Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Alice, Thanks for the tips. One question though, how do I draw the line between high quality links and low quality links, If you could give me some tips? Thanks.

It's a limited solution. It can get visibility fast and possibly drive traffic. It can also (unintentionally) interfere with your site - for example, a product news release could do well and the product page on your site could rank lower. So it also depends what the CTA is and what you want to rank best. Even with good content, you need a way to get it out there to get visibility which is what a service like this can do. Then again, it can also do it for not really great content.

I have had to kill any outsourced bulk link building which I did a bit of while optimizing my clients' websites through forums, article submissions and Blogger outreach. I think those are big as well as niche profile directories. These have an associated cost but have a lot of good fodder such as review options, article uploading, followed links and often times a referral service.

Vince, One of the toughest things about switching to a Mac is compatibility issues with SEO software. SEO Administrator, like many other 'SEO' software programs is only compatible with PC. I, personally, use Parallels for these types of issues and to run programs like Xenu, Internet Business Promoter and the like. While I've heard good things about Boot Camp, I find Parallels consistently performs better.

There are many ways of building links. The only limit is your creativity. I wrote an answer a couple of weeks back to a similar question, it might help... http://www.seomoz.org/q/first-links-for-a-new-site Glad you are finding SEOMoz useful - there's a great community here and staying ontop of things is easy because there are so many people doing their own testing and sharing results. By the way, don't do too many press releases. Try one every couple of months maximum. Matt

When I moved across country I used this one to let people know that I had moved my consulting business: http://www.prlog.org/ They did a good job. I even got picked up in a few local print newspapers.

You are 100% correct. This is how you dump links! You must remove the page and let it 404. Won't guarantee that you will recover if you did link building to your homepage though, which is why you should never point links to your homepage. Good luck!

thanks I am currently doing that with my blog posts ..... http://www.turksandcaicosrealestatespecialist.com/blog/

Rule of thumb is if its a niche directory specific for your industry  then go for it otherwise unless it dmoz or really strong and popular dont. All the link and seo directories i would stay away from.

This is an interesting case.  Your analytics data definitely looks like a Penguin hit site...but when I look at your backlinks you only have 3 domains linking to you.  Penguin is almost always about GROSS abuse of anchor texted keywords in backlinks.  I just can't see that happening with only having 3 backlinking domains. I can think of a few possible reasons for your traffic to look like this: 1. Do you have a domain that you are redirecting to this one?  If the backlink profile of that domain was affected by Penguin then this would directly affect your current domain. 2. It's possible that one or more of the 3 domains that link to you were affected by Penguin and therefore, you lost the link juice from that domain on April 24. 3. When did you create this site?  It's possible that the initial traffic on your graph was a honeymoon boost that a new site often gets and you just happened to drop at the end of April. 4. You dropped from about 40 visits per day to about 15 or so.  It's possible that you were holding the #1 position but a competitor came in and beat you.  A drop from #1 to #2 or #3 could result in a decrease of traffic like this.  Mind you, you mentioned that keywords dropped to page 5 so this is likely not the case. 5. There could be some other issue that has caused you to drop such as malware, a bad robots.txt problem, etc. Edit:  I see that ahrefs reports 75 backlinking domains with your keyword being the most prominent anchor so it is possible that you were directly hit by Penguin after all. We haven't seen too many credible reports of Penguin recovery yet.  The general thought is that if you can remove all or the majority of your spammy backlinks then you can recover but seeing as there were very few reported recoveries after the refresh Oct 5, no one really knows if that is possible. There is a way to recover by migrating penalized pages to new pages though...but it's complicated and you would have to start fresh with a clean backlink profile for those pages.

Hi Yannis I am sure there is (a few options discussed here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-are-the-best-seo-tools-out-there)  but my question would be why do reciprocal linking? Generally it is a tactic that has no SEO value these days, with search engines recognizing both links, and essentially cancelling them out. If one party is a huge high authority site (CNN/BBC etc.) then the smaller receiving party will benefit, but in most cases where sites are of similar authority levels, there really isn't much point to reciprocal linking. Regards Simon

I woudn't use that place it can't be possible for them to vet standards.  If you click on any of those big company names it seems to take you to media coverage about freelancers not that those companies use that site. I found your site from its name within your profile,  you have no page descriptions and all your page titles are the same which is keyword cannibilization.  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization You need to get onsite as best as you can before you do offsite (e.g. link building).  I would suggest that SEO moz is a good source of information to learn to be able to do it yourself if that's an option for you. "Open Site Explorer" tool on SEOmoz finds links. The starter guide PDF is a good place to start, I got to about chapter 7 then most of what I learnt is from the search box on here for the relevant terms like "exact match domain" or "meta tags" etc.

Thanks for the help Simon. The other post has a lot of helpful information. Cheers!

Nope, GWT is the fastest thing I have come across. When I guest post I find between 2 weeks and a month and its in GWT.

Hey Brian There is really no such thing as a bad strategy, just low quality and overly aggressive ones. You want to win difficult links rather than build easy links and focus on quality over quantity. You want links from topically relevant sources and ideally, whilst you can build links, you want to inspire them if possible (easier said than done). The usual strategies apply, write great content, network with other bloggers, try to get people talking about things that you do. Guest posting still has some legs, as does outreach but you need to have something for people to link to. Guest posting seems to be something people are migrating towards as a safe strategy so it is worth pointing out that this is not a magic bullet approach, if you go low quality, it is really just article marketing so go after those hard to win links and sure, flesh it out with some good