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Hi Benjamin, Do you mean in OpenSiteExplorer or Google? OSE just released an update, and we could have just not crawled some of the links you had before -- they could be there, it's just that we didn't crawl that site this time.

You're probably right. No-follow would be the best solution.

James- We are also considering using Zemanta - I've been quoted $2k a month minimum for related articles and $3K for In-text links. Did you just negotiate a lower minimum? Also are you using In-text or related article and in your opinion which method is the more valuable link. Thanks, Chas Blackford-LegalMatch

Do you have some reference? Here's what I found out last night which is contradictory to what you said: added 11/30: I was reviewing competitors' link backs I found they did a lot of press releases and gained a high-level link back from each one. These were the best/highest-authority links they had. The syndicated releases were not even listed anywhere. And then I reviewed their SERPs... and guess what, their ranks increased with each one. (So I don't think "duplication" is an issue. If anything only the syndicated copies were penalized, but not the original one)

First up, if you have an infographic, the smart money is to control how people link to it in some way. Usually, this involves providing them with some kind of embed or linking code. Secondly, if you are a using some SEO smarts here you are going to want them to link to a page rather than to the image itself so you can pump some of that inbound link juice out to other pages or at least control it and provide a little more info, branding, funnels to service pages / social sign ups etc. So, the way this tends to work is through hosting the infographic on a page and then providing link code to that page something like: [image: my-infographic.png] < href="http://www.yoursite.co.uk/">Your Home Page You may also include a link to your homepage in this to really pimp our link opportunity. Now, the only problem here is that we are creating a signature for the links as each link is going to be exactly the same. So, this is almost the sitewide scenario where they can count one, but identify and easily discount the others. But, the real bones of the question is not 'how can Google devalue infographic links' but rather how can we stop Google devaluing infographic links. Certainly though, an infographic is a high quality piece of content and if people choose to link to it, that link should still count. Whilst, they may look at ways of devaluing these links if they get too widespread but really, the boom (and bust) in infographic production may well have devalued them already in that there are just so many to choose from. Hope that helps Marcus

Peter, Thanks for the reply. I tried deleting the question when I saw that it was an issue with Open Site explorer (read the updated question above), but as seomoz wouldn't let me (it only returned 404-page every time, I used the same question to type a new one. Your answer was of great help anyways. But would be great if you could help me with the new one.

Also, Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to see exactly what links and anchor text Google is picking up for your new domain.

Thanks Cyrus - very helpful. I still get the feeling that getting a link from a PageRank e.g. 7 site (however relevant it is) is going to be a lot more valuable than a load of PageRank 3 sites, though maybe not as valuable as an extremely relevant PageRank 6 site...

We're checking out textbroker.com. I will keep everyone else in mind. Thanks for the PMs

Spot on, I generally just use OSE to check out competitor's backlinks. To me, nothing beats the back link results from WMT. Also keep in mind that more tools beside OSE are avaible: ahrefs.com majestiseo.com

Thanks for the kind words

OK so i actually took a minute to look at the site hehe I see no glaring problem I would change this to index, follow name="robots" content="noodp,noydir,noarchive" /> sometimes Google will choose to noindex noarchived pages Link to it from other sites and submit the URL in WMT

I agree with Matt here.  I would just add using SEOmoz's Report Card tool to check all of the on-page factors that Matt mentioned.  I would also take a look at a whiteboard Friday done by John Doherty back in July for internal linking best practices http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

No Not at all, think of it like this you post a great quality article on a site that is a good fit, inside the article is say an offer or promotion, well if Google crawled the site every week or month then your article is not getting indexed until the crawl, the promotion could be over by then or the information outdated so using such services can insure your article is picked up quickly & you get your just deserts.

yes .. it is fine as long as you are not using it for the sole purpose of giving a push to your website's visibility.. take it as an attempt to make it easier for people to navigate your website.

I cant really understand your question -but you can see links for your site using opensiteexdplorer.com. If you want to see links made recently i would use  http://ahrefs.com/ or http://www.majesticseo.com/

There are many factors involved but, at a high level, a bad link profile as detected by Google's Penguin algorithm is one with a high percentage of keyword anchor text links. The way most natural links are created is to copy and paste a link. For example, a link to this Q&A thread is: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-a-good-link-portfolio-look-like. When site owners create links to their own site, they often try to take advantage of Google's algorithm by using specific keywords such as good link thread. When you take a site which sells watches and you look at the profile and see most of the links are URLs with some occasional anchor text links thrown in, that would be a more natural profile. When you see most of the links use anchor text such as "best watches" or "cheap watches" that indicates a high likelihood of manipulation. There are numerous other aspects of a good or bad link. Some criteria to consider: the PR of the linking page the number of links on the linking page the position of the link (in content is best whereas a footer link would offer less value) the anchor text the relevance of the linking site to the target page You can go to Open Site Explorer and examine the backlink profile of good sites such as Google and the New York Times, then compare it to some spammy sites. You will see the difference quickly.