I am in a bit of a dilemma and would like some advice. My situation is that I hired AgentImage to design my site and blog (on a wordpress format) 6 weeks ago and based on my initial consultation I was told my site would be live/launched by this point. It seems as though it might be 2 more weeks or so before it actually goes live. Currently my domain points to my Keller Williams generic page.

In an effort to start the ball rolling on off-page optimization, I have started posting on different forums for backlinks (and also to gain knowledge, specially since there is so much to learn), submitting to directories (specially since some of them can take quite a while to list), started in the design of some social media pages (twitter/facebook) while creating group pages for neighborhoods which I would love to farm/target, and I wrote a couple of articles which I have not posted yet (since my site looks so sub-par, I would rather not direct potential clients there just yet).

My questions:

If I create a blog on activerain to start posting and gaining quality backlinks, would that potentially hurt my SEO since my site is sub-standard currently?
Should I continue to post on forums if my site is not up yet?
For future reference (not necessarily in my current situation), would having multiple blogs (wordpress, activerain) hurt my efforts if I have similar content as it might be seen as duplicate? Or should I post different content on each?

I have asked this in another forum hoping for some expert advice, and I am still hoping to have experienced SEO-knowledgeable people give some input.

It would not hurt. Google doesn't care if your site is "sub-standard" when counting the backlinks to the site.


Yes, it can't hurt.



Posting different content on each blog would be desirable but there are only so many hours in the day. If you have similar content on multiple blogs, you can avoid any potential duplication issues by appointing one article to be your primary article and placing a link to the article from within the duplicate articles on the other sites. That tells Google which one should be treated as the authoratative article.

Doug, thank you for your input. It certainly helped and eased my mind. By the way, nice blog!

You can never backlink to early, but slow and organic is the pace.

Right totally agree with this. I often build backlinks before a site even is built.

You could start a wordpress.com or blogger.com blog. It could act as a good source of backlinks.

Thanks for the input. It certainly makes me feel better about my current efforts.