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I know that the ads.txt system is designed to prevent ad fraud and technically has nothing to do with search. That said, the presence of such a file would seem to be an indicator of overall site quality because it would show that a site owner wants to participate in a fraud-free system. Has anyone ever tested that? If so, they don't seem to have published their results. Maybe it's a secret weapon that some pros are using and not sharing?

First let me say that we don't care that much about Adwords. We were spending about 20 bucks a month and we never optimized it, tinkered with it, or cared that much. Business is booming for us just with organic search and referrals from happy customers. (We're a blog writing service called BlogMutt. Motto: We work like a dog to fill up your blog.) But we just got suspended from Adwords. After multiple inquiries and multiple unhelpful responses, we got a note that said: "Please note that your website contains matter which states your site's SEO increases. Anything which relates to SEO is not allowed as per Google Policies. Please make appropriate changes to your website." Now, we don't say your site's SEO increases with BlogMutt. What we do say is what everyone says, that blogging is a best practice for any modern marketing effort. We certainly are less clear about improving search rankings than, for example, moz.com. Why is it OK for Moz, but not for us? Don't get me wrong. I think Moz should be able to continue advertising. I'm just wondering how we got into the Adwords crosshairs. Any thoughts?

We've never sent out a press release before using one of the services, and thought it might finally be time. Then I saw that Google seems to be calling services like PR Newswire out. "Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en So, is it worth it to spend a few hundred bucks to distribute a press release, or am I better off just publishing it on my blog for my blog writing service and promoting it all the regular ways?

We had this great, great thing happen which is that the Wall St. Journal quoted me in a story about contract workers. The story (here, and my blog about it here) was awesome, but it had absolutely no link. It got the name of my company right, but the only link comes in a comment that I wrote, and that is on a separate comment page that has not shown up in my Open Site Explorer, or any other tool that I can see for inbound links. Is there anyway to help Google to understand that the Blogmutt that the WSJ wrote about is the same as the Blogmutt.com on the internet? I don't imagine there is, but I'd be interested if anyone has any ideas. Thanks in advance, (First time posting here) -Scott