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Hi All, Just wanted to get everyones opinions on this, I see it more and more now where businesses own multiple domains for [keyword] + [location], they have multiple domains for different locations and setup individual sites on them. I see these types of domains rank very easily for medium competition keywords, as long as the on page is good and there are a handful of back links, they rank. just to clarify, for example - iphonerepairmanchester.co.uk (purely an example not sure how this site ranks!!) What are Googles views on this? I've always insisted its better to build a strong brand with the "real" business rather than creating extra websites named by keywords. But I've recently had a client want to pursue this and it seems it currently works, but is there a danger down the line Google will penalise it? The short term traffic increase is undeniable but like anything in the world of Google at the moment, I'd rather persuade clients not to go this route if it will protect future interests.

I'm talking the least relevant and incredibly spammy. We've all done site audits and stumbled across some ridiculous ones. The funnier the better.  I'm compiling a list of hilarious links that sites have gotten. Any input would be great!

A friend of mine has a pagerank 3 website that links to all my pages on my site on every page of his site.  The anchor text of all these links are the title of each page that it links to.  Does this hurt SEO?  I can have him change to the links to whatever i want, so if it does hurt, what should i change the anchor text to if needed? Thanks mozzers! Ron

Hi, an incredibly popular website, with several thousand pages, has offered me a site-wide footer logo link. The site this popular website would backlink to has 50 high quality backlinks (and low volumes of traffic - it's a new site). I am tempted to say no, because of the risk of penalty, but then I started wondering whether a logo link posed the same penalty risk as a text link.

I have a shop and also a blog where I explain better the products on the site, such as: how to use, tips, recipes and more. How do I place the product link on my blog? Should I put a link with nofollow? Should not I put link? To put the link anchor text or just put the page URL? Don’t I need to worry about it?

We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site. They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil. Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?

I am in the process of recreating my company's website and, in addition to the normal retail pages, we are adding a "learn" section with user manuals, reviews, manufacturer info, etc. etc. It's going to be a lot of content and there will be linking to these "learn" pages from both products and other "learn" pages. I read on a SEOmoz blog post that too much internal linking with optimized anchor text can trigger down-rankings from Google as a penalty. Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does. And I figured they would all have optimized text because I think that is usually best for the end user (I personally like to know that I am clicking on "A Review of the Samsung XRK1234" rather than just "A Review of Televisions"). What is best practice for this? Is there a suggested limit to the number of links or how many of them should have optimized text for a retail site with thousands of products? Any help is greatly appreciated!

So I made a big mistake.  I know it was dumb.  I took a chance and got screwed.  I've been researching one of my competitions back links and found that about 7000 of their 12000 links came from one site.  Upon further investigation that site is a page rank 7 and the link looked bought.  My competitions page rank is 6 which I thought was largely because of this one link.  I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and they bought the link pretty cheap.  So I thought... Hey!?  Why not! About two weeks later, today, google webmaster tools finally found the link and my links went from 100 to 7100.  Now that I really think about it, I know it was a stupid move.  I just figured if they got away with it, I could. I'm a white hat seo'er from now on.  I've learned my lesson.  Wake up today and find that all 400 keywords I am attempting to rank for, which 60% used to be in the top 3, are now not in the top 100.  Luckily I am still indexed in Google though, I'm just not ranking for anything significant. Now I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and had him remove the links.  He was pretty quick about putting them up, so I figure they'll be down today.  Is it just a matter of Google realizing that they're gone until I'm back in the SERPS?  Or am I screwed for good?  This is a little scary, I depend on Google for my entire livelihood.  Yeah, I know not something I should be gambling with then. I only spent $125 on the links, but every month of traffic is worth about $3k to me.  Ouch.  If I lose a few months I'm at least looking at a $10k hit.  Please give me some good news 😞