Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Looking at your original question about registering web 2.0's in your name or your company's - doesn't matter for ranking but it's a question of your goal: are you branding? Are you just trying to manipulate rankings?

If the latter, it doesn't matter who you register under. If the former, probably your company's name. But it's not as if you can't build the web 2.0's - they're links to get all the same.

As for what to do instead of link wheels - I'd start with finding your top competitors across tough terms, as well as consistent competitors across your long-tail KW's. Mainly you want to find the sites that are ranking for the tougher terms, and follow their best and strongest links if you can. Since you're posting in the SEOMoz forum you can start with the SERP analysis functions of the keyword research tool.

I also use other tools to find competitors across niche related keywords (A1 Keyword Tool from Microsys is one): but you want to find quality competitors and not just copy anyone online: you could be copying a link profile of a poisonous website and repeat their mistakes.

That's why I'd start looking for those sites that rank for the tougher terms. Find their best links, try to copy them.

Link acquisition is more than copy-cat SEO, though - you can read plenty more about it in the forum or YouMoz blog, or one of Rand's many posts on the matter of link building - but I'd suggest looking at making your site(s) capable of attracting links, finding raving fans of your brand and give them incentives to share your content (i.e. build links - like running a contest for instance), creating awards for other websites that are somehow correlated to your site and getting a link via the award (an older but effective method)...

I'd run from the "flavor of the month" methods like link wheels because it's not going to net you quality and sticky links. Those links will have a high amount of link rot and are designed to provide the link wheel company/software provider with a recurring income, meanwhile in today's environment you'll simply be out-running and inviting Google's manual review (especially if a competitor decides it's best to rat you out in Google Webmaster Tools: link wheels are easy to find).

When your site drops rankings, the answer is always going to be, "build more links," or "use another tool," or "you did it wrong, but keep building more links to replace the links you've lost." Meanwhile it's time and money down the drain.

Solution: build a defensible link profile.

Go for the links that are harder to come by because your competitors are too lazy to try: they're all busy with link wheels.

Think of it this way: the PageRank/link juice of a link is calculated on a logarithmic scale. It's much harder to get a PR 6 link than 100's of PR 1 links. The site that gets the former is going to out-rank the site floating on the latter, and it's just a matter of time before the temporary rankings generated from the cheaper methods get penalized or otherwise demoted by the algo.

But experiment: all this is just my experience. After Penguin I've had to rethink everything, but I was one of the loudest mouths supporting link wheels and everything else "that worked..." That short-sighted pragmatism wound up biting me in the end.

You might find something in your experimentation that I totally missed, but I don't want the responsibility of giving out more bad advice, so I'm more cautious in what I share these days.

My initial thoughts were that it would appear more natural in my own name but if I have many sites linking to the same page, isn't that bad for SEO?

Does anyone have any advice?

• If you're interested in how "natural" it looks, my advice is to avoid link wheels, which aren't natural.
• Your name/business name doesn't affect the rankings of the web 2.0 properties or your website.
• The only concern here should be what you're planning on doing once you've invested the time into the strategy only to find Penguin 2.0 isn't as dumb as Google 1.0, but that's my opinion (having my own old link wheeled properties and sites obliterated in Penguin 1.0, thought I'd share).

What's "bad for SEO" here is the technique you're using - it's years old at this point and not a sustainable business model, but that's a risk you're going to have to assess as time goes on. I maintained rankings doing this for a few years, but not after Penguin 1.0 - my advice (since you asked) is to find a more defensible link building strategy, and a traffic generation strategy that is Google-agnostic. You'll be better off in the long run.

If it's a matter of not wanting to "write" any type of content, is he interested in any sort of content? The fact is that SEO and search is concerned with delivering content to searchers looking for it, so without content you won't have much to go on (25 pages can still work, though, it all depends on the quality of that content and the depth of the searcher's intent: do those 25 pages answer their query and satisfy their search, or will they bounce to a competitor's site?)...

I look at your question this way:

If your client is simply averse to writing, what sort of content is he more comfortable in delivering?

If your client is satisfied with his 25 pages, can you find keywords and examples where competitors are eating his lunch? Showing lost opportunity can help change his mind.

But at the end of the day, you need to ask your client what his goals are, and if this roadblock in content opinion is going to hinder your progress in helping meet the goals...if content is going to remain at 25 pages, you have to weigh that against the stated goal and deliver the reality check.

Other than that, it's hard to say what I'd do in your shoes apart from seeing the site and knowing the niche: knowing the opportunities at hand and knowing how deep you want to on this project is really up to you to determine. (That is, you have to know if you're actually able to even do your job given these limitations, and if not then you need to tell your client you can only deliver so much in terms of ROI and move accordingly.)

Another way to look at it is that you've just been given a defined boundary: making your job potentially much easier than it would be otherwise had there been more content to rank.

[I see a bit too late that there were 2 other responses above mine - whoops! I'm too lazy to edit other than making the observation.]

