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From an SEO perspective and from a webmaster's perspective I would love to have comments on my website and blog.  I would enjoy seeing the search engines get all of that content and I would enjoy the community of friends that would develop around the topics that I publish.

However, I don't have comments turned on for the following reasons:

1. Comment spammers would stink up my site with linkdrops, product mentions, beggings and trollings.  I know that there is software to guard aginst these but some will still get through and it will make your site a target for the underworld of the web.   The more successful your blog becomes the bigger this problem gets and it can easily get to a point where you can't scale it with enjoyment or profit.

2. A blog or a website on almost any  topic will require a certain amount of moderation as there will be a small number of errors, petty disagreement, and other problems that require attention.  Again the busier your blog the greater these minor problems become.  Volunteer moderators could help a lot with these problems.

3. Saved for last is the one that in my opinion can be the greatest problem - people who have a personal jihad against the topic or the industry that you cover.  If you blog is about kittens this will probably not be too big of a problem, however, if it is about one of the more controversial political, social, environmental or religious issues your blog, email, telephone and more could be placed under heavy attack.  If you like this type of challenge it could be a great way to get links and traffic - it might scale profitably. But if you don't care for this type of engagement you better turn the comments - you will still get some of this but it will be at a much lower level.

Absolutely!  How could you possibly resist all of that content?  salivating

Related discussion here.

I have not read any studies about length and how Google evaluates the video.  I believe that Google learns about the video from how visitors respond to it.  Do they visit the video page? Do they start the video?

You have probably heard this one before....

"Short enough to be interesting... but long enough to cover all of the details"

There are two parts of this....

Offpage... all of your links will remain the same no matter what content you display.  So if your anchor text is optimized there that should support stable rankings

Onpage... if you keep your title tag, H1 and some other onpage mark-up in place then different topics rotating through the blog should not be a huge factor.

I believe that the factors above are more powerful than the loss that you might suffer through keyword dilution.  And ,  if you want your site to be like this just earn a few more links to support your current rankings.  Isn't that what the blog is supposed to do?

I think that you can get links that will lift your rankings from these services.  However, I feel that these are risky links.  The risk is probably one of the links being devalued and your site dropping an amount equivalent to the links being removed - thus you wasted your money.

I would not use this service.  I would instead invest in content with the goal of having a quality level that is high enough that other webmasters will link to it without any work or payment from me.

Second question:  Is 15 links a month from PR 2-5 blogs (writing on my subject matter) enough to help out?

Maybe Yes, Maybe No.  It depends upon who you are attacking.

Linkbuilding is not a game of numbers, it is a game of relative velocity.   Let's say that your competitor has 150 links and you might say... "If I get 15 links per month I should catch him in about a year."  That works well if your competitor has a crappy site that attracts no natural links and if he is sitting on his butt instead of linkbuilding.

However, if your competitor is gaining 20 links per month and you are only gaining 15 then you will never catch him.

Also, if your competitor has 150,000,000 links and you gain 15 per month you will never catch him.

So, it depends upon who you are competing against, how hard they are working and how their content smells.

(I am not touching that first question... some people would say that they are paid links and even if they are not considered paid links those blogs could be into other types of manipulation.   Be careful and realize the potential risks.)

I do not believe that you will receive any benefit from using an Amazon Webstore.  However, if you start listing items on Amazon.com you will have a great opportunity to get search engine traffic from the strength of the Amazon domain.  I used to sell a lot via Amazon - but their high fees drove me to selling on my own site.  It's really hard to beat Amazon.com in the SERPs.

I believe that you are lucky that they run two websites.  The reason... they have gotten backlinks into both of those domains instead of focusing ALL of their backlinks into a single domain. That divides their power instead of concentrating it.

So, I don't worry about competitors who think that they are going to build five websites in the same niche to kickass on me.  Let them do it, divide their energy, divide their time and divide the backlinks.

I will start sweating when they redirect all of their satellite sites to the homesite.

I used to have a few competitors who ran multiple identical sites - all linking to one another.

Today just one site remains.  Duplicates are filtered from the SERPs.

My bet is that these competitors will have just one site in the SERPs by this time next year.

I would place my bets that Amazon's page won on the basis of domain authority.

I have a number of long articles that were produced by merging the content of multiple short articles.  These single-page articles bring in a lot more total traffic than all of the short articles combined.  They pull that traffic because of the enormous diversity of words on the page but also because of higher overall rankings.

If you merge these lintel articles and produce a title tag like below, I think that the page will be a candidate for the "lintel" and "lintels" SERPs plus all of the subterms such as "wooden lintels"......

