Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Larry, I think the question you really should be asking yourself is: Why should anyone bother to link to me? Once you can answer that question you'll find it a lot easier to build or "earn" links to your website. As for Link Building tools I recommend that you use Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to start to learn what types of content in your niche gets linked to the most, and then create a better resource than them or approach an old concept that was covered in a piece of content from a new angle. I could literally write for hours on link building and link building techniques but if you can answer that first question you're in a better place than 75% of people who come to me for link building advice.

If the site is doing well, avoid panicking - lots of webmasters freak out and go on a rampage trying to remove every link, when they should just sit back and relax. If we're talking thousands and thousands of junk comments, it's something you might want to be concerned about. If it's a lower number, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it and would focus on building quality backlinks going forward. Contacting blog owners is a nightmarish task because the sort who have blogs that auto-approve junk comments are usually not the most tech-savvy and often don't even think to include their contact info anywhere. Lots of them don't own their own domain, so you can't get their whois info that way either. If it were me, I'd put my time and energy into building good, diverse backlinks rather than spending tons of time trying to remove these links that don't seem to have negatively affected you.

I am now showing the links in Google webmaster without downloading

In short, yes. There's a useful Matt Cutts video on PDF optimisation and how Google treads PDFs.

what if someone has done this? remove article or links or build more quality links to nullify the effect? I have done this and lost my ranking to a great extent. What should i do now?

Thanks Brian and thanks Steve, yes read it, seems very strange but hopefully it will get sorted

have you managed to get into sunzu as i have not. we did have an account and they took money last month but we could not get into it, we were blackstar members so now we have stopped payment and told them so. it looks like no one can join at the moment. to me it seems very strange why anyone would buy ecademy and then close it down, what is the point

There has never been anything like this from Google - they will never give numbers, but the general rule of thumb when link building is to not just use target anchor text. Use things like "Click Here to see more", "Click for more information", the website URL, your name, etc. and add in the odd keyword based phrases now and then. Target key phrases too much and you will undo any good work you have done. Andy

Remember you don't need to have that phrase exactly to be ranked for it. If the content has "peer" and "lending" in it, with some good off-page ranking "points" they could show higher than your site. Good luck!

Thanks for the great responses! For now, I am going to do a rel="nofollow" for all of our clients and slowly over time, change the links,wording and dofollow of the text.

But In every new Micro-niche sites like tumblr or pinterest - i have added the Blog url ! like this many sites i added, will it affect ?

It's okay to reciprocal link with a quality website. I "reciprocal" link to my BBB page: http://www.bbb.org/san-diego/business-reviews/freight-forwarding/ship-overseas-inc-in-san-diego-ca-25001132/. I recommend that you read: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Can you encourage the sites you guest post on to add authorship markup so that you can benefit from your work as the author? Our WordPress plugin AuthorSure works on multi-author sites.  Try getting them to add it? That is assuming you are guest posting on WordPress sites.

Charles, Thanks for the kudos on the site design. We've spent the better half of January sprucing it up with bread crumbs, service pages, a new layout, the custom illustrations, etc. The goal was to increase user experience while also improving the SEO friendliness of the site. It was a lot of (positive) change and that's why I'm excited to start seeing some results and fruits of our labor! I didn't know that you could submit a url to WMT... in fact, we haven't been using WMT very much at all. I just poked around and found out how to do that, so that's done. Thanks! As for backlinks, we did get a fair number of quality ones (and one coming early this week from eHarmony's blog yet too)... so I guess I'll just have to be patient for that to show up in OSE. We're still a pretty new SEOMoz account, so I'm just a bit antsy to start seeing some of our metrics improve. I guess I just need to be a bit patient Thanks for the response!

Thanks Charles, I will try to get these links taken down.