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It's pretty clear that "AuthorRank" is going to be a big thing for SEO.

Although the main principles seem to be pretty straightforward (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building) what I'm less clear about is how we can start to think about author influence as a measurable metric.

Webmaster tools gives us Author Stats as an impact on the site's impressions/CTR, but how do we measure the influence of an individual author? Are those factors even defined?

Will we get to a stage where authors can be given a Klout-like score for Google Authorship? If not that, how will it look?

This will be a HUGE question to solve for future content development strategies, and is something I'm thinking a lot about right now.

Best, Matt.

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone's been able to get link vendors help clean up Penguin-related problems that they helped create?

I have a client who was sold years and years of AWFUL link building work from a major and prominent SEO vendor, that we are now battling to de-toxify.

There are no legal grounds for us as the ToS was watertight and the client is ultimately responsible (if naive), but has anyone been successful in getting vendors to cooperate with cleanups on ethical grounds? What's the best way to play that with a major vendor, I'm assuming they wouldn't want to be outed.

Cheers all,

Matt

My company provides search & content marketing services for a number of high end / luxury travel brands.  We don't really share your problem.  We don't build sites ourselves, but the sites we work with have usually been well built by SEO standards. When we come across a site that does need some work, it's usually very easy to explain to a client why they need to take a second look at their architecture, and how they can do that without sacrificing their branding.

There's absolutely no reason that a luxury brand shouldn't have content on its site. In fact, I'd say the opposite: a luxury brand should be finding every opportunity to communicate its unique expertise and authority in its field, using a variety of content to do that.

When it comes to content creation and off-site SEO working with luxury brands can be trickier than most since the bar is often much higher in the level of quality that is expected.  So our luxury clients usually end up spending more on content development, which means we have to be very careful how we deploy that content to ensure they get best value.

We also spend a lot of time on publisher & blogger outreach and building relationships with high end publications that we can partner with to help promote our client sites.

But in some respects, this is actually easier than doing SEO for a non-luxury brand, because the client already has an understanding of the need to invest in quality, and they don't expect results from cheap, spammy tricks.

Regards, Matthew

Thanks Kyle, much appreciated.

My first priority is to see if they'll consider a new HTML version, it remains to be seen if they'll be convinced.

The problem is that by definition long tail keywords have relatively low individual search volume, making it difficult to identify them in an algorithmic manner.   A lot of people stand by http://ubersuggest.org/ you could give that a go.

I prefer other methods, such as digging into analytics or site search data to figure out what information people are seeking from your site. If you can collect data from other sources, such as a sales team that answers queries from clients, that could also be useful.