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Using social media competitions to increase search demand for certain queries is very effective.

That blackhat is a really poor long term strategy

In my experience, there are two ways to pull off the B2B badges tactic:

1. For B2B badges to work with big brands, you probably need to be some sort of industry leader being able to give out awards that actually mean something.

2. If you are not an industry leader, you can give awards/badges to those companies not receiving a whole lot of attention usually. They tend to be used a lot.

The best example I can think of is Google's AdWords / Analytics certifications used by quite a lot of SEM agencies.

I agree with Robert. The ranking difference between .com / .net and no-hyphen / one-hyphen is going to be minimal. So go for the domain that is easier to read. That will probably benefit you in the long run.

I don't attribute too much value to page-rank sculpting. It's based on such a flawed understanding of SEO - that SEO is about sending PageRank to a few but important pages that will then rank. Good SEO is about making the website easy accessible for users and crawlers. And internal linking is great for this.

Internal linking is a great way of doing SEO, whenever it's done with a user perspective in mind. I'd be thrilled to work with internal linking on news websites, as it is possible to do so much relevant inter linking.

So I guess my advice would be, that all links should be based on relevancy, not PageRank sculpting. That does NOT mean, however, that you cannot optimize the anchor text on the links, or place them strategically (e.g. links to most important pages in the top of the page; lower priority in the bottom).

I do that too! Only little problem with that is it often creates some significant bumps in link acquisition rates.

One more thing: building a community and optimizing their contributions. That is the very future of SEO in my opinion.