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The easiest way is the black hat way using proxy/ips. I am not sure if it can be necessarily labeled black hat but anyways...

The clean way is to have a direct link to google with the search terms - put it on high traffic pages and ask visitors to click it and find your website.

Firstly you are increasing the search count and also the likelyhood of it getting included in the Auto Suggest list of google.

2nd, you are getting your visitors back.

You can make it interesting like a treasure hunt, give them a discount or a freebie.. to go to Google and be able to find their back.

There will always be some people who can get around that. Fresh proxies, Private proxies - by the time Google has those proxies (if at all) it in their "list", they come with a fresher list of new proxies. Cat and mouse chase.. except there is one cat and too many mice. Anyways, its not something I would recommend.

Making links 'nofollow' to preserve link juice is a thing of the past. As of now, the "link juice" that you think you 'saved' just vanishes into thin air. Meaning, if you do use 'Nofollow' on links, you won't be saving it and passing it on to others.

100 links on page is just a broad suggestion for most websites. Our website have 180 links on homepage and we rank pretty well.

It depends on the kind of content you are going to have there. As you mentioned, if you expect good quality inks and a lot juice there, I'd suggest doing it on a sub-directory.

However, if you are going to be creating many pages that could be considered 'thin' (little/no content pages, no backlinks at all, no images, etc), I'd say go with the sub-domain so as to have a buffer of its possible repercussions on the main website.

This is definitely not the best technique to quickly see competition heat as it could be easily misleading. Why? The # of results with certain keyword phrases in title does matter as it does show the # of competitors but what it doesn't show is the authority of those competitors and if they are active as of now, and its anybody's guess what could happen when you go into a fight and without knowing your opponent.

Say, you are optimizing for entertainment/celebrity related keywords, you can do quick 'intitle' search and get quickly scared as it may seem as there is a lot of competition looking at the # of results.. however, if you dig a bit deeper its easy to see that majority of pages are low authority pages and are easy to beat as they do not do heavy optimizing (since entertainment traffic doesn't convert well...which means less $ for optimizing).  So my 2 cents...dig a bit deeper, check the top results in first 2 pages at least and look at their authority. Its worth spending a few hours to  know your enemy before you go against them.. rather than spending months in optimizing later and realizing your enemies are much stronger, more active, aggressive and have deeper pockets.

Fortunately or unfortunately Google still gives pretty good weight to exact match domains and for the search query you pointed you I think its definitely possible that the domain is what got it the high positions.

The #5 ranking site is:
interimcfoservices.net - registered 2 years, not many links and not much authority.

However, Google is reducing the authority of exact match domains so I wouldn't go out my way and invest in such domains as it is unlikely to benefit in SEO in the long run.

What many do not consider or cannot calculate is the number of visitrs/ potential clients lost due to to having such a keywordy" domains that not only appear unprofessional but are very difficult to remember.

Absolutely no penalty for multiple links to a single page!

Don't forget the Pininterest - if you have good images, incredible SEO potential there.

Also, find relevant websites who might find your images interesting - not difficult if your pics are unique and not-so-common. You can allow them to use it if they link to you.

May be I am not seeing properly but where is your sitemap?

Also, do you add fresh content deeper pages frequently? These intelligent little bots crawl a good deal initially but they tend to 'learn' the frequency of your content updates and update their re-visit schedule accordingly. As busy as these little ones are, you have to feed them something worth devouring and do it so frequently, so their frequent visits to your site is worth their time.  If they keep visiting your site and don't find nothing new..they have just spent all their energies for nothing and hence they become lazy for future visits, and this could explain delay to deeper pages. Just my thought... there could be something to else to it too.

Yes it could impact display and also the text ad traffic.

Display because your publishers might go up or down in traffic and you might notice a difference if that movement is big enough.

Text PPC traffic could be affected because they made some changes to Local results as well, however it completely depends on your niche, your geo target market and if your organic competition includes local listings at all.

I usually just use Xenu's link sleuth (if you thousands of pages) to list out all the URLs you have and I would then manually check them, but I haven't come across an automated tool yet. If anyone knows any, I'd love to know as well.

