I have several clients that have agreed to drop a link to my site in their blogs. My question is two parts: Should they post my link in the blog roll or the blog post? I know the blog roll is on most of the pages of the site and includes the home page rank, but will page rank still leak through if they insert the backlink in to a blog post, then eventually is archived? The only reason I would lean towards the blog post is because I have about 30 clients that are interested in doing this for me, but I don't want google to suspect me for buying links because my service isn't the same topic as these blogs. Do you guys have any suggestions?
Blog Roll will result in 100's of backlinks for your site rather then one back link. I always go for Blog Roll
In this case, the multiple backlinks that you'll get from the Blog Roll should be priceless, especially if the blog roll is already placed on the homepage. It's like getting a homepage backlink, the one with usually the most PR juice, coupled with residual, passive backlinks from the future posts of the blog.
That should be more about quantity, one blogroll link could be bit worse than one blog post link but since with blog roll your receive much more than 1 link, considering the overall quantity of links it's better.