unique content.  There is no way of getting around it, so just build excellent site navigation, and proper linkage in your homepage content and you're set.

Best of luck.

While your page rank may be zero, your Mozrank is 46/100 which is pretty decent.  It just goes to show you that the PR that can be found via the checkers are either not accurate, or do not matter as much as we may think.  Especially if you are ranking highly for many of your keyword targets.

While I am not a huge fan of the design, it is extremely straightforward.  Where it might be lacking is the unique content and information that would bring value to a visitor.  The other SEO elements seem to be in tact in the few pages I have checked.  You even have quite a few links(although much FEWER than larger competitors.)

The time off is likely the culprit for low rank as the PR is updated quarterly or less. So you may see an uptick in PR in the next round of updates.

I think time is the biggest element here, as there is a chance that the content has yet to be crawled or indexed.  While I have read that there is benefit to having links as close to the root page/domain as possible, I don't believe pages being a directory or two away matters all that much.

You would definitely want to do proper redirection if you are going to change your url structure site wide. If you are utilizing a platform like wordpress this is rather easy.

You might also want to consider keeping the current structure in tact, and creating links on the previous well ranked page.  I would most likely go with the 301 redirect, but have seen popular blogs/sites simply put a link on the previous page to the new page.  That way the popular page will still be seen but the new link will be easily crawled and indexed.

Having a good understanding of the site navigation and how internal page rank is passed is well worth it if you are doing a complete redesign.  Something I just came across may also be worth reading:

The New Page Rank

An example that I saw that worked recently was for a pasta company, and they literally sent out free pasta for every person that signed up.  You ended up having to like and follow their company to sign up as well, so they killed 3 birds with one stone.

I found out about it from a "frugal blog" site.

It was seriously popular, and it built a following that was specific to the brand and product.  Excellent idea, but probably not the cheapest thing ever done.

Try installing the plugin I suggested.

You changed the permalink structure that was followed previously, so you will want to make sure they get redirected properly.

The plugin I mentioned will do just that.

There is also the off chance that you need to empty the cache of your website via your cache plugin, or server side.

Buying traffic sounds like a bad short term solution for a longer term issue.

While I believe there may be some positive results from getting a bunch of fake traffic to a site, blog, facebook, or twitter campaign, what do you think your client would prefer?

1. Purchased traffic that fakes out Google temporarily, with the possibility of punishment and other repercussions?

2. A legitimate campaign that reaches out to their current customer base, and allows for an organic following of their site, blog, twitter, facebook?

I know as a small business owner, I would realize that the second answer might take a lot longer, but would be superior to number one if the correct strategy is put into place.

As many of the recent SEOmoz blog posts point out, building a friendship and loyalty between a business/site and their customers is absolutely key.  It should be approached as a fledgling friendship, and the rewards will be real when one if finally developed.

As far as a specific Facebook "like" campaign goes, start with the basics.  Have all of the owners and employees follow the business in question, and "like" and/share all the likeable shares and posts.

Before this happens it would be advisable to have these same people ask them to follow the business as well.

Hope my suggestions help.

If I am understanding Rand and Todd's opinions correctly regarding this subject:

Rand believes it doesn't matter.

Todd believes it does matter and can be beneficial.

To me that would say to err on the side of caution and choose Todd.  Not because he is correct, but because there is no harm in doing so either way according to Rand.

Am I understanding this correctly?  The blog existed, had MANY blog posts previous to the update of the url structure, and not you are now seeing broken linkage via that app?

The best thing to do is to install this plugin:

Permalinks Moved Permanently

It should correct your problem.

After reading a recent blog post on guest blogging and ways to build relationships for link building purposes, I began to wonder about something.

It is my understanding that one way backlinks are superior to reciprocal linkage, but reciprocal is better than no link at all.

So is it still worthwhile to do reciprocal guest blogging, and will the value of the links be worth it when completed?

Or should we just be of the opinion that:

One Way Link > Reciprocal > No link