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It's best to have majority of your links branded. If you are getting links from quality sites for a term without your brand name it looks unnatural and that is what will sound the alarm.

if you URL is www.makemoneyfast.com go ahead and build as many "make money fast" links as you want... However if your brand name / URL is Moneymakefast.com link 70% of your links to your URL / Brand Name (Money make fast), the remaining 30% link to your exact and diverse links.

Here's a good slide show: http://www.slideshare.net/wilreynolds/google-is-making-changes-how-to-prepare-for-them

Without a URL we cannot really help you. However you may be dealing with the Google dance. Also be sure to check for your rankings without being logged into any google account and be sure to clear you browsers settings prior to making your search.

If the links don't benefit the users they wont benefit the search engine. If these sites are linking in using [exact] math anchored text I would recommend having them take it down. If the sites are anchoring in with the URL or Brand name just leave it and focus on new relavent (helpful to users), educational, or entertaining content to link to/from.

Thanks

As long as the sites don't have penalties or too many bad (non relevant) links pointing at them you should be fine. What is the reason for this? are you trying to push PR to one site? If so... What does your linking profile look like?

If the new site will target the same keywords or if you are going to use the same exact text I would recommend doing a 301 redirect so that you can keep you link juice (authoritative qualities) and avoid duplicate content.

From what I know your looking to gain 2 things! 1. Users linking back to your blog and 2. Sharing the content on social networks.

Building up social lists on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc so when you do post something new you have a hub of users to help push your post by sharing it on social networks which should also help to generate more backlinks.

Yes and there's more... Building up social lists is very challenging, it takes time and added value. The goal is to make friends with people in your or relevant to your niche. By interacting with their posts and contributing to their posts you will also be able to find good content that they are missing or add to content that they have already created. Building a social lists requires a lot of engagement, but when done properly you win.

Is this the main purpose of a blog for SEO? Would anything else apart from the above effect the SEO for the site? Maybe the freshness of content also has a positive impact!

The main purpose of your blog should be to help your users and other users that are relevant to your niche.

Also if your blog is picking up lots of links, for this example lets say 100 links a month and the rest of the site outside of the blog is picking up 10 a month will the blogs power of picking up links effect the rest of the sites rankings, would you need to anchor text link out of the posts in the blog to make the most out of it?

The blog will help the entire site.

Include anchored text where it would make sense for your users.

Example: If I had an article about creating content:

This article is about creating content bla bla and also learn how to share content bla bla bla

I would try to include my keywords, but always think of the users. Is this going to help them learn more? Is this going to entertain them?

_The external links that are generated will be natural if your content is natural.  _

I would set up my website as www.branname.com and my blog would be www.brandname.com/blog. Create content your users will like and then they will link to and share your blog pages: www.brandname.com/blog/article  : )

Hello,

If I put out too many press releases/blog entries out can google penalize the site?

Google will panelize a site for search engine manipulation. If you are linking to your site using your keyword ONLY and not using your brand name/URL it will look unnatural and you can get penalized. If you are linking a ton of sites that are not relavent to your site it will also look unnatural.

Also other than wordpress or blogger are there any other free blogs that are worth while?  Can hosting on the main site help also? I was thinking of hosting on the main site but I wasnt sure If I needed to buy a new domain name, or just host it as XXXXXX.com/blog

I would recommend hosting it on your site xxxxxx.com/blog, that way when people like your articles and they link to them/share them your site gets the credit : )

so If i do a 301 on my current  free xxx.wordpress.com blog does it matter that the name does not match?

Yes you can do a 301 redirect from one name to another, it does not need to be relevant it can be www.cat.com to www.dog.com : )

Currently my free blog is my url.wordpress.com, would it be an issue if i did a 301 on it? At that point would my free blog be dead?

I don't think this will be an issue. However I never did a 301 redirect from a free wordpress blog, I know that you can set up the 301 redirect within Google's webmaster tools. Your old feed would be redirecting (when someone types www.oldurl.com they will end up on www.newurl.com) but you can copy all the data to the new location.

Hi,

It's good to place links where the reads can benefit. It is not good to place links to manipulate the search engine. Having EMA (Exact Match Anchor) multiple times on a blog post clearly looks like an over optimization attempt.

1.  Should i stop adding so many blog articles to each site?

You can add as much content to your blog as you want. However, it must be good/entertaining/educational content.

2.  How many interlinking anchor texts should I use per blog?

There is no real number for that, placing a link to another resource should be done for the user not the spider.

3.  Should I go back and either get rid of all those interlinks on past blogs or just trash the blog articles altogether?

I would remove all the links that do not help the readers or change some of the links so that they do help the reader.