<title>Structural Lintels: Wooden, Steel, Concrete, Stone, Cavity</title>

Pages like this should have a general description of lintels at the top and then subheading paragraphs for wooden, steel, concrete, etc.  A menu of on-page anchor text links will be obviously displayed at the top of the page - much like you see in a long wikipedia article.  These on-page anchor links, in my opinion, have almost as much optimization power as a title tag.

I agree that a big page like this might not immediately rank as well as individual pages, each optimized for a single keyword.  However, these big impressive pages will attract links faster than several short articles.  Those links will power them to higher overall traffic and rankings in the long term - which is what I am playing for.

Relevant to this question, my experience is from building information pages on information sites.  We load them with deep substantive content supplemented with data, media and images.   Several thousand words, reference lists, data tables, a video or two and a dozen big images.

This is an info site with a small store.  The info pages get us into competitive, high traffic SERPs but we often feature sales items just like you might see adsense or other promotions. These can be buy buttons right on the info page and always have links to a product pages with full product information.

A great way to put products into difficult relevant SERPs.

Interesting... very strange... when I click through the listing in the SERPs, I land on this  URL.....

https://sites.google.com/a/burtonsnowboardsonsale.com/sites/system/app/pages/meta/domainWelcome

Anybody know what's happening here?

I really like Alan's answer.  Just tossing out something else to consider and that is TRUST.....

I wonder if physical locations nationwide, multiple toll free numbers, multiple trust seals could be helpful in  this business niche?   Not saying that this is in fact the case, but are there any additional ways that you can exhibit trust on your site.  Will probably benefit you in many ways.

I have lots of articles on websites and the ones that earn the most links, pull the most traffic and rank the highest in the search engines - for the most difficult keywords - are the ones with the most substantive content.

When I write an article about a subject I want the person to land on the page and say WOW!  - without having to read it.

In your example, if someone was writing an article about buildings and used the word lintel and wanted to link to a page that explained them, which do you think they would link to?  A short page about wooden lintels or a substantive page with descriptions and photos of many types of lintels?

I am figuring that them buying the links are not negatively affecting the sites or they would lose their clients if they got into black hat links. It must be good inorder for them to keep their clients.

I have been watching SEO forums for a long time and can tell you that lots of people arrive there for the first time and post...  WAH!  My SEO got my site banned!  Puleeeezzeee help me!   So, they are not all keeping their clients happy.

I was interested in buying links, but do not know who to trust. Does anyone have a recommendation?

I think that you have two risks.... Trust is the one you identified... and.... Under the radar is the one that you need to consider.  Anyone who answers your question in an open forum isn't under the radar.

I would enjoy seeing google close the accounts of people who are doing spammy +1's.

...it automatically penalizes sites that don't have it...

I feel the same way - especially about the review stars that you can see in the SERPs - the small player is screwed. Put it on your site to minimize damage.

Yesterday I went to several sites such as HuffingtonPost, TechCrunch, WashingtonPost and Mashable who were reported to be "partnered" users.  The number of people using  +1 was puny when compared to the number of people using tweets, Facebook shares, and email.  Almost nobody using it.  Facebook was  500:1 above it.   When I googled the titles of their articles I could see the counts displayed in the SERPs.  It's still early, usage will probably increase over time.

I have the  big AddThis chicklets at the top of my site set to "preferred services and personalization" (it displays services that the visitor has already used to share).   Yesterday I changed the last preferred service to force Google Plusone but it produced a chicklet with a count that broke my design.

So, I am going to watch this for a couple of weeks to see if the usage rate picks up.  I  think that getting a bunch of +1's for your site will be extremely valuable in the SERPs.

My concern about +1 is that the initial information that google has put out about it is not very easy to understand, clicks to dead URLs and has content that will turn off people who worry about privacy.  Also, +1 has been around for a while in other forms and people might be tired of seeing yet another iteration.  I am not betting big money on this one.

We have enriched lots of pages from a few sentences to several paragraphs and then to substantive articles of a couple thousand words with images, tables, references and sometimes video.   These enrichments usually were accompanied by a ranking improvement but were always accompanied by an increase in long tail traffic and an increase in the average visitor time on page.  I believe that they also made the pages much more linkable.

I agree 100% with what Ryan said.

Something else to consider is... when you give articles away to other websites you are giving them content that could make them competitors in the SERPs of your primary and secondary keywords.  They could outrank you and cut off your traffic.

Also, if you give high quality articles away they will earn links for other websites instead of your own.

We never give articles away because we don't like to feed existing competitors and create new ones.

