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I think that Google prefers you to have a natural blend of sites. Any website that naturally attracts links will get links from PR 0 sites on up. I would approach your link building methods cautiously, as having too many high PR inboud links can raise red flags. My advice is to write great content and seek links from reputable websites that are relevant to your website. Whether the page is PR0 or PR9, just make sure the website is trusted. On the flip side, the advice that you were given may be related to sites who's index pages are PR0. The reason they may be giving you that information is because a PR0 site can also indicate that the website has been devalued or penalized by Google. Having spammy websites link to you can actually hurt your rankings. In reference to your second question, I don't believe that other countries linking to your site are anything to worry about as long as they are relevant. Remember, SEO is a popularity contest. Google is always doing algorithm updates and it's best not to participate in questionable link building tactics. The best way is always to produce quality content and naturally reap the rewards.

Do you know HTML? If not, the W3C stuff isn't going to be any use to you and you need to hire someone.

Andy, Thank you for the response. I'm using suggested local directories on the SEOMOZ Pro Directory list. I'm guessing that all of those are trusted sites. I am still curious as to whether or not the directories actual help or boost rankings though.

Hi Johan, What I understand from your question: You are linking articles/news pages from your home page to attract traffic to those pages( to complete article). Am I right ? If you this is the case, You don't have to do anything. Check home page of seomoz.org, they are linking to latest blogpost from home page. Correct me if I misunderstood your question ?

Thats a good idea, in that way we can remove competitor out as well and also notify DMOZ editors as well. But, according to me, they get a notification when the site is dead and there are some hosting or domain issues with the site

Hi Nakul We don't have a lot of outgoing links, it would be linking from a blog post of ours. I've always thought that as long as the site being linked to is relevant then it doesn't matter what country. I just wanted to make sure. Thanks

You might want to try outreachr.com, I can make an intro for you if you like.

Article spinning?  Really, as a long term strategy this doesn't work. Your customers.  Use google tools such as Google Analytics and Google Adwords to find out how they're getting to your site. Never trust a website promising a quick and easy way to get links.  Usually these links have no value and won't serve you any use in the long term. It's effective for buying YouTube views not customers, which is what you want in the long term right? Let's face it Marketing is hard and sometimes monotonous work, but when done right awesome results do actually happen.  So don't trust any of the quick rich schemes you've mentioned.  Do the work, put the hours in, and you  will see the results.

Hi Sara, If the competition is low, you will probably be able to see results within a few weeks. This would be a gamble but i've seen some of my pages for mediocre level keywords rank in 10 days from the day the page was created. I guess it would depend on how low the competition is and how far you are willing to go. If you are willing to spend some time creating a really good PR, it would help push your site up in a shorter time. Honestly IMO no one owns Google so no one can truly answer this question. From my experience it is possible ; ) but its up to you and how far you are willing to go. Hope this helps.

Hi there, if it's a "relevant and quality" blog it probably will be considered natural. This is fine once in a while but I wouldn't rely on it as a tactic - too many reciprocal links will devalue the link authority.

Thank you for the honesty. I have considered this over the past few weeks and have been brainstorming solutions that will separate my site from the competitors. I'm going to read up on Hipmunk, thank you.

Hey Tyler I have to disagree with most of the responses here to some extent. Link building as in, here is $100 get me 10 PR4 links is over but link earning is far from over. Content, content, content - we have all heard that but too many folks put stuff out there that gets no links and very few social shares so developing a strategy that helps you identify the kind of content that gets linked to along with the actual people who do the linking and building a content + outreach strategy can be very effective. Think about this: Identify the kind of content in your industry that gets links make a list of all the people that link to it make a list of all possible influencers that can help promote your content to their network build a relationship with the influencers build content that is highly linkable and better than or unique to what was out there outreach to the people that linked to other content similar (but not as good of course) outreach to the influencers to share your content guest post on influential site(s) to get more eyes on your content (and win more links) Basically, the age old buying of links is dead and buried (good riddance) but there are still some very cool strategies revolving around content generation and the effective marketing of that content to a wider audience of people who will link to it. Following a long term approach like this you also look to build a broader network of contacts in the social networks and blogger buddies. Once you get to this point, where you share their content, they share yours etc then picking up links should be easy. I have a client that put out a fairly cool but ultimately pedestrian piece of content last week and picked up over 30 links to it from the Blogosphere. All highly relevant sites with readership so there is a referral value as well but could you imagine trying to buy these 30 links? Lets say you went with some fairly low rate guest posting service at say $100 per post you are looking at $3000 - if you are doing this each week then $12000. So, whilst there was some initial pain and investment in content and strategy the return on the investment downstream is beyond compare when looked at in a pay X for a link approach. It is also pretty much unbeatable and hard to duplicate by your competition so if you want to play hard and can settle in for a six month + program then you can get some real benefit from working with someone with some real link building smarts. Hope that helps buddy. Marcus

