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Well then it does. I often see images counting as links for many websites.

It is about gathering a community and making it spread the word and not so much about seo stuff like keywords and so on. Even if ebay did not rank well on google people will still use it as much and talk about it as much.

But search engines do count likes +1s and so on so they are metrics now and yes the more the better.

If they do not submit good content you may be flagged as spam site and this will damage your rankings for sure. Better stay away from this.

Yep ... it is a public secret that once u rank first for some keywords and people get to know you you start ranking automatically for others too because people spread the word. And optimizing the next 5 is easier and thus less costly.

I totally agree with him here.

Well there are a few aspects to it. When u are hosting your images elsewhere people will find them via google images on amazon. But you still get your links from them.  Or actually you can check whether or not u get any link value with the open site explorer.

Here is the link for the social development guidelines from facebook

http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages?sk=app_283788381634959

You should definitely find another vendor that does not use spam techniques because the recent google panda update really hits them very hard.

I am not saying the budget is over the top ... I am saying that if they are spending it for the services they listed it is not well spent.

Actually it may be legit. The technique is as follows ... you create a small article directory on your website which they use and they include your link on other such sites that create small article directories too. The thing is that they can go black hat real easy and also they can submit porn sites as well.

The way to determine whether to work with them or not is the following :

Check the source code of the pages ... or make your webmasters do it. Double check it!

If the source(here meaning the company) is trustworthy they will have at least a digital signature or something that makes you trust them. If you don't trust them completely do not do it.

For pages that have similar link metrics and are competing for the first page rankings I would really recommend to focus on the social metrics as of late they seem to be what helped me get my clients from top 5-9 to 1-3.

If you give more information about the page and keyword we can do further analysis and see what you lack from the puzzle. But you can do that yourself too ..

Check here :

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

If u are missing a piece of the pie simply do work on it and get to the top.

The kung fu panda roundhouse kicked you man It is the same with so many people. You have been naughty and you chose quantity over quality and the big G said "NO" to your links and kept the quality ones. You can ask them and they will tell you the same in much kinder words.

Google has a "do not be evil policy" so they do not attack competition in such ways as much as i know.

Add a separate analytics code on a sepparate analytics account   Register the www.domain.com/za/ url in webmaster tools and so on. treat it like any normal website just with a different link.

Getting likes tweets and +1s should be your everyday work man. First thing is that once you get a person liking your page once you do not lose them so it is much different than a click ! By gathering a community of fans you can make them do work for you ... invite new people, spread the word, word by mouth offline advertise you and so on. It is the new age of the online world man. There are really good tutorials on how to do that in the facebook guidelines for pages. AWESOME resource you should really check it out it gives tons of insights how to do social online development for businesses and people.

Man ... a category is very similar to a catalog ... both are listings ... You should take a look at imdb.com here you should really call me and i can help you free of course.

Youtube , Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and your local top 1 for example vbox7 for bulgaria and hulu for the US and so on.

Suggestions :

Do it manually create accounts and channels!

Add descrition with a link to your website.

Add transcription of the video.

Add subtitles.

Add videos frequently ... like every Friday or every day at 8pm.

If u have money for that or time to spend ... make the videos HIGH quality so that users spread them.

Have this in mind ... "Be real" otherwise people will not spread your videos and they will never hit a million views.

Google indexing works like taking a snapshot ... thus it depends on which content it catches when the indexing occurs it would have nearly no effect you should aim for the pages where the products really reside to optimize well for them and go for the broad terms for the main page.

The price you are paying is GIGANTIC .... You can get what they are offering for like 250$ per keyword. and you are paying 100 times more.

And as the other guy said most of it is rubbish ... what they are offering is a lot of low quality links and what you need is not so much high quality links.

Regarding your content :

Google and people and "our world" basically favors quality over quantity. For the price you are paying you can get someone to "rework" your content so that it is professionally made like apple's content for the users and also keyword targeted for your searches. In other words REAL on page optimization.

Regarding your social networks status :

Also you will get professionally made profiles in all the social networks (VERY high quality backinks from them too)  As Gillian (The president of seomoz ) told me when i last met her ... "it is all about gathering and nourishing your community". You will start gathering the community of your real fans... the real people that like you and will really spread the word about you.

Regarding links :

You can get links to relevant sites to yours and high quality ones. For example the 1 link you get from YouTube which has Page Rank 9 is worth 10 000 of the links you are buying for 100 000 times lower price ... Also the open directory and so on. I am from Bulgaria and I always do quality work here ... it is amazing how great it works on the low markets ... I get a clients website to top 1 on all keywords for 2-3 weeks just including them to like 20-40 websites like youtube, dmoz , facebook , linkedin , and websites from their area. The days of "automatic seo" are over man it has SO LOW value that it is not worth it.

Advice : You should be paying someone to research your busyness and figure out link bait techniques, find high quality relevant websites you can make link partnerships with, understand your busyness and advise you on how to spread the word and go social, work on your content and do some usability work and so on.

Regarding your vendor :

The services you listed are the lowest quality possible and are being almost surely done with automation software which sooner or later gets "caught" by Google.

Advide : Totally YES ... change the vendor. You can find lots of great people that can do that for you here in the seomoz community ... including my company ( a bit of shameless self promotion here for the time i spent answering )

It doesnt really help to "increase indexation" but rather to speed it up so that your pages get indexed on time and this is important to do after optimization or if you publish news or other "time dependent" content.

Usually it is considered a best practice to optimize 1 page for 1 keyword or key phrase so i would recommend in your case to edit the pagination of the website a bit and maybe optimize for 2-3 keywords at a maximum per page. Also you should consider putting similar things in one place ... for example u can optimize 1 page for 2 things if they are similar like "cosmetic dentistry" and "restorative dentistry" But i really recommend making a different page for each keyword you want to rank for and follow the "perfectly optimized page" example from the forums. It works like hell. Also make keyword research on what people really search for and what they search the most for ... an example would be that 1.2 million people search for "fridges"  every month and 7 million search for "refrigerators" so it would be best to go for the refrigerators Your client has about 20 different services so you should really make a research on how people really search for those services. And optimize each service's page for the most searched term again using the "perfectly optimized page" example.

The answer is no if you make each page be about a different thing and you make a catalog page containing all you would actually benefit here is an example The catalog page contains The best movies of all times The best songs of all times The best wine of all times The page "The best movies of all times" would follow a the "Perfectly optimized page" example And since you have a page that contains the keywords a few times you would rank well for The best x of all times and all your pages will rank well as well as your catalog page. I can see you are from Bulgaria so you can contact me on fasscorp@gmail.com or 0894481844 for further support if you need it.

Yes it definitely will.  Even creating a network could get you some Busyness to Busyness relations and other benefits.

I am very interested in the same topic as well.