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The fact that you're getting dramatically different views on the issue leaves open the possibility that there is no steadfast rule to go by here. If that's the case, your SEO experience should be telling you to tread lightly. A few years back, Bill Slawski wrote a post about what search engines think about reciprocal links. Some months later, Eric Ward a post expounding on "Why Reciprocal Links Will Always be Viable".  Both are still relevant and good reads.

disagree with above posts. get some page juice to your site! a) dofollow them b) use branded term only (not your keywords) c) put on homepage footer only, not global. If the footer is global, simply create a homepage-footer.php file.

No, you can do it, but you'll run into some technical issues. For instance try to run this tool on one of your URLs and you'll see it gets rejected. If you're only making the site https because of a technicaly easier implementation, then I would suggest putting the time in to set the site up right and force https only when secure pages are needed, and force http when coming off of those secure pages http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ Response Checked link: https://site.com This link does not work. Error message: Invalid protocol (URL must start with http://)

Hi Tom, I wonder if I might question you on this point you raised: "If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site." Is content syndication therefore an absolute no-no these days? I'm aware of many of the best practices for syndicating content such as getting the content partner to specify the originator as canonical version or getting a link back to your original version in order that your article is not usurped in SERPs, but is it really the case that syndicated content with dofollow links to our own site would lead to some sort of penalty? Our quality content is used by many sites (quite often sites with high authority) and these sites will link back to us. Are you suggesting this could lead to some sort of penalty or even a site-wide penalty? Thanks in advance.

Thank you, any recommended articles, books or videos?

Hi Ted, If you have dodgy links seen from GWT which you suspect as part of a blog network, you might as well further investigate it using other tools like OSE, MajesticSEO, Ahrefs or LRT in order to assure you that only 2 dodgy links are pointing to you. GWT in most cases won't tell you the complete picture of your link profile. Of course, 2 dodgy links won't hurt you but it won't hurt you either to use the Disavow Tool when you see incoming spammy links en masse. Being proactive using it is fine IMHO. Why? I would not want to be hit first and lose revenue along the way. By experience, bringing back a site from penalty takes time. Dropped traffic over a period of time is tantamount to revenue loss.

Google only index and crawl hyperlinks. In this case, the url http://www.petst­reetmall.com/pet­safe/, will be indexed, not because of the 3rd paragraph mention, but because of the Visit Website hyperlink in the footer of the ad.

Bottom line...They probably don't care as much weight but that must certainly carry some. To echo TextMarketing, my hunch is that no-follow editorial links from high-authority sites such as Wikipedia are a sign of trustworthiness.

Claiming a site on Alexa isn't a bad thing. I'm not too sure about paying for their certified metrics though. But if you claim your site then there are a few small sections you can update to make it a bit more visitor friendly instead of just a bland listing. I use it to keep a quick tab on global traffic rankings but its not something I find that I'm really using on a regular basis or digging deep into. Some other here may have a different opinion of Alexa. I'd assume those sites in the 100k and better range would be more likely to want to use the certified metrics.

That's true gold Ryan. I'm trying to add more value to this even if it's difficult. Probably you're making some confusion among the EMD algo, which reduces the value of exactly matching domains, and penguin which affects our linkbuilding strategy. Waht you should try to focus is to create linkable assets and then spreading the word in the channels where you can achieve links. If you're trying to achieve links in a product page (I prefer to point at product categories since product may expire or get out of stock) you may want to propose special offers or if it's difficult to find opinions on it, create an extensive review with a video maybe so users may find it useful and why not, maybe they'll link or share it! Quoting Ryan with the best ending: "Stop building links, start earning them".

I would continue with erring on the side of caution when it comes to link building.  That competitor is on a one way street to a penalty sooner or later.

Thank you very much Takeshi! But will tthat not be causing a crazy interlinking? I have several categories in the main menu and also pages. If I have a post in category Kenya Travel News can I really link from that post to a page?

Hi Nitin, thank you very much for the advice! I have found that is doing plugin called Broken Link Checker. Thank you very much for your patient, time and great help.

There doesn't seem to be a real definitive answer to this question. back in 2008 Google talks about exploring new and improved ways to crawl pages including some HTML forms. It's been almost 5 years since then so I'm sure they're doing more than before. I would still however include some text links on pages if you're looking to send web crawlers there. Also make sure that you have a solid sitemap to help the crawlers find your content on these pages.

anyone can give some suggestion?

Thanks Tom!

I think that article alone just scared me away from using Disavow Thanks Mike!

hey tom, very good suggestions! and very interesting regarding about this directory

Thank you all!

Great Ideas Doug