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1. Google stated it repeatedly and sticks to its decission: nofollow links are meant to tell crawlers not to follow the links. They don't pass pagerank and they won't influence your SERP rankings directly. Nevertheless, most nofollow links (comments, mentions etc) are great techniques for networking. Even if they won't have any impact on your SEO campaign, later on they can help you build partnerships, friendships and, eventually, they can lead to some pretty powerful dofollow links as well.

Best two things you can do are:

1. Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and then go to Traffic -> Search Queries. The keywords your site ranks for will appear within a few days after you confirmed your site on GWT.

2. Use a traffic tracking service and check if you get any traffic from search engines.

For detailed SERP reports on Google (including geo-specific reports) you should try www.georanker.com. As a registered user the tool allows you to crawl 100 keywords in each report.

Register on myblogguest.com and try contacting a few guest bloggers through  the forum. Their guest blogging community is pretty big, I'm sure you'll find quite a few guest bloggers that will fit your topic.

Use phone verification. Much faster and much easier.

Using a PO Box address on Google+ Places is one of the big DON'Ts. Google is against using PO boxes and in most cases they can even figure out that the address you declared isn't the real one. When this happens your Google place page gets deleted. Submitting your business again won't be very easy...

If you ask me, the most successful fake products are books that sell the secret to happiness, money and success. Though you have to be careful and make a really weird product, or else some people might buy it.

Is mysite.com a static page? Google values fresh content a lot, the fact that mysite.com/blog is a continuously updates with fresh articles can be an explanation for why it ranks better in search results.

Hi Diane,

This is a very legitimate question, especially since most SEO tool developers place pretty high price tags on their apps. Most tools require a monthly few between 100 and 800 USD, is it worth spending all this money on a tool? To answer your question you first need to look at  what you are currently working on. Do you have the budget to finance 3-4 paid tool subscriptions/month? SEO tools are meant to extract data and simplify reports that can mostly be generated manually too. Do you have time to generate these reports on your own?

In my opinion the most valuable tools are backlink checkers and SERP analyzers, that can be used for link prospecting. Such tools as Opensiteexplorer.org use their own crawler and provide data that isn't available anywhere else. The monthly fee gives you access to that data, which can prove to be very valuable, if used correctly.

SEO consultant from Romania here.

In our country "massive" link building stopped being effective about 3-6 months ago. Of course, at some searches spammy sites still show up among the TOP results... which is something I can't explain up until today. Nevertheless, bulk link building doesn't seem to have any impact on new sites. It's equal to zero and in some cases it even has negative effects.

Register on myblogguest.com and try contacting a few guest bloggers through  the forum. Their guest blogging community is pretty big, I'm sure you'll find quite a few guest bloggers that will fit your topic.

dofollowforums.org? Starting a link building campaign with building forum signature links is NOT a wise choice. If I were Google, this is where I'd start checking  for "bad links"...

Is mysite.com a static page? Google values fresh content a lot, the fact that mysite.com/blog is a continuously updates with fresh articles can be an explanation for why it ranks better in search results.

Is SEOmoz becoming a black hat tool?

SEO consultant from Romania here.

In our country "massive" link building stopped being effective about 3-6 months ago. Of course, at some searches spammy sites still show up among the TOP results... which is something I can't explain up until today. Nevertheless, bulk link building doesn't seem to have any impact on new sites. It's equal to zero and in some cases it even has negative effects.

As Mat Bennett already mentioned, the information provided by Alexa is way to impartial in order to provide any relevant information.

As for PageRank, in correlation with other metrics it's useful to find out if a website was penalized due to suspicious link schemes or link selling. For example, if a 2-3 year old website is linked through tons of good quality links, yet it has no PageRank, then there's most likely something rotten with it.

There are also a few programs that can automatically check a few things for you (headings, inbound links, metas etc). One such tool is seo-report.co.

If you ask me, the most successful fake products are books that sell the secret to happiness, money and success. Though you have to be careful and make a really weird product, or else some people might buy it.

First of all I'm curious why you want so badly to improve your Alexa rank. Alexa is deprecated, highly impartial. It calculates traffic through a toolbar only very few people have installed on their browsers. You can grow your Alexa rank (artificially) by finding masses of people who use the Alexa toolbar and ask them to access your site. Nevertheless, I don't know what good this will bring you.

Greetings,

I can only see two ways out of this dilemma:

1. You convince the site owner of the importance of having unique content and, based by the budget he offers you, you hire someone to rewrite product descriptions or just add some default paragraphs to each product. Starting a blog on the same domain and constantly updating it with fresh and unique articles might also be a good idea.

2. You try to get away from your client, before he'll get the chance to blame you for ranking droppings. People who don't understand the importance of unique content are usually the people who don't understand what proper, white hat SEO actually is. These are also the people who will probably blame you for future traffic changes and sales droppings.