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Thanks Aditya The reality is SEO now requires a level of quality much more challenging than ever.  While this is true due to the ever-increasing capabilities of search engines in their need to battle spam (and the fact that their systems are so complex as to be far from perfect), it's also the nature of the web regardless of SEO as well. This is because the web continues to grow in size all the time.  The more crowded any market, the more important the message delivered needs to be consistent in its ability to rise above the noise. It's a fact of marketing as old as time itself. While some "classical" link building might still suffice, that notion is fading away.  And because of this reality, my position as an advocate of best practices is that the energy expended on those methods can better be used for fewer, higher quality opportunities. Whether we like it or not, in many situations, it means a slower building up of trust and authority, and in turn, a slower building up of ranking strength. It also means more diversity into social signals is that much more important than ever as well.

Thank you, Nakul!

I would stick with the image embed option and live with the fact that not everyone will link.  I'd rather have more people posting my advert.... sorry, widget on their site that included some without links than I would have less people using it.    The vast majority of people will take the easy way anyway. I'm not sure that adding a registration would really help anyway. What I would say is be careful not to "over optimise" your anchor text doing this.  It is surprisingly easy to skew your anchor text in a dangerous direction with a good widget campaign.  You could even consider mixing up the anchor text that you offer them as part of the widget generation, but generally I would err towards brand over keyword.

Don't be surprised by Google's inability to penalise obvious breaches to its TOS. So many sites slip under the radar. Case in point, after looking through the top backlinks in OSE and MajesticSEO after you sent me the URL (thank you very much by the way), I think it's clear how they've done it. There is an absolute ton of links coming from high PA/DA .jp and other Japanese domains pointing to the site. Furthermore, it looks as though the site may have been hacked at some point, because there's a load of high PA/DA viagra links as well - most of which look deleted now. Both of these sort of links, while without question unnatural, would pass page and domain authority to the site.  As for why it hasn't been penalised yet? Well, you may be able to see that the linking anchor text to the site is 95% raw URLs (as in: http://www.example.com/).  This means that they would not have triggered any Penguine threshold for over optimised anchor text, leaving it to the algorithm to work out the spam another way, and perhaps it will only be penalised when reviewed manually. It's an absolute ton of raw URL links coming from high PA/DA, but completely suspicious and irrelevant, websites that has caused the site's authority to sky rocket. Hope this helps clarify a few things.

"All" was probably a poor choice of words. Sorry. Do any of us really know what blackhat SEO is anyway?

I very much hold the same opinion as you. Directories pass very little strength, if they pass any at all. Primarily for the reasons that you have said, but also because they really offer very little to the user (when's the last time someone used a directory to find something?) What I think we've seen lately is Google targeting directories and devaluing the little strength they had relatively quickly and regularly.  This should be reason enough not to pursue them as a tactic. But then you have to consider the negative effect. Directories could very well harm your website.  We've seen directories in the past be deindexed, and links from a deindexed domain can be a negative ranking factor.  There's nothing stopping Google deindexing more directories in the future, in my opinion. I'd move far, far away from directories as a linking tactic and explore other inbound tactics, such as content marketing.  As for bookmarks, I'd pretty much say the same.  I think the chance of it causing a negative effect are smaller, but any benefit a social bookmark has now is likely to be negligible. They're pretty much good for indexing and little else (and even then, sharing the link on facebook or Google+ is better for that). Hope this helps - I think you're spot on and should whip those SEOs into shape!

Subscribe to Ward's linkmoses email newsletter, and purchase the archives.  The insights you will gain will be invaluable.  I'm not sure that a single link will "turbo boost" your sites rankings.  His email archive spans over 2 years and is about 300 pages - a much better investment in my opinion.

Thanks Marcus, the other one is nofollow as well. I'll leave 'em be but will ask the client if they're aware of any other SEO activity being done in the last couple years. Cheers, Peter

Sorry, I didn't actually look at the site, but yes agreed,  I would certainly ensure St. Charles, MO was in the title tag for that page and any additional pages that they are looking to rank for!

Thank's Mike,  I was just putting in a generic URL. All the HTML looks correct on the site, but some of the artists are getting a link back and some are not.  I will send it over in a PM

Ok thanks I think we will just left it. Thank you for your help!

In theory, yes it should. The 301 is designed to pass on all of the link data of a page to its new destination.  That means if the redirected page has a spammy link profile etc., then it is being passed on to the new destination.  The latest video blog from Matt Cutts says that pretty much all of this strength is passed on. Breaking the 301 will break that link.  It might take the crawler a while to recognise this, but it should do over time.  How long is quite hard to say - case in point, I saw an old URL ranking in the SERPs for over 2 weeks (while redirecting to a new page that ranked 1 place above it), before it was dropped from the SERPs. By the same principle, it could take awhile for the crawler to recognise that the old redirected links are not being pointed to the new page any more.

Yes, absolutely. Attribution is considered to be a very reputable way of linking.

I'm more concerned about the number of domains rather than the number of links.  Google's usually pretty good at figuring out that those 14000 links are actually just one domain. If you've got a pattern of obviously manipulative linking then you may want to consider removing them.  But you could do yourself more harm than good in doing so though.  If the vast majority of your link profile is natural I'd ignore those self made links.  The only exception would be, perhaps, if these links all contained anchor text for which you were trying to rank.  Then there's a chance that a future Penguin refresh could get ahold of that.  It's a tough call.

Thank you for your quick response! As you can tell by my "Aspirant" status, we are early at this and I have also been advised to pick some key words and really work at them before doing "all: of them. How would you recommend balancing your advice, with balancing the need to rank for something? Thank you!

have you been doing link building for the clients and if so have you been getting the same types of links from the same places?