This would seem like a no-brainer, but it's not on your list so I would add effective email writing to your list. We all know a good personal email can go a long way toward building a relationship and ultimately, high quality links. If there is a website I am really aiming to earn a link from, I usually don't even ask until the second or third email, and by then I barely even have to ask.
Best posts made by dunklea
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RE: What link building techniques do you teach to new hires with no SEO experience?
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RE: 301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
A 301 redirect is basically telling search engines that content has moved from an old URL to a new one. In order to do this effectively the content has to no longer exist on the old domain (if a 301 redirect wasn't there, a 404 would be returned).
And yes, you should redirect each page individually. This will ensure that what PageRank the old content had is passed onto the correct new content. Redirecting everything to your homepage means that the rest of your new site is effectively starting from scratch.
If you're trying to redirect over thousands of URLs you might want to look into writing some custom Apache script to match everything together. It's a little tricky, but can potentially save you a lot of time!
Good luck,
Andrew
PS. Remember to update your Google Webmaster settings to let Google know that you moved your content to a new domain.
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RE: Nofollowing to boost internal page rankings.
What's your PageRank? I have seen evidence that websites with high PR can get away with a higher number of links on their homepage. Just look at the New York Times or similar sites. They have 100's of thinks on their front page, but Google will crawl all of them because of their authority.
But to address your question, no, nofollowing internal links has been shown to be ineffective and frowned upon by Google (see link in other reply). Follow everything and really think about the value of each link and whether it really needs to be there.
Good luck!
Andrew
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Why does SEOMoz use Wistia? Why would you not use YouTube as well? Does Vimeo factor into the equation at all?
I am wondering what the best options are for video hosting websites (YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, etc.). Which host has the best interface that you would want to use to embed into your site? Any advice you have in regards to optimizing the videos on our site, then that would be much appreciated. Thanks! And our YouTube channel is here http://www.youtube.com/user/gooverseas
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RE: Is there any SEO benefit for links shared in Facebook feeds or wall posts?
In my experience it really depends on the user is sharing the information and their Facebook privacy settings. If the user has everything open to the world, then it stands to reason that a Google bot will see these as well. Google has stated that Facebook and other social media sites have been given more weight to their organic rankings, but it is hard to say how much. Either way, I strongly suspect that this trend will continue.
ALSO, Google does rank the influence of the user sharing the post. If a user has a lot of 'trust' then that share will be worth a lot more than say a new Facebook user. Something to keep in mind.
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RE: Domain authority decrease after open site explorer update. Reasons?
We noticed the same decrease on three of our websites as well, and some of the competitors we track. One of our websites also went dramatically up (with many new questionable links). I believe this latest update of the link graph had some major changes that altered the domain authorities on a lot of websites. These numbers are all relative to everyone else, so hopefully this isn't an accurate reflection of how our websites are performing.
Good luck! Happy optimizing
Andrew
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Rich-Snippets with Sitelinks. How-to?
Quick question with a hopefully easy answer (and to get away from all this Penguin 2.0 talk). Does anyone have any tips for activating Sitelinks for landing pages other than your homepage?
I've attached a screenshot to better illustrate what I'm hoping to achieve, but basically I would like our SERP to have the same extra links under our meta description as the #2 result. I haven't been able to find any direct information as to how to achieve this. Is their markup code involved? Another one of those things that Google just randomly does?
The keyword in questions is, "teaching jobs abroad" FYI
Any factors that would point me in the right direction would be very helpful!
Andrew
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RE: What's the best SEO practice to get conversion rate up?
Sounds to me like you haven't researched and targeted the right keywords. In my experience, long tail keywords convert better than high volume keywords. The trick is to target A LOT of long tail keywords to keep your volume and sales up.
I would setup a Google Adwords account and start testing there to see which keywords convert the best, and then target those same keywords in organic search. This way you can quickly get relevant feedback.
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RE: Pagination and links per page issue.
Rel canonical doesn't tell engines not to crawl the page (the mata tag nofollow does that), but rather just tells the engine not to index the page in place of the 1st page of your pager results. This helps reduce duplicate content penalties and consolidates your PA onto a single URL. I could be wrong, but I imagine you would also prefer organic users to go to the first page of results rather than, say, page 6.
The result is that engines will still crawl your pages and find your listings (and index those), but only index the first page of your listing page.
I hope that helps to clarify things!
Andrew
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RE: If UGC on my site also exists elsewhere, is that bad? How should I properly handle it?
Definitely -- would still be nice to hear another opinion or two, but Todd was very specific and thorough. I've got some great, actionable takeaways from this conversation.