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Hi everyone,

I am currently working on a site where people can buy mail-order bagels, i.e. the bagels are shipped via postal mail. It's a good alternative for places that have no good bagel stores nearby, especially in small, rural towns.

I am about to launch a link-building campaign for the website, but am a little stuck as to where to begin. My first thought was guest posting, but it seems like the vast majority of food blog owners are very protective of their blogs and rarely, if ever, allow guest posts. I also thought about doing sponsored reviews (i.e. sending mommy bloggers free samples in exchange for a review), but that's essentially a paid link, i.e. a no-no. There are of course generic web directories, but those only get you so far, and article marketing is out of the question (too spammy).

Was hoping I might be able to bounce off some ideas off of you all. Any thoughts?

Thank you in advance for whatever tips/ideas you might be able to share

• Lukas

See this article:

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-counts-site-speed-as-ranking-factor-39708

Key takeaway: speed is a ranking factor, but it's a very, very minor one. Definitely does not carry enough weight to justify moving servers.

Hope this helps!

Just ran the example link that you provided through two independent HTTP response code checkers, and both are giving me a 200 response, i.e. the site is OK.

This question has been asked before on here; you're definitely not the first person to run into the issue.

One way to diagnose what's going on is to dig a little deeper into the crawling report that SEOmoz generated. Download the CSV file and look at the referring link, i.e. on which page Roger found the link. Then go to that page and look if your CMS is doing anything weird with the way it outputs the links that you create. I recall someone back in December having the same issue and eventually resolved it by noticing that his CMS put all sort of weird slashes (i.e. /.../...) into the link.

Good luck!

To the best of my understanding, adding the rel="noreferrer" attribute to an <a>tag (i.e. attaching it to a link) just means that you don't want the user's referrer information (e.g. what browser, operating system, etc. he/she is using) to get passed along. </a>

<a>My guess is that it has more to do with privacy, rather than SEO. From a search marketing standpoint, I wouldn't spend too much time thinking about it, if at all.</a>

Just to add to this:

Adding an ALT attribute (alternative text) to all of your images is a usability best practice and can also help with your SEO efforts.

Here's a (fairly old) video from Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam team, that highlights the importance of not ignoring ALT attributes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbuDpB_BTc

And here's an article from Rand Fishkin that briefly touches on the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

Specifically:

"Alt Attribute - Surprisingly, the alt attribute, long thought to carry little SEO weight, was shown to have quite a robust correlation with high rankings in our studies. Thus, we strongly advise the use of a graphic image/photo/illustration on important keyword-targeted pages with the term/phrase employed in the alt attribute of the _img _tag."

Hi Donald,

From an SEO standpoint, if you're just buying exact-match domains and redirecting them to your main website, there is absolutely no benefit. You'd need to build up each website with unique and high-quality content to get an SEO boost.

Here is an article from Matt McGee, Executive News Editor at SearchEngineLand.com & MarketingLand.com, with some more insight on the matter:

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/sbs-mailbag-should-i-buy-multiple-domains-for-seo/3165/

That said, if the concern that your competitors might snatch up the domains and actually start using them as their primary website (rather than just as redirects) is real, that may be enough of a reason to keep renewing the domains.

Hi Phil,

Just to be clear -- are you asking whether links in the website body are more valuable than links in the footer?

If so, I recommend that you watch what Matt Cutts (head of Google's web spam team) has to say about the matter via the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE

He doesn't come out and explicitly say "yes", but it seems like if you had to pick one or the other, I'd put the link in the body of the page.

watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE

Just to add to this:

Adding an ALT attribute (alternative text) to all of your images is a usability best practice and can also help with your SEO efforts.

Here's a (fairly old) video from Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam team, that highlights the importance of not ignoring ALT attributes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbuDpB_BTc

And here's an article from Rand Fishkin that briefly touches on the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

Specifically:

"Alt Attribute - Surprisingly, the alt attribute, long thought to carry little SEO weight, was shown to have quite a robust correlation with high rankings in our studies. Thus, we strongly advise the use of a graphic image/photo/illustration on important keyword-targeted pages with the term/phrase employed in the alt attribute of the _img _tag."

To the best of my understanding, adding the rel="noreferrer" attribute to an <a>tag (i.e. attaching it to a link) just means that you don't want the user's referrer information (e.g. what browser, operating system, etc. he/she is using) to get passed along. </a>

<a>My guess is that it has more to do with privacy, rather than SEO. From a search marketing standpoint, I wouldn't spend too much time thinking about it, if at all.</a>

Just ran the example link that you provided through two independent HTTP response code checkers, and both are giving me a 200 response, i.e. the site is OK.

This question has been asked before on here; you're definitely not the first person to run into the issue.

One way to diagnose what's going on is to dig a little deeper into the crawling report that SEOmoz generated. Download the CSV file and look at the referring link, i.e. on which page Roger found the link. Then go to that page and look if your CMS is doing anything weird with the way it outputs the links that you create. I recall someone back in December having the same issue and eventually resolved it by noticing that his CMS put all sort of weird slashes (i.e. /.../...) into the link.

Good luck!