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Guest posts are being targeted actively by Google - so aren't necessarily a good idea just for SEO. If you are going to go that route, then just make sure that:

• the blog is indexed
• it's relevant to your niche
• the link they give you is 'do follow'

Good luck

Did your re-design include deleting these pages? If so, then just create a new sitemap.xml and submit it to GWMT then mark it as fixed. They usually stop searching for the missing page pretty quickly...

Improving your speed will help more from an SEO perspective as Google likes to count it towards the 'visitor experience'. Country specific really makes little difference these days, especially as many businesses use content caching such as Cloudflare - which could be based anywhere.

Unfortunately not. If he blocked crawlers from his site for long enough, they would eventually give up and treat the site as though it was gone from the Internet. If he doesn't rank now, he will effectively be starting from scratch.

Indeed you are doing fine if you are getting improvements in search engine results. Whether he will return to page 1 or not depends on many factors, such as how much his websites has changed, how many links have been built during that period, what other websites have done during that time and any Google updates that might have affected his linkbuilding.

I wish you the best of success - but you will need to be honest with him and tell him the damage he did by blocking search engine crawlers. Doing THAT was 100% not your fault.

Alan pretty much summed it up. ONLY go for quality backlinks that happen naturally. If you link profile is over optimized for your keywords you could dilute it with other keywords such as 'click here' or 'read more'.

However, if this is a manual penalty, then you're going to need to get those links removed as best as you can and then submit a reconsideration request to Google.

There are a whole bunch of alternatives - all with their pro's, cons and prices. Here's the ones I can think of from the top of my head:

ChartBeat
GetClicky
Kissmetrics
Woopra
Reinvigorate
Piwik
Open Web Analytics
Mint
GoSquared
StatCounter

Would it be out of the question to ban the members for violating your TOS and delete their profiles?

Aside from that, if your site is big and has many members etc, I dont think people building spammy links to your site will hurt your SEO. What does OSE or ahrefs say about your anchor text profile? Are these user campaigns having any affect?

There aren't really any SEO qualifications that are worth anything. However having a good understanding of Google Analytics will help you in your own SEO campaigns - and you can get a qualification for that: http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/

I know you've seen them already, but there is so much information from reputable sources (such as SEOMoz) that I would spend some time reading their guides. There are also a ton of books on the topic at Amazon - just look for something with good feedback.

Hope this helps,

Disavowing links is ok, but won't remove any penalty in place (if you have one). I do use it as part of my efforts to help clients that have been hit and include this in the documentation I send to google for the reconsideration request. Not had a request rejected so far...but then I've only had to do 10 or so.

You can buy them pre-compiled from places like fiverr. Don't get over excited though...directory links are worth about as much as you'll pay for the list itself

Chicken and egg. Writing great content is a good idea...but if nobody can find it, nobody will link to it?

I'd expand on the above idea and suggest writing a great article then perhaps push it out through Digg so that people will see it and likely talk about/links to it. Works for me anyway.

Good luck!

That depends on what percentage of your links are made up using those keywords. Negative SEO usually takes a LOT more effort than building a few crappy links to your website. The same has been done to some of my client sites in the past and it's not made any difference to their SERPs

Anyway, the simplest solution here is to login to Google Webmaster tools and use the Disavow Links tool so that at least they won't count towards your backlink profile.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487

Hope this helps.

I agree with the post above, you're going to have to cut down on the info. Some great tips and answers to your questions can be found in this webinar from Moz that is well worth a look!

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/everything-you-didn't-know-about-infographics

Having built 7 websites with the same features you describe, I found Wordpress to have the shortest learning curve.

I did try Drupal as well, but found plugin support for Wordpress to be more readily available. That was support that i desperately needed to make my projects work too.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who can recommend Drupal as well. Simplest way is to try both and see which you are more comfortable working with. It's free to find out after all!

I've help a couple of my clients to set this up. It's a double edged sword because if they dont stay on top of it and keep it up to date, the Facebook page looks like old news and will give a negatove slant towards reputation management for them. If they do work at it though, they can benefit assuming that anyone on Facebook cares a damn about their products or services. I have a client who repairs boilers. He's #1 in Google for all his terms but nobody cares about boiler repair on Facebook.

If you can:

• tell a funny story related to your business
• share a related video that will amuse people (perhaps even go vial) - say something relevant to what people are doing (at xmass for easter etc)

then it can help. People who read something amusing or captivating on Facebook are far more likely to check out a link to the site owners web page. It just needs some real effort and proper thought. The odd post saying something uninteresting just wont help. In which case, its a waste of energy IMHO.

Hey Brant!

I'd go with the sub-domain route like es.yoursits.com and have the Spanish pages right there. In my experience, I've created multi-language sites and not run into duplicate content issues.

Secondly, Google translate does a kind of dictionary translation that may not read so well by your target audience. If at all possible, find someone who can translate the pages for you. Spanish is a common language so you may know someone who can do that for you. If this isn't the case, you could try the url below, I've used this provider before and had good results. May not be viable if you have a lot of text to translate though.

http://fiverr.com/newwealth/do-small-english-to-spanish-translations

Hope this helps,

Dan

Im amazed that nobody commented on this. You may post up to 3 AdUnits per page. As long as you follow the rest of the guidlines, you should have no problems. I have a couple of adsense sites that do just fine as long as I follow the rules

"You may place up to three link units on a page, in addition to the three standard ad units, and two search boxes. Just make sure the page complies with our program policies. "

Hope this helps,

There aren't really any SEO qualifications that are worth anything. However having a good understanding of Google Analytics will help you in your own SEO campaigns - and you can get a qualification for that: http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/

I know you've seen them already, but there is so much information from reputable sources (such as SEOMoz) that I would spend some time reading their guides. There are also a ton of books on the topic at Amazon - just look for something with good feedback.

Hope this helps,

Here's 20 (with PR listed) to get you started.

http://www.web-directories.ws/Regional/North_America/Quebec/

Enjoy!

Indeed, that holding page left me salivating!