I am not a big fan of auto text->link widgets but if I were you I'd put a condition to replace text to a specific link only once per post. You do not want to 'over-optimize' your Internal links/ anchor text. Regular variations, whether its an inbound link from external site or just an internal is most effective.

In this case, there is nothing that needs to be done.. you are good to go but in future if there are too many bad links and you suspect negative SEO in play, and you think its affecting you, you may want to create are report and send it to Google with detailed explanation.

Hopefully, in future Google allows an option in webmaster tools where you could just go and 'flag' or 'disallow' any backlink that you think is bought by competition to get you down.

I don't think there will be a "penalty" as per say but those links could definitely be discounted or filtered out if they are hosted on the same server (IP range).

We have many such domains pointing to our main domain and there is no issue at all. Do make sure that those 20 domains are clean and are not in 'bad neighbourhood' (bad links, hosted with bad sites, etc) as penalty could pass through a 301 redirect.

I imagine it has something to do with IIS compatiblity issue with Wordpress/ PHP. Your host might have to spend $10k or so to get the latest IIS to make it compatible with PHP and that's my best guess as to why they won't do it.

Here is a link for the IIS compatbility with PHP, it helps: http://php.iis.net/
My recommendation for an easy to use simple shopping cart is OpenCart. I find it much simpler than Magento and has a host of features that most webmasters would be content with. The script is free but if you want more advanced options/ features, you can get those 'extensions' for $5-99. The script is easy to work on and customize.

Just creating zillions of social profiles for a link isn't going to help much. In fact there are many automated software, the borderline spammy ones, that does it for you but those links don't add value and if you domain is not of high authority, it could potentially even cause a dent on the domain 'trust' level.

If I were you, I would focus on few in the beginning - Twitter, FB, Linked & Youtube or other one depending on your niche, and add couple of more social networks every month, so you are building on social signals without quickly thinning out on the activity levels for each. You don't have to be very active in all networks, but have more than just couple of social profiles is good. Digg and SU is definitely worth considering because of the traffic they can send to you along with the longer term social juice for SEO

Google still does not have access to Facebook data, specifically to private walls of 100s of millions of users where a big majority of links are shared. Google has the tweet links and other data shared on Twitter and tweeted links has been shown to improve ranks even if temporarily. I'd vote for Twitter in terms of SEO at the moment but this might change should there be some sort of data sharing agreement between Google and Facebook.

You might also want to read this article regarding Twitter signals & its effect on rankings: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

It could. It shouldn't weigh in heavily as 'time on site' does not always equate to quality of page or even the relevancy of the page. Some pages are more useful when short and the 'action' perhaps does not consume a lot of time but I assume Google looks at industry or "website type" averages, sets benchmarks and considers accordingly. This is what I 'think' - not something successfully tested and proven.

It depends if yours is a high authority site or not. If its a relatively new site or with low-avg authority, it could very well have fallen under the 'fishy' side of the radar.

Its unlikely that nofollow links would trigger a penalty but the # of links you mention here is staggering so I wouldn't count that out.

Also, Google made 40 changes 5-6 days ago, which is when your saying your site traffic fell so it could be that as well:  http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

I wouldn't pay that amount even if it was a permanent listing. Certain Nofollows do pass juice and they are not completely useless but this one is not worth the investment considering the price.  Even if it was dofollow, just look at the worth of the page not just the root domain (which is not that great either).

Adding Nofollow couple of years ago could have saved your SEO juice and passed on to other dofollow pages, but as of now, that nofollow goes into a blackhole so it hardly matters much.

However, if the site your linking to a shady site or a site that is in a shady neighbourhood, you definitely want to use nofollow for that - otherwise you could be part of that shady neighbourhood yourself. In my opinion, a lot of these sites that exchange links leave lot of messy traces behind and do not have a clean profile. If I were you, I would most likely put a nofollow or even more likely, I'd putting my efforts in different strategies like guest blogging.

Before you even start on trying to get links for the website, just ask yourself why others would link to you. You are an e-commerce website and it makes it even more difficult to get quality natural links - so being creative is important here - think of different strategies you can pursue so it makes your content more "linkable".

