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I'm afraid nobody can really help without a URL.

Hi Alex,

Assuming the blogs are genuine and the articles are unique I can't see how search engine's could possibly know for sure whether the content is paid for or not.

It sounds like a pretty sound strategy to me.

I'm not so convinced that they wouldn't at least like to. There are lots of different factors that I am sure they use already where sometimes the effect may be neutral on some non applicable sites and used for others where possible.

For now I'm probably just paranoid but I would never rule it out. I was really just wondering if the new privacy policy at least allows Google to do this theoretically.

Does anybody know if Google's new privacy policy allows it to use data gathered by Analytics to be used as a ranking factor in the SERPs?

There is no charge for creating a business page or any other type of organisation page: Start here

Are you saying that you plan to use Facebook as your main website? That is all well and good but I would question whether you will gain much traffic via the search engines where you will be competing with websites that will have a lot more control over content for SEO. Your best method for gathering traffic on a Facebook page will be through effective engagement with the Facebook community... you might find that difficult if you are not familiar with how Facebook works - I would recommend reading a guide first.

What is the difference between Google Great Britain and Google United Kingdom in the keyword analysis tool? I had always expected Google United Kingdom to mean google.co.uk but now I am not so sure...?

If you are doing client work then the pricing structure is barely an expense. 5 reasonable clients should make $99 insignificant - if not you need to increase your rates.

If FB shares updated with the rest of linkscape then it may just be that you have had more shares since the latest update. I'm sure somebody from SEOmoz will confirm if this is true or not. You can see the update schedule here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

I might be wrong but I don't think reciprocated links have too much value, at least not in comparison with one way inbound links... I would probably focus more of your attention on those.

Many years back I did something similar via http://www.linkmarket.net/ (which makes everything much simpler by the way) and it worked out as quite a bit of time for not much return. I felt the biggest benefit came when I deleted my link directory on my site and noticed that some, many until this day, of the inbound links remained and actually passed a fair bit of juice. So there is some value in the process. That being said I would still focus on other strategies in the main.

Dediserve.com - I cannot speak highly enough of them. After messing around with shared hosting for years I finally decided VPS was the way forward. Not the cheapest but by far the best value and I've been with them all!! (including 3 of those you mention above).

Edit: Check out their Twitter page for plenty of good mentions. Also I guess I should have put my affiliate link in there too : https://billing.dediserve.com/?affid=76

There is no charge for creating a business page or any other type of organisation page: Start here

Are you saying that you plan to use Facebook as your main website? That is all well and good but I would question whether you will gain much traffic via the search engines where you will be competing with websites that will have a lot more control over content for SEO. Your best method for gathering traffic on a Facebook page will be through effective engagement with the Facebook community... you might find that difficult if you are not familiar with how Facebook works - I would recommend reading a guide first.

If you are doing client work then the pricing structure is barely an expense. 5 reasonable clients should make $99 insignificant - if not you need to increase your rates.

Elance can be pretty good but be wary of the exceptionally cheap providers and be very specific in your brief about what you want.  If you are specific and you try providers out with small jobs to begin with you will find one you are very happy with.

We've had contractors that were an absolute joke and others that exceeded all expectations so it's certainly worth taking a look...

If FB shares updated with the rest of linkscape then it may just be that you have had more shares since the latest update. I'm sure somebody from SEOmoz will confirm if this is true or not. You can see the update schedule here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule