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We've been debating this. We've had some budget allocated to quality paid directory listings. We read that SEOMOZ analyzed some 2685 directories, 20% of which were banned from Google. So our question is, should we keep paid directory submissions with keyword rich anchor texts as a part of your SEO strategy or should we drop it. Thanks!

Hello, We've used a popular paid blog posts platform to get back links through blog posts. Recently, performed a link audit noticed a very interesting problem. 40% of the 49 sites we purchased paid posts from, have been de-indexed. These blogs are the kinds that would take money from almost anybody in any given niche to write a review and give a paid link to you. So, I assume most of these blogs had a high number of outbound links. Their page rank has also been demoted to 0 (obviously since they're deindexed). Now, our dilemma is that should still go ahead with paid blog posts, after checking for the following: 1. PR 2. Google Penalty The sites at the time of purchasing the posts were not penalized. But 40% of the sites being completely de-indexed is a staggering number. Can someone please suggest whether to go with paid blog posts techniques or not?

Hello, We recently added new store views for our primary domain for different countries. Our primary url: www.store.com Different Countries URLS: www.store.com/au www.store.com/uk www.store.com/nz www.store.com/es And so forth and so on. This resulted in an almost immediate rankings drop for several keywords which we feel is a result of duplicate content creation. We've thousands of pages on our primary site. We've assigned a "no follow" tags to all store views for now, and trying to roll back the changes we did. However, we've seen some stores launching in different countries with same content, but with a country specific extensions like .co.uk, .co.nz., .com.au. At this point, it appears we have three choices: 1. Remove/Change duplicate content in country specific urls/store views. 2. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au with duplicate content for now. 3. Launch using .co.uk, .com.au etc with fresh content for all stores. Please keep in mind, option 1, and 3 can get very expensive keeping hundreds of products in untested territories. Ideally, we would like test first and then scale. However, we'd like to avoid any duplicate penalties on our main domain. Thanks for your help and answers on the same.

Dear SeoMozers, We are working on ranking towards some hyper competitive keywords (each query has millions of searches a month) and working with an external SEO Vendor. We were not satisfied with the progress, therefore we asked them to send a revised SEO Plan. Here's what they proposed: 1. On Page Optimization (standard techniques) Off Page Optimization 1. Directory Submissions (100) 2. Article Marketing (Two unique 300 word articles to be submitted to 300 directories) 3. Press Release (Two Press Releases to 100 PR Sites) 4. Classified Ads Submissions 5. Business Listings 6. Link Reinforcement (Create wheel to circulate traffic) 7. Blog Submissions, Commenting, Forum Posting 8. Web 2.0 Link Building (Squidoo Lens, Hub Page, Link Wheel etc) 9. One Way Links (Not Specified how many) Our concern is that this sounds like low quality link building. We've given them 19 top keywords to achieve rankings for and will be paying $20-25K  to achieve Top 3-5 rankings for the targeted terms. Do you think this strategy would work or should we change the SEO Vendor?