Could you provide any free tools or widgets that your readers might find useful? For a real estate guy, a free mortgage calculator might work well.

You could run a contest targeted towards women audience - have viral impact by social sharing  - this usually ends up with several links from "mom blogs" and other portals.

As James suggested, go for Directories - those are easy links - but make sure they are thematic and relevant. There are very few general directories of value.

I believe its a keyword/phrase based filter. Meaning, the site probably got too many exact anchor links and/or used too much of the same keyword or phrase in the title, description & main body.

Also, like you mentioned, it could be a duplicate content issue - try looking at the re-written content: where you use the keyword/phrase that you are targeting. Perhaps, it wasn't rewritten effectively to be pass Copyscape/ considered 'original'?

We use DreamSystemsMedia, owned by Matt Siltala and they do a pretty good job at it.
Website: http://www.dreamsystemsmedia.com/

To get Data for these infographics, you can refer Stephen's answer in this thread as it pretty much covers it all: http://www.seomoz.org/q/data-for-articles-and-infographics

I would have said Google Directory just looking at all the importance Google gives to their own services (look +1, personal results, etc) but its been taken off couple of months ago - so Dmoz it is for Free.  And definitely BBB for paid - great to give trust signals as BBB verifies business extensively and I am positive Google wouldn't ignore that in their algo. but its pretty expensive and time-consuming to get listed there though.

When it comes to links, I'd trust SEOMoz 100x more than any Google's tool, any day.

If you'd like to verify further, I'd suggest comparing SEOMoz  link data with MajesticSEO

Changes should be on deepest level - words/ phrases. Rephrasing alone is not enough if the words used are exactly same.

Also, to get most bang for SEO campaigns/ traffic, I'd try avoiding having content that is 're-written' from just 1 source. I would use many sources and sort of give a 'new take' on this newly merged comprehensive consolidated content piece.  As I mentioned in another post, this huge content piece with a "new take" leads to your article being considered original and unique, and it also adds to likelihood of it attractive a lot more links than just a re-written piece would.

Here are some suggestions to rank specifically in one country

The first 2 points could be important or not depending on case by case basis (depending on competition, branding strategy, etc)

• Try getting the site hosted on that country's IP/ server
• Try using that country TLD
• Definitely get lot of national/local signals - country directory links, links from same country hosted sites, BBB or similar accreditation listing in that country,  etc

In the long run, having a blog on your main domain is going to outweigh the benefits of having a separate one.

Google is looking for stronger brand signals and pooling all your great content and resources under one roof will play a key factor in SEO.  If you have a blog on a separate domain and if you generate tons of links via social media.. all that "juice" is not being sort of 'transferred' to your main website, which I am assuming is the money maker.

Furthermore, Google is giving much less importance to 'keywords' in a domain. You can assume that keyword in domains is going to decrease in weight as a rank factor even more, as they can be 'gamed' easily so I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Having a separate domain could make more sense for big brands especially if SEO is not of great importance.

If it's one IP I suppose SEOMoz would be ok with that, but I'd contact them just to be sure ~ http://www.seomoz.org/about/contact

In short - Yes it can

Doesn't matter much since if you use NoFollow you still lose a certain rank "juice". If i were you I'd leave them as it is - but If you are using same content from PDF on other web pages, I will nofollow/noindex them

It just means Google will weigh the easily manipulated on-page and off-page factors less than they have earlier.The anchor text might have as much important as it used to before - perhaps the context of link would be more important than the anchor.  It could be a factor - not necessarily THE factor ~ I mentioned that since you wrote 'anchor text' relating to 'rankings' and now the anchor factor is not as heavily considered......

"anchor text having the url as the landing page for the page you want to rank for."

The 2 links you are seeing in opensiteexplorer is most likely the 2 unique domains that link to you. 101 links in SEOMoz toolbar is the number of pages that link to you from those 2 domains.

If that's not the case, just make sure you are using the exact same url including the 'www' in the beginning.

Yes it does help but its worth noting that Google is giving less and less weight to the age of the domain, just like they are doing to keyword domains as well, since they realize its something that can be gamed rather easily.