Hey, This is a hell of a question and in honesty, there is no 'best' strategy and the best strategy is the one (or many) that works for you and your business. There are two main link building strategies from a pure performance in the search results perspective: 1. Manual Link Building You actively seek links from sites that will allow you to link back to yourself. In this category we can have everything from article marketing and press releases through to guest blogging. Even the lowly directory can feature in this approach. Some ideas that fall under this category topically relevant & local directories (that are high quality) - article marketing (squidoo) - press releases - infographic submission directories Really, we are looking at places with little to no editorial control and that have a fairly low impact when it comes to moving the dial. You will also hit a wall with these approaches and whilst there is really no limit on how many articles you could submit to squidoo there is a limit on how much value they pass. (obviously, if your squidoo stuff is super awesome and gets tons of links it's better but really, if it was that good it should be on your own site). This approach also does not scale awfully well so by all means, pick the low hanging fruit but don't expect it to be particularly sweet! 2. Content Based Link Building Next up we have all the ways we can use content to build links and this includes various strategies (some of which we covered above but) guest posting (the fashionable one) - getting interviewed if possible - blogging - big content - infographics and directories - ebooks Now, with content based stuff, we are seeking to identify useful and in demand content and hoping that it generates links. Well, it would be great if you could do that and it 'just worked' but the reality is that it takes time and effort to get to the point where your blog is in such demand that people are tripping over themselves to share and link to it (but you can get there). There is no reason why you can't look at the easy options or even guest blogging but it is not a process you can scale very well and it can be a slow, painful process to build links in any volume whilst maintaining quality. To put this into perspective the textlinkbrokers people offer a high quality guest posting service - I have not tried this but it is like $800 a pop. Now, I don't know how many $800 links you want to buy but clearly, whilst there are other options, this is going to get pretty expensive pretty quickly. My suggestion would be some kind of long term structured approach starting with a six month program. An approach that focused on identifying at least two to three pieces of big content that you can use to attract links and then using social media to help promote that content. A process like this has been pretty well covered here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building It includes social outreach to build a network, identification of link targets, identification of influencers within your niche that you can use to help seed out your amazing content and techniques and strategies to help build relationships with the people you are asking to share your content and link to you. This is not a paint-by-number approach, you are going to have to use some smarts to help identify valuable content but all the tools are out there. Ultimately, I expect people to dive in with the usual content, content, content approach and that is right to a point. But what you really need is great content and a well established network of people that you are going to get to share your content and link to it. (think blogger buddies). Point I am trying to make here is that any one 'strategy' is not going to win the war. You want diversity, you want scaleability and true content driven strategies like infographics + guest post on an established site, ebooks + guestpost on an established sites, ego bait, social outreach etc will help you take great content and give it the audience it deserves. If you follow this kind of approach for six months or longer (try to think 2 year strategy if possible) and build up a great social network winning links can become easy. A client we work with who has gone through a similar process can pop a blog post out, promote it via the social channels, see a large number of retweets, likes etc and expect several links. A recent piece of content that hooked into halloween generated over 30 links from a single, fairly pedestrian piece of content. Summing up Really, you can't replicate this kind of scale or success by manually building links and you can't get to this point over night but if you hunker down and play the long term game, build a big social network, develop content people are actively seeking, blog and network with blogger buddies then long term you can get into a position where the external portion of the SEO should take care of itself! Hope that helps! Marcus

Yeah--half of all seo firms are below average

I feel your pain, I am in the same situation. Despite what others are saying about EMD they still rank well, & it drives me nuts.  You can either try to get as close to them as possible & make your listing stand out with rel author & a great title, or you can invest heavily in to trying to out rank them. Or you could join them.

Yes I am seeing some very strange results too. This morning I did a search for "http timeout error" and got a list of results that had wikipedia at the top followed by over 50 results for Time-Out magazine, not a very helpful set of results. Also since the last know updates I have notice a 40% or increase in the amout of organic traffic coming from Bing and Ask (e.g. gone up from 100 visits per day to 140 per day), has anyone else seen this?

Hi Robert, Thanks for the answer, that was pretty much my take on the matter. The sites in question are all sites build by the previous SEO company, so there seems to be a small link network. Their Auth and PR has dropped dramatically. Thanks Rob

Do you possibly mean no outgoing links?