That makes sense, it's good to test first.  From personal experience I can tell you that Crazy Egg was very easy to set up and gave me some great information and insight, so it is possibly worth the fee in the future.

Also, if you're a Moz member you can get Crazy Egg free for 90 days! Have a look on the Moz Perks Page.

John makes some good points.

It's worth communicating those risks to your client and make them fully aware of what such activity could end up doing to your site.

Now, occasionally, you might get a client who is happy to run the risk - they're happy to try and test and live with the consequences.  While I would usually steer them to try other avenues first, it could be that they're looking to run a test with a disposable domain.  So something like a link broker could come into play.

But then why would you want to use a link broker?  If they're publicly selling links left right and centre, how good are the links going to be? What controls do you have in place? What other sites are on there? What if the broker takes the money and runs?

So in that case, you not only have the penalty looming large over the website, but also the fact that you could literally be throwing money away.

Sometimes trying new tactics can be rewarding - but link brokers? Cons always outweigh the pros, in my opinion.

Hi there

It will take a bit more time, but rewriting the content to be unique would be so, so worth it.

If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site. It won't think that you're offering as much worth to the other blog and subsequent referrals if you're regurgitating what has been said.

Now, the obvious exception to this rule are Press Releases through sites like PRWeb. This is a well-known anomaly in the industry (some say it passes juice, Matt Cutts tries to say it doesn't), but it's so far down the line now that it seems unlikely that Google is going to penalise your site for it.  The worse that would happen would be not passing any SEO value.

It is not safe to assume that this would be the case for sending your articles to these other blogs - it may very well penalise you.

By rewriting the content, you negate any risk of this and also ensure that the uniqueness will most likely pass the SEO benefits from the separate blogs.

To me, it's a matter of risk management, and all signs seem to point towards rewriting the content.  It's a bit of an annoyance, but a small price to pay considering the benefits.  It's also a great compliment to what you've written before, which has obviously proven to be very valuable, so congratulations on that!

Hi John

If you aim to make the alt tags descriptive and not just contain the keyword, I think it would be fine.

So, let's say your shop sells shoes, the five image alt tags could look like this

Brand Trainers Front View
Brand Trainers Side View
Brand Trainers Rear View
Brand Trainers Size Guide
Brand Trainers Packaging

The whole idea of the alt tag is to provide an accurate description of the picture.  Using a method similar to this would do exactly that, while having the product or keyword in the alt tag would be perfectly natural, as it's using the alt tag for its primary function of describing the image.

This is only based on my opinion and experience, but having used similar methods in the past, I've never had a problem with over-optimisation, as it were, so you should be grand!

Hope this helps.

Alick

It wouldn't surprise me if Google already discounts the major coupon sites in their algorithm for this very reason.  It doesn't want to reward link building like this (if some were inclined to do it this way), while equally it wouldn't want to penalise legitimate sites that use them.

I think you'd be fine.

Hey there

Dan Shure wrote this fantastic Wordpress optimisation guide here on the Moz blog a year or so ago and it is still very relevant for today.  In that post, he goes into depth about the problems with tags and what your best practice should be.  Usually, you want to noindex the tags on your WP site - keep them for navigation purposes if you want, but letting them be indexed can lead to duplicate content issues.

I don't think you can put a general % on keyword density.  So long as it reads well and doesn't appeared to be stuffed, it should be fine.  Mention it as many times as you can without it appearing forced.  There's no doubt that having a keyword appear more times on the page will help Google deduce what the page is about, but similarly anything that would compromise a user experience or attempts to over-optimise for the algorithm can easily be penalised. Saying what number this is though is highly dependent on context, so you can't put a broad figure on an "optimal level"

If you haven't changed the density on the page, I don't believe that your density level would have caused a fall in your rankings (unless it was overdone, as said before). The strength this signal has on your rankings would be small at best, so there's very likely another reason for the fall.  I'd start looking at other on-page factors and especially what sort of links you might have earned recently (or indeed lost).

Hi Gary

I think what Bright Local are looking to do here is earn you more business citations, rather than directories.  It's funny, because the difference is only a subtle one, but rather than getting you on websites that are more "traditional" directories, they instead will look to get you listed on places like yelp, yell, forsquare, bing, yahoo, qype and so on.

Those kind of citations definitely do help.  It does look as though Bright Local offer directory listings on moderated, niche specific and local directories, which is less of a risk (but valuable? I'm not so sure). In the package you can also hand-pick which ones you want - so you could opt out of them all if you chose to, which might not be a bad idea.

Looks like it automates/outsources what can be a pretty laborious process, so it might be worth looking into if the price is right. Bright local are a pretty reputable brand so I'd say the quality would be there.

Of course, you could build those citations yourself and good place to start is right here on Moz.  Moz has the best ones by city, and best by category, while BrightLocal has an international list, as does WhiteSpark. You can probably find more by searching for "best citations for [country]".

Hope this helps.