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Thanks for the quick response Cyrus!

To clarify a little bit:

I have been working on a site that's less than 1 year old, but all of the competitors have been around and building links for 3-5+ years.

Their DA is in the 40's, and ours is currently at 23, even with less than 1/4 the linking root domains of the site with DA 36.

So, I started thinking, and wondered if there's a quick way to figure out if I'm on track in terms of the quality of my links, relative to my competitors.

Would dividing MozRank, MozTrust or Domain Authority by Linking Root Domains be a decent way of determining that, or does the exponential increase in difficulty to boost these metrics make this method useless?

Since the MozRank and MozTrust metrics are on a logarithmic scale, I'm wondering if it's still valuable to get a general idea of the quality of a site's link profile by calculating:

MozRank / Total Links

MozTrust / Total Links

Would this be useful, or is it always going to be higher for sites with lower MozRank & MozTrust since it's "easier" to achieve the lower values?

All things considered, it's best to avoid syndication services, as the vast majority of them are geared toward mass-link building spam.

The best examples of content syndication done right in our niche are our very own SEOmoz and HubSpot.

Both companies have a wide variety of content dispersed amongst all of the highest-quality sources (their own blogs, press releases, other authoritative blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, etc.)

It's manual by nature, but it works.

There are, however, some great syndication services for specific tasks:

• Video: TubeMogul
• Press Releases: PR Web
• Social Media: HootSuite

I hope that helps!

To my knowledge, yes.

They have certainly evolved, but in my opinion their evolution would point only to the fact that they will see through masking tricks even better than they once did.

I ran an experiment with an affiliate link in 2008, and because the domain I purchased was the exact match of a product (the owner was trying to brand his name with his domain instead of the product which people actually searched for), and my masked domain was ranked #1 for weeks!

Shortly thereafter though, Google realized it was duplicate content, and while the experiment made over $1,000 in that time, the moral of the story is that they did catch on, and the rightful owner of the site reclaimed the #1 spot (and my masked domain got the boot just like it should have).

If they were able to detect this 3 years ago in my little experiment, I would bet they could detect it now much faster, so in my opinion it would be best to avoid these tactics altogether.

Hi Tim,

The only thing I can figure is that using coords links instead of traditional text links is keeping Google from crawling through the entire site.

Instead of:

<area shape="rect" coords="194,132,289,160" href="wedding-video-pricing.html" alt="Wedding Video Prices Arizona">

Try:

Pricing

I'm not positive if it will help, but it can't hurt with indexation...

I noticed the same thing a couple weeks back!

The 302 redirects aren't as "bad" as nofollow tags from what I've heard, still passing some link juice to external pages, according to this Google thread: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7ee9dbd3802c2a2a&hl=en

That said, I believe LinkedIn is one of the authoritative social sites from which the engines are considering links, even if they are nofollowed (like Twitter & Facebook).

In my experience with content management solutions, it's easier (and thus more common) to keep all blog posts under the blog directory, then use categories in the URL and/or the Title tag (if necessary at all).

That said, most of the time I find categories to be more useful for users, and less helpful for engines.

So, to me the pros of using /category/content-title would only apply if the categories are very straightforward and short (which depends on your industry).

For example, if you run a outdoor hobbies blog, and you have clear, distinct categories like backpacking, camping, hiking, fishing, and so on, then using the category URL structure would be great.

However, if your blog is more specific (say backpacking only), your categories will start to become more convoluted and long, taking up a large part of the URL.

In addition, this can cause unnecessary redundancy in your URLs, which can appear like keyword stuffing.

Overall, I prefer to stick with /blog/content-title, and possibly include the category in the title tag if it's really important.

Though it depends on how much authority you've been able to build with the old myblog.com domain, it is typically much better to keep everything on one site to consolidate your links and increase brand awareness.

If you don't have too many pages and links on the old domain, I would recommend following your gut and using 301 redirects to conserve most of your authority on mysite.com/blog.

My apologies, I didn't catch the DSEO part.

In order to stack the 3 listings, a 301 redirect would not help.

That said, in order to truly make use of each domain, be sure to include undeniably unique content, preferably specific to the nature of the domain's extension.

e.g. The .org could be a listing of organizations your company is a part of, non-profits to which you have donated, events you've sponsored, and any other charitable work you're a part of.

As for the .net, you could focus purely on the history of your company and staff, with some helpful content about your brand (YouTube videos you've produced, slideshare presentations, twitter feed, etc.)

I hope that helps!

This is a common practice, though in my experience it is better (and a LOT more natural) to buy other domain name extensions to protect your brand, and 301 redirect them to their .com counterpart.

This is what Google, Yahoo, and Bing do, so it's more than likely your best bet.