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That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank You

Hey Jimmy - it's been a while since you posted your question. Did you get the answers you needed or can you give us further clarification of what you're still wondering about? If you did get the answers you needed, could you mark as  "Good Answer" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future. Thanks! Paul

yes, 404 means link is no longer counting and your work is done this is why people should never point links to their homepage, you can't 404 your homepage. these directories allowed you to deep link to internal pages though? a lot of directories want your homepage link.

Thanks for the Plugin Suggestion !

Despite Google's best efforts, there are still a lot of spammy tactics that work and spammy sites that rank. However, in general, black hat tactics do not work for long, as Google's algorithm catches up with them. If you were hit by Panda, your best bet is to clean up your thin content and work on getting high authority links. Solid links from high authority sites will outrank spam links in the long run.

Doing a site audit, so thanks for the input. I think that the site was hit with Panda, there is a ton of duplicate content due to dymanic generation from secured login pages. Where is the no index no follow tags? Yea, they did not exist.... The site dropped like a stone around the 21st, so that is a clue. Plus, I think the content is somewhat thin www.aireindustrial.net E-commerce sites trying to keep all the pics above the fold. Much work to be done!

Google uses some complex algorithms to determine topical relevance, so I don't think anyone can tell you exactly which keywords Google thinks are related (although things like the Adwords tool and search suggest can provide hints). Your example seems pretty relevant though, given that both sites are both about cell phones.  Even if a site is not relevant, it can still pass valuable link juice, as long as it's not done in a spammy manner.  My advice is not to stress over a single backlink and work on a strategy for building lots of links from both relevant and non-relevant sources.

Thanks for your replies! Gee, I thought things are easier @ Marie no I havent got a google warning nor were my search results downgraded by penguin update. After talking with a few SEO companies and receiving astronomical offers I have decided to keep trying myself. A am currently doing a lot of different activities and after on-page optimizing am trying to improve backlinking. I have reached great results over the last few week, but I am constantly thinking that I might make some dummy mistakes Since I have heard that google is downgrading or even punishing sites with backlinks it considers bad, I thought there might be an eays way to check it before problems occur. @Tom Thanks, I have found LinkDetox just before posting my question here and have just tried it out. Something sort of I have meant with my question. Unfortunately, for a buck it doesn't provide a full information. @Irving Thanks, an interesting tool. Checking every single domain linking to me should be quite time consuming. Strange that the engine would report "essex" positive - I hope that google itself is not that stupid.

Thanks for the background Oleg, Could someone jump in and let me know the best way to locate these types of high PR profile links - like Quantcast?

Yes, a new website should claim its brand name on social media immediately, whether or not that improves its rankings. If you don't get your @companyname, someone else will.

Yes, most social media profiles and pages work in the same way. If you were to earn healthy links to your page, you could theoretically rank higher for certain terms.  Whether there's an upper limit for Facebook in Google I'm not sure.

Ok got you. They have definitely messed up with the canonical thing. But Google is definitely not going to follow this wrong instruction. Canonical tag is just a signal and if you are setting it incorrectly, Google will not follow that. So, that means all the pages of that directory will get indexed and you will get value for your website. Hope that helps.

On page factors are also OK , it can be due to over optimization of keyword through link building (this can be true for first case but still I need some concrete stance and what can be done to remove the same) but second case is not at all understood.

Article directories have been heavily devalued with the big Google updates.  While they were once quite powerful, that time has now gone. Definitely won't say they won't pass any value at all, because they will, but put it this way - for every 1 article you submit to a general article submission site, you could probably find 100 better websites, blogs or more to post it to.

Much in the same vein as Monopoly - you can have a special themed Scrabble board. There's 1000s of Monopoly ones out there - I'm sure you could come up with tonnes of unique/(stupid) ideas!

Looking at some Zemanta links in the wild, it doesn't seem too aggressive. Take for example, the bottom of this blog: http://kevinwmccarthy.com It depends on your goals. From a traffic perspective, as long as the links are relevant, it's fine. I can't tell you whether Zemanta will drive traffic to your particular site (I haven't used it), but it's certainly plausible. It probably depends a lot on your niche and the population of sites using the system. From an SEO standpoint, my gut reaction is that it's fairly low-risk but may also be low-gain. Google could easily recognize these plug-in links and simply devalue them. I doubt a block of four relevant links is going to get outright penalized - it's more likely Google will just see this as a link-exchange of sorts and simply dial down the volume on those links. That's not to say it's risk-free (we've certainly seen many link networks get hit in the past year), but I suspect that John was speaking in generalities and not about Zemanta in particular. On the other hand, no tool like this should be seen as some kind of panacea for link-building. It's just one piece of the puzzle for getting exposure and traffic.

Both great answers - thank you Sean and Brighton College. This just confirms my suspicion that it's not a good idea. You know that sickening feeling you get in your stomach when something doesn't feel right? That's the feeling I got when approached from our customer about doing this. I think that gut instinct as Sean alludes to has a lot of truth in SEO. I agree with both of you on "it's better to have a few good outbound links" and "the more inbound quality links vs outbound, the better." Thank you!