I always assumed Google would have 1 or more staff dedicated to manually hunt/ look out for link building networks. It doesn't take couple of hours to get a list of dozens of these popular networks where hundreds/ thousands people buy and exchange links. If anything I am surprised it took Google so long to catch up to them.

What would be even more interesting to see is if they are able to catch up to all the 'participants' in this network and be able to discount all those links

Nope, in most cases these blogs are owned by people who simply sell links. To be able to sell links, they have to have some content around it and so they start publishing crap - since content quality/ people's opinion is not at all important here.

This is where the shady companies you mentioned come in - they create mini "review" sites and get links from these junk blogs. Obviously these are shady companies and they have something to hide which is why they are spending so much effort to bury the negative reviews, rather than go after the root cause of this negative publicity.

Are you rereferring to search engine's ability "count links" or "view clicks"? 
The title says the former and the message is about the latter, hence my confusion

If you are talking about clicks - let's not forget that they have access to a LOT more data from other sources like Chrome, Android, etc. There is no sure way to know (as of now) if they are using that data though.

If you are referring to "view links", then yes they can as their cute little crawlers can sneak in and read website pages whether the site has Analytics installed or not

HIGHLY unlikely that your website got pandalized due to "duplicate video" content hosted on your server.

If the videos were embeds (youtube, etc) and the creator of the video  has higher authority website and has the videos embedded too, then yes, your site might throw off 'thin' content trait but even then it shouldn't be enough to attract the Panda to its door.

If I were you, I'd look at all the pages for the text content they have and if any are duplicates or close to duplicates, and if I find any I would have original content written for each . I would also look the title and meta tags and check for duplicates also analyze see the # of backlinks to all the pages.If 1% of your websites pages have all the backlinks and rest have no links or social activity at all, that could throw off a thin content profile as well. I would also get lot of social signals (retweets, etc) - get those pages on Twitter and other social networks including Digg, Stumbleupon, etc to show Google that these pages don't simply exist for the sake of it but they are shared (liked) by people as well.
Take a look at other metrics as well - time on site, bounce rate, etc as they are getting more important.

A rather not-so-exciting very long term strategy recommendation (for a legit biz/site) would be to 'feel the pain' of negative reviews -  leave the wound out in the open with fresh air and let it heal. Don't wrap it up as it just a easy lazy thing to do and it just numbs the pain and hides the problem  - the cause of the negative review still lingers around..uncared for.

But that's my suggestion to a business owner not the SEO who has no control of the 'quality' of the offer and cannot improve customer satisfaction.

Regarding the places where they get links ~ from what I have seen most of them have links coming in from blogs that seem full of garbage - posts that re-written content that doesn't make much sense (probably auto generated). It's surprising but such links still have power to push up ranks even for a temporary period. When the sites links get get caught in the filter / ie. get their links discounted/ de-ranked, they probably have a bunch of others to rely on. There is not much risk since they are not playing with the main site.

I checked the first site you linked to and it seems pretty new - just about 2 months old I believe? It doesn't seem to have any links/ authority as of yet and thats why it gives you that "No Link Data Available..." message.

Try acquiring some links on other relevant websites and checking back a few weeks later.

On-page looks good to most extent. If you just build 6-7 quality/authority links that are relevant, you have a good likelihood of outranking several competing sites to be at least on the 1st page.

If I were you I'd go for 3 word phrases first, rank for them (enjoy the traffic), and as you do that, you would be also building enough authority and trust to be strong enough to compete for major 2 word phrases. Having big goals for rankings is good but breaking them into small milestones makes them easier to achieve IMO.

Thmbs up'd. Love the idea! Not super easy to execute but could be very well it.

I would make sure its re-written to a major extent that it passes Copyscape check otherwise there is a possibility of duplicate content issue. Also,  if possible I suggest you try to refer to many other credible sources as well on the same topic and not just source from the 'larger organizations' piece.

You can try and a have a unique take on this much more comprehensive piece. This will do two things: make sure your content is considered original & it could also make content more "link attractive" - so you attract more links & get good returns on the extra writing effort.