Hi Andrew, thanks for the info, it's always good to share ideas and advice with the community.

With that in mind I would like to share a few thoughts myself.

1) Firstly, it is incorrect to say that search engines "only care about links after some time has passed". The only amount of 'time passing' that matters is the amount of time that it takes for the search engines to (re)index the page that your link sits on. That brings me onto..

2) One of the best keep secrets in SEO is linking see more to your links. Yes, the search engines will give more authority to your link if it in turn has links pointing to it, makes sense right? Also means links get indexed quicker, if they are not indexed you are wasting your time. e.g. write an article and then post the link on your social networking accounts.

3) Dolphin is pretty good for SEO in the main because of what it is. A social, community site. This means it is large (many pages to get indexed), driven by fresh community generated content that works even better since the google panda and refresh update.

Having said that I am sure improvements can be made to the structure and code but for the record, offsite SEO will massively outdo any onsite SEO setup, it is probably somewhere in the 80/20% range.... and that's being kind.

4) Make sure any link building that you do is natural. That means links for different types of sites, a mixture of dofollow (passes link juice) and nofollow (doesn't pass link juice but still counts). Also although you ideally want the majority of your anchor text to be the keywords you are targeting, you should also have a variety of anchor text including your site name, url etc to maintain the natural link profile.

5) Instead of struggling with SEO there is a tailor made way to get traffic via google. That is google news. I have suggested it before but I will do so again here.

If Dolphin (news section) is made compatible with google news guidelines then Dolphin webmasters would have traffic at their fingertips, just write a news article and google news will automatically put it into one of the most read news aggrigators in the world and also into it's main search results (providing your site gets accepted of course). No SEO required! Yeah (SEO is very boring, tedious and should be outsourced as soon as possible!).