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I have a web service that help bloggers to do certain tasks and find different partners. We have a couple of thousand bloggers using the service and ofcourse this is a great resource for us to build links from. The bloggers are all from different platforms and domains.

Currently when a blogger login to the service we tell the blogger that if they write a blog post about us with their own words, and tell their readers what they think of our service. We will then give them a certain benifit within the service.

This is clearly encouraging a dofollow-link from the bloggers, and therefore it's not natural link building. The strategy is however working quite good with about 150 new blog posts about our service per month, which both gives us a lot of new visitors and users, but also give us link power to increase our rankings within the SERP.

Now to my questions: This is not a natural way of building links, but what is your opinion of this? Is this total black hat and should we be scared of a severe punishment from Google? We are not leaving any footprints more than we are asking the users for a link, and all blogposts are created with their own unique words and honest opinions.

Since this viral marketing method is working great, we have no plans of changing our strategy. But what should we avoid and what steps should we take to ensure that we won't get in any trouble in the future for encouraging our users to linking back to us in this manner?

So if I understand it correctly, it seems like they decreased the value of the EMD in the September update. This does not mean that the value of EMD's are low or "= not good" as you put it.

So yes, Google has decreased the value of EMD's. But is it still a big benefit to use a domain name that has a Exact Match to what your business is about? And does this benefit outweight the added user experience of having a shorter domain?

I've searched and found a lot of discussion regarding the benefits of using Exact Match Domains, however I'm still unsure of what is a "too long" domain to make it not user friendly.

I'm working on a new web application that help users design their own <product>. </product>

Let's say that the product would be canvas paintings as an example. Would you choose the domain www.designcanvaspaintings.com if it was available? Or would you rather create a "brand" like paintify.com that is shorter and has a more "brand" feeling to it.