Right on, David. That's what I'm referring to Travis. Rand also mentioned this recently in a WBF.

I know that rand recommends hosting your blog on a FOLDER of your root domain instead of hosting your blog on a subdomain.

The reason for doing so is that the domain authority of the subdomain will put a slightly larger distance (in terms of authority signals carrying over) from the root.

For example, its better to have your blog at bobsmithdental.com/blog vs blog.bobsmithdental.com.

After that, its really a matter of tightening up your keyword optimization on the blog posts and building and earning quality inbound links!

-Ricky

To my surprise, I couldn't find a clear answer to the questions "Do paid directory links violate Google guidelines?"

I know Matt Cutt's recently had a video on paid links, but it didn't really cover paid directory links. Are well-curated directory sites that charge for inclusion violate Google's guidelines? A good example would be the business.com directory.

Cool stuff, thanks guys!

Hmmm..are we sure they aren't tying in any third party reviews? My client has 5 reviews and only 41 "likes"...seems unlikely, right? (Also none have comments etc. and you can't find them anywhere on the page aside from the star rating)

I have a client whose FB page has a 5 star rating (apparently from 5 reviews) but I have no clue from where they are aggregated? I tried Google-ing for answers with no luck!

Any idea?

This is the page I am referring to...

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Partners-in-Womens-Health-of-Jupiter-LLC/310303442400699?bookmark_t=page

Thanks guys! I've got a solid checklist now to complete to qualify a site!

Though for anyone else reading this thread--@salman...sounds like a very old-school, black hat SEO tactic! Not only do I doubt that would work short term, I KNOW it is something that Google will be looking to penalize. A link network/ link farm like that is not really a legitimate SEO practice and violates Google's guidelines.

Hey guys, i've seen some stuff about this before but I recently found an opportunity to put it into action and wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into!

I am looking at buying a domain (expired and now only 10 dollars) that has a decent domain authority and has some keywords in it related to my clients practice. I plan on using a 301 redirect to pass "link juice" because this client is looking for a quick bump in rankings.

Thoughts? Benefits? Problems with this?

I don't think that would cause any issue as long as the navigation links are all to the same page/url! You should be fine!