Nope, they don't.

Good article here explaining it in more detail: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2325343/matt-cutts-facebook-twitter-social-signals-not-part-of-google-search-ranking-algorithms but basically any link from Facebook or twitter does not help your rankings.

Would be way to easy to manipulate to get rankings.

If your new to link building, then this is a great beginners guide to it: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Thanks

Andy

Very good question and this has been covered in this great moz article: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase

Will it help, maybe not in the short term - but if you do nothing you are running the risks of being penalised further down the line and losing all your rankings. Thats the worse case, the best case is by removing the old links your rankings increase. I would never really leave bad links, as you will always be looking over your shoulder waiting for Google to strike.

Remove them and then concentrate on getting some quality links to your site to help boost rankings.

With Google you can never really predict anything any more and you won't really know the outcome till you have removed the bad links.

Worse case: you remove the bad links and your rankings don't improve - but your no longer looking over your shoulder waiting to see if you have been hit by the next update.

Best case: You suddenly jump up in the rankings and you no longer care about the next update, you actually look forward to them, to see which off your competition has been hit.

You will probably get neither of these by removing them, you will probably see a little improvement but nothing massive and you won't have to look over your shoulder.

I know I haven't really answered your question - but even if Google was to answer this question, they would only be guessing as they can't 100% accurately say what will happen as its all machine learnt.

Andy

no its not being unreasonable - what happens if the SEO guy changed something and broke the website - would would the client ring up and moan at the SEO guy or the web design agency.

If the guy was willing to take responsibility for his changes, then they would be unreasonable, but why would they allow someone to edit their work and potentially break the site - only for them to get moaned at.

SEO is 'secret' anymore - so I don't get what they guy has from not willing to work with the agency. To me it sounds like he will be doing stuff he isn't willing to share so either black hat techniques or doesn't actually knows what he is talking about so was going to bluff it until the client clicked on that the guy was b*ll shitting.

I agree, I wouldn't have given them access without trusting them, all it takes is for them to alter one line of code and the site could crash.

Sometimes SEO's ( and I used to be like this but have changed) look at SEO in silo and don't think about how the changes impact other parts of the business / website - so a change that is good for SEO isn't always good for the website or the business.

So nope, I wouldn't give him access - our developers don't allow me access, I have to put a business case forward each time to get changes done, which has to be present and approved by senior management. Without this I could ask for a change which could cause a lot of issues.

I run an in house team for a large ecommorce company in the UK. We all work from the same office. I love having the team around me to bounce ideas of and debate new ways of solving problems.

I can fully understand how you feel, yes they are not yours and the site I work for I don't own - but I have put it a lot of long hours making the site as good as an experience as possible - I would hate for someone to come in and take control.

Hi

Sorry there is no 'x' date that I can give you. It all depends on Google and whether you have done all the 301s etc correctly.

When you say you are doing 'link building' strategies what do you mean, maybe this is the problem if your have got a bad link somewhere?

I wouldn't recommend going back - you wouldn't get the traffic back to what you had and as the 'experts' said it would cause you more problems.

I would check all the 301s are correctly, did you actually change anything on the site at the same time or was it just the url that you changed?

Thanks

Andy

"So how to get backlinks than ?" - this bugged me, what have you been doing upto now to get links, if you have been performing black hat techniques (http://www.pushon.co.uk/articles/top-5-white-hat-and-black-hat-search-optimisation-techniques/) then it might be worth giving up on your domain, and starting with a new domain (especially if you have a penalty) or trying to remove the penalty before you start doing any of the below.

there are many ways to get good quality links without guess blogging. Ive never done guest blogging and wouldn't do it on low quality sites, writing a great article on youmoz is different and can get you some links, but that is a different debate (see here http://moz.com/community/q/could-posting-on-youmoz-get-your-penalized-for-guest-blogging

I could spend days writing a huge articles about ways of getting links without guest blogging, but I will keep it relatively short.

1. How about writing and producing great content on your website that people want to link to.

2. If you sell products, send them out to some influential people in your niche and ask them to review (not guaranteed to get a link, but usually works)

3. Out reach, contact people in your niche and offer advice to help their articles and see if they can quote you.

Below is some great articles on helping you, I would also recommend watching Rands WhiteBoard Friday and subscribing to Matt Cutts on Youtube

http://moz.com/blog/google-traffic-links 

http://moz.com/blog/earn-higher-rankings-without-content-creation-whiteboard-friday

http://moz.com/blog/filthy-linking-rich-how-to-passively-attract-valuable-links

Hi

I know this isn't technically an SEO question, but wanted people's advice.

As I am flying half way round the world I am actually arriving on the Friday and have Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday to go and explore Seattle.

I plan on going to watch a baseball game and visit the home of Starbucks (and I hate coffee, but thought might as well visit), but what else would people recommend doing / seeing in Seattle.

Thanks in Advance

Andy