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Sorry Jo, I completely disagree that 'the links should come naturally'. If you have a boring, functional product that doesn't lend itself to social media, or even if your content is just something that users won't naturally link to, you're stuck.

Elissa - one of the best ways I've found is to put in time to researching the bloggers in your space, crafting unique pitch emails for each one, writing some great content for them and providing a decent guest post, or asking them to include a link in one of their posts that relates to your page.

Blogger Linkup/My Blog Guest etc won't generally serve up decent quality sites any more you need to do this research manually, but you should be able to get some good links out of it!

No we're paying to produce the content, they're linking back to us. We may be able to bring other brands on board to sponsor the content. Average video plays on their site are 15,000-20,000

We've got an opportunity to create video content for one of the highest authority news sites in our region.

It's a great opportunity for links - PR8, DMR 7.84, DMT 8.86 and also to build our brand.

However the site is also one of our main competitors in the SERPs, and we would be providing content to them that serves some of our most important seasonal and year-round keyphrase targets.

So my dilemma is whether it is better to create the content and get the links, keep the content for ourselves and aim to make our site the authority for those keyphrases, or place the content with another (less authoritative) site that doesn't compete in our space?

Hi Sebastian and Irving - thanks for the help. Our site is www.greatbritishchefs.com - check it our if you like to cook!

It was really strange as I started to test it out more by searching for other non-brand terms such as 'beef recipes' and Bing was still only returning 40 results. Cleared cookies and am now seeing full results again. Very strange!

Thanks again for answering

Rory

I regularly check our index inclusion and this morning saw that we had dropped from having approx 6,000 pages in Bing's index to less than 100.

We still have 13,000 in Bing's image index, and I've seen no similar drop in the number of pages in either Google or Yahoo. I've checked with our dev team and there have been no significant changes to the sitemap or robots file.

Has anybody seen anything like this before, or could give any insight into why it might be happening?

Does anyone have opinions on syndication of blog posts through aggregators?

With a good internal link strategy in place, will the links generated by submitting our RSS feeds to sites like http://www.rssmotron.com/ have a positive effect on our rankings?

I'd agree with Dana - you should build a site with great content (why wouldn't you?) but social bookmarking does have an effect, press releases still work in the post-penguin world. Just remember you're at the mercy of Google and all this could change with futures updates, so if it's ALL you're doing and you don't do any RCS you could be in trouble down the line.

Go back to your keyword research. Try looking for the terms that have the highest volume (Google keyword tool) but are least competitive (look at number of results in the Google SERPs).

Create a piece of content for that term and you have much more chance of ranking highly quicker, especially if you submit it to social bookmarking services like Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit, which can also be good sources of traffic.

I'd disagree with Larry - press releases do still have some value, particularly building links into your homepage, even if the just the press release aggregator places the link on their site they are decent white-hat links. There are companies that can distribute your press release to the various aggregators relatively cheaply if you don't have the time.

Hi - I'm having issues getting started with the Mozscape API. I'm putting the following into my browser:

http://[member-ID]:[secret key]@lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/url-metrics/greatbritishchefs.com

According to the blog posts I'm reading I should get loads of json script returned but all I'm getting is {}

Does anybody have any pointers as to what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks

Hi Greg - I've done this and resubmitted the sitemap, but I'm now getting severe health warnings saying that robots.txt is blocking important pages.

I've run our robots.txt file through the tester in Webmaster tools and it is saying allowed, however I'm obviously concerned about the warnings.

Have you experience of anything like this?

Thanks
Rory

We recently had an issue when a load of new files were transferred from our dev server to the live site, which unfortunately included the dev site's robots.txt file which had a disallow:/ instruction. Bad!

Luckily I spotted it quickly and the file has been replaced. The extent of the damage seems to be that some descriptions aren't displaying and we're getting a message about robots.txt in the SERPs for a few keywords. I've done a site: search and generally it seems to be OK for 99% of our pages.

Our positions don't seem to be affected right now but obviously it's not great for the CTRs on those keywords affected.

My question is whether there is anything I can do to bring the updated robots.txt file to Google's attention? Or should we just wait and sit it out?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

Hi - we are about to have a product review go live on a site that uses a paywall.

Will the link from this still pass SEO value to our site, and should we therefore optimise it?

Thanks

Our site has a lot of content we are able to modify/distribute without too much time so I am planning to syndicate some of this using article distribution.

Apart from Ezine articles, are there any other article distribution services I should/could consider using?

I do know that I should also be focussing most of my resource on building high-quality links through guest blogs etc! However this seems like a relatively quick win.

Thanks in advance

Hi there - is there a canonicalization method that is better than others?

Our developers have used the