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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!

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.

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?

As meta keywords - no. As part of your meta description - maybe. Like with your body text, it must flow naturally.

Your meta description should contain your main keyphrases, by which time you wont have much room left for anything else as Google only looks at the first 150 - 160 characters anyway. Anything beyond that a) will get truncated and b) looks like keyword stuffing.

In your case, I'd focus on sliding the LSI keywords in to your body content where natural and not worry about including them in your description.

p.s It should go without saying that 'meta keywords' holds pretty much zero value in SEO anymore. Even Yahoo doesnt care about them much these days.

Further reading: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

You'll be just fine with that until a competitor or disgruntled customer reports you to Google and they look into it. At which point you'll be hit hard for offering paid links, as will anyone who you link to as a result.

I'd want to be making a FAT wad of cash before I allowed the above to happen. Certainly not something I'd consider for a site that made any sort of income for me anyway...

I'd recommend you steer clear of sitewide links from B to A. The majority of your duplicate links will be disregarded by search engines and they look like spam. Far better to put one link on the homepage of B and have 1 authority link instead of 400,000 discounted ones from PR0 pages (which I will assume most of them are?). Its always better to have links from diverse sources than many links from one source - even if its a notable one.

Good luck.

Whilst I do agree with Federico, it is also possible to 301 those old sites to the new one and enjoy about 85% of the linkjuice they had. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why one might do this - indeed I once closed 4 separate websites and 301'd them to my new site in order as the business we being consolidated. None of this was about building a private link network at the time...that's just how it worked out. Anyway, my new site went from PR0 to PR3 at the next toolbar PR update and has been fine for 3 years+

Just my 2 pence...

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.