We simply have the .pdfs on our own site and many people link to them.  We are happy to have those links and those links make these .pdf documents rank in the SERPs for important keywords (you can edit the properties of a .pdf document to produce a "title tag" that will optimized them and display in the SERPs.).

We could add a notation to our website that invites people to post them on their own website or add customized branding (still keeping the embedded links to our own site).   Or, we could contact webmasters who link to them on our site and offer the custom brand if they host the document on their own server.  That would get us some additional backlinks.

Thanks. When I read "marketing" I thought you were selling.

If I was taking that approach I would place it in a .pdf and have a few embedded links within it that click the visitor to your website where more information can be obtained.  If you allow others to post the free guides on their websites these will be spidered and counted by google as backlinks to your website.

Also, if you have a shopping cart that allows "buy buttons" you can embed links within a .pdf that can make a sale by linking to your shopping cart.

Good luck!

This is contrary to what you are asking... but I would probably post it on my website in public view as a way to attract links.

I have written some product guides and that is what I have done with them.  They are some of my best pages for pulling in search engine traffic and have attracted a nice number of links.  These pages are responsible for a lot of my sales and reduce the number of questions that we must answer by phone or email.

Using your idea, I guess I could take all of the product guides that appear on my site, bundle them into an easily printable .pdf and offer them as a download for $9.95.  Now I get the traffic, get the links and sell a few copies too.  Best of everything. 

A friend of mine has a lot of how-to-do-it pages on his website but also sells ebooks that includes all of the stuff posted on his site but some bonus items too.  There is another way to approach it.

The shelf life of a blog post is indefinite.

However, let's imagine how the value might diminish over time....

Let's say that the blog where the post is published has the ten most recent posts on its homepage, and each post is assigned to one category, and each category page displays ten posts.

When your blog post is brand new the page where it is displayed has one link into it from the homepage of the blog and one page into it from the main category page.  However, after many other posts are added the blog post no longer displays on the homepage and to find it in the homepage archive you must page back several pages.  The same is true for the category page.  After ten posts in that category it is getting buried in the pagination for that category.  So over time the links to your blog post page will be buried deeper and deeper in the pages of the blog and less linkvalue is passed.

I would contact the site with the 22 links and ask them to add the www if you think that they will be friendly about the request.

I would also modify my htaccess file to 301 redirect all non-www URLs to the www version - that will set you up to avoid most future problems.

Finally, be sure that all of your on-site links are coded for the www, check your site map, and set to the www version in Google Webmaster Tools.

Sure, its OK to do - if your client really has a history and a presence in each of those communities.

Let's say that your client does high-end landscaping.  You could create a website with one page for each community where he has done at least one highly visible project and - with owner permission -  feature them in a fantastic photo gallery.  The great photos will be a testament to his work, demonstrate his reputation in each community and instill confidence and trust in potential clients.

Get professional photos and offer them to the clients for use on their website with a possible link to the photo gallery.

Be sure that you have genuine content.  I would not make a site that has twenty pages of yada, yada, yaday, yada Oakwood..... yada, yada, yaday, yada Shiloh.....  yada, yada, yaday, yada Riverside.....  You will be filtered for doing that.

I can't say for sure because I am not familiar with the site.

I have secondary menus in the side navigation of a couple of my own sites and visitors click on them.  On one site about 30% of the homepage clicks are on a secondary menu located near the bottom of the page (a popular free resource that brings in a lot of organic traffic but does not produce revenue).

Not answering the question but a comment on the topic...

A PA/DA of mid 80s is absolutely phenomenal. For reference, this is a DA often seen on the websites of major universities - Berkeley.edu is 86.  I would be skeptical of a DA Mid80s site that would give homepage and sitewide links.  Sounds too good to be true.  I would wonder if the site has enough manipulative links to make it dangerous?  Just sayin' how this registers here (if it sounds too good to be true then maybe it is)....  but maybe you have found a treasure?

Should we nofollow these links in the secondary menu?

In my opinion, definitely not.  If you nofollow them then the pagerank that would have flowed into them will be lost.  If you keep these links on your site let the power flow into them.

I would test conversion rate too.... I bet people who see the full text without having to click are better buyers.

Hiding that text could be costing a lot of sales.

Visitor will be able to view first 30 words and there will be a "read more" text link just after that content. If they want to read more (which we think most will do) they will have to click the text link and rest of the content will slide open in the same page.

If you think most will want to read the full description then why would you want to hide it?   Why make the visitor do anything extra to see your content?

Based upon your post it sounds like you are doing this because you are "protecting" your design.  If this was my site I would be putting my design efforts into serving the visitors instead of inconveniencing them to conserve a design that does not work.