I was just writing a client based on their rank tracking data (crawled just today) so this is news to me - which module again? Campaign > Rank Tracker? (I'm not sure why but my client's data was all in tact, or is this another issue?)

If it's not overstepping things here, I'd recommend having a few tools to check ranks. One I use is a Firefox extension from SEOBook.com/tools called "Rank Checker" - but it works best if you can run 10-15 KWs at a time, change proxies, and do it again so you don't get banned from using Google...but I'm not sure that sort of thing is frowned on at SEOMoz or not since I'm still new here.

I personally use 3 different rank trackers for issues like this - you always want a backup just in case.

I tried that query in Google and it turns up everything but what you'd hope for (for the most part). Looking up search queries like:

"Guest Bloggers Wanted"

"Submit a Guest Post"

"Guest Posts"

...etc. plus your keyword turns up better opportunities in most searches (or try Google's Advanced Search feature so you can filter further without being a search query string geek, it's pretty easy).

My initial thoughts were that it would appear more natural in my own name but if I have many sites linking to the same page, isn't that bad for SEO?

Does anyone have any advice?

• If you're interested in how "natural" it looks, my advice is to avoid link wheels, which aren't natural.
• Your name/business name doesn't affect the rankings of the web 2.0 properties or your website.
• The only concern here should be what you're planning on doing once you've invested the time into the strategy only to find Penguin 2.0 isn't as dumb as Google 1.0, but that's my opinion (having my own old link wheeled properties and sites obliterated in Penguin 1.0, thought I'd share).

What's "bad for SEO" here is the technique you're using - it's years old at this point and not a sustainable business model, but that's a risk you're going to have to assess as time goes on. I maintained rankings doing this for a few years, but not after Penguin 1.0 - my advice (since you asked) is to find a more defensible link building strategy, and a traffic generation strategy that is Google-agnostic. You'll be better off in the long run.

Looking at your original question about registering web 2.0's in your name or your company's - doesn't matter for ranking but it's a question of your goal: are you branding? Are you just trying to manipulate rankings?

If the latter, it doesn't matter who you register under. If the former, probably your company's name. But it's not as if you can't build the web 2.0's - they're links to get all the same.

As for what to do instead of link wheels - I'd start with finding your top competitors across tough terms, as well as consistent competitors across your long-tail KW's. Mainly you want to find the sites that are ranking for the tougher terms, and follow their best and strongest links if you can. Since you're posting in the SEOMoz forum you can start with the SERP analysis functions of the keyword research tool.

I also use other tools to find competitors across niche related keywords (A1 Keyword Tool from Microsys is one): but you want to find quality competitors and not just copy anyone online: you could be copying a link profile of a poisonous website and repeat their mistakes.

That's why I'd start looking for those sites that rank for the tougher terms. Find their best links, try to copy them.

Link acquisition is more than copy-cat SEO, though - you can read plenty more about it in the forum or YouMoz blog, or one of Rand's many posts on the matter of link building - but I'd suggest looking at making your site(s) capable of attracting links, finding raving fans of your brand and give them incentives to share your content (i.e. build links - like running a contest for instance), creating awards for other websites that are somehow correlated to your site and getting a link via the award (an older but effective method)...

I'd run from the "flavor of the month" methods like link wheels because it's not going to net you quality and sticky links. Those links will have a high amount of link rot and are designed to provide the link wheel company/software provider with a recurring income, meanwhile in today's environment you'll simply be out-running and inviting Google's manual review (especially if a competitor decides it's best to rat you out in Google Webmaster Tools: link wheels are easy to find).

When your site drops rankings, the answer is always going to be, "build more links," or "use another tool," or "you did it wrong, but keep building more links to replace the links you've lost." Meanwhile it's time and money down the drain.

Solution: build a defensible link profile.

Go for the links that are harder to come by because your competitors are too lazy to try: they're all busy with link wheels.

Think of it this way: the PageRank/link juice of a link is calculated on a logarithmic scale. It's much harder to get a PR 6 link than 100's of PR 1 links. The site that gets the former is going to out-rank the site floating on the latter, and it's just a matter of time before the temporary rankings generated from the cheaper methods get penalized or otherwise demoted by the algo.

But experiment: all this is just my experience. After Penguin I've had to rethink everything, but I was one of the loudest mouths supporting link wheels and everything else "that worked..." That short-sighted pragmatism wound up biting me in the end.

You might find something in your experimentation that I totally missed, but I don't want the responsibility of giving out more bad advice, so I'm more cautious in what I share these days.

I tried that query in Google and it turns up everything but what you'd hope for (for the most part). Looking up search queries like:

"Guest Bloggers Wanted"

"Submit a Guest Post"

"Guest Posts"

...etc. plus your keyword turns up better opportunities in most searches (or try Google's Advanced Search feature so you can filter further without being a search query string geek, it's pretty easy).