You can probably find a way to make the page look great while showing the full description.

I would use wordpress because it has many useful plug-ins that work great for blogs.

I would also place the blog in a folder rather than a subdomain.  If you place it in a folder then your primary domain will get greater benefit from any links that hit the blog.   Take a look at where SEOmoz has their blog - its in a folder.

What are your thoughts on this statement?

It hits really high on my BS meter.

When the pairs of pages were first built we simply replaced WordA with WordB.  Then ran into a duplicate content problem - lots of pages were being filtered from the search results.  We then wrote unique for all pages.

Thanks Dave.

That article surprised me.  I never expected google to have robots trained to hack at forms.  I wonder how many other robots are out there stuffing data into forms?

I made two pages for each product.

One was highly optimized for the slang name (highest search volume) and lightly optimized for the formal name.  The second was highly optimized for the historical name and lightly for the ignorant.

That was a few years ago.  Once my site became dominant in the SERPs for all of these terms (for a wide variety of products) I merged the two pages of content and now have just one page highly optimized for the slang name with mentions of historic, ignorant and formal.

I think that google is getting better at associating the usage of these words and today google often changes my title tag to match the query.

Might be Google knocking.... 

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-fills-out-forms-crawls-results-13760

Thanks for the details.  I understand your problem better now.

I have a site that sells a product that has a formal name, a slang name, an archaic name and an ignorant name.   Something like photographs, photos, pictures, pics.   Google understands that my site is about all of these  - and even related words such as "images".

When my site was new and weak I had to create special pages in a historical context or slang context to get optimal rankings for those words.  As my site grew more powerful the primary pages began to rank well for all of the word variants.

If you have links into all of these 25000 pages then people and robots will be able to find them.

If you want to keep robot scrapers out then you can use a white list of robots that allows the robots of search engines and other allowed automated visitors in but instructs others to keep out.  No guarantees that they will not find a way in with this but it might help.  Human scraping will still get through.

You could probably also devise a way to throttle the number of pageviews per visitor or per IP but that would take some creative programming.

and I cannot put that many keywords in the page...

I don't know why this is the case but if I was in your situation I would either fix it or change my philosophy about what can be displayed on a page.

I understand that if someone optimizes for "cards sapo pepe" they would get higher than my site.

if you don't have the word "cards" on your page or in link anchor text that hits your page then you page will not be relevant.

My question is: does Search Engines rank you high if you optimize your page  for a subset of the keywords people search for?

Yes, but only if you deserve it.   You will not rank high for "cards Mickey Mantle" unless you have a strong site or a number of good links

The suckerfish menus at htmldog work well....

http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/example/

http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/example/

http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

Thank you Alan, I appreciate your kind words.

One valuable reason to answer questions is that whenever I have a question of my own folks like you and Steve O always put a little extra into answering.

Lots of people think that they should build 25 sites to kickass on their competitor. Following that temptation will cause you to divide your time on a lot of projects that each will be puny against the competition.

Remember, SEO is like war and great generals know to divide the forces of their competitor and kickass on them one unit at a time with overwhelming force.  Don't divide your forces for the enemy.

The best route is usually to put ALL of your effort into a single site in one niche. Then when that site becomes the #1 ranking dominant site in that niche you can think about a second site that will rule the SERPs in one of your most profitable subniches - powered by links from your main site.

When you have that job done then move to another subniche. Save your KW domains for this effort.

Lots of people think that they should build 25 satellite sites to give links back to their main site... but I believe that the really successful strategy is to do the reverse.

I shouldn't be telling this stuff.

Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page.  However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page.  So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same?

Let's reverse the math.

Which do you think will win in a head to head battle for "cheap hotel in paris" ?

-   One big domain with 5000 backlinks

-   One small domain with 1000 backlinks

Whichever you think will win is where you should place your bets.

All of my money is on the big domain.

I think that the key here is the quality of your content.

If you have substantive content that is genuinely linkworthy then you should not be afraid to link out to other domains.  However, if you are just tossing up yada yada yada content that nobody cares about then you are not only wasting those links, you are wasting those pages and you are wasting your time.

Now, if you are worried about linkjuice then consider how that page fits in the linkage of your site.  If it has a sitewide link into it then a lot of linkjuice is going to flow in and a lot is going to flow out.  However, if there is only one link from an unimportant page coming in then not nearly as much will flow out.

I personally don't worry about linkjuice.  I just link out as it meets the needs of my content and my visitors.

If you want to rank in the USA your site should be hosted in the USA.

I would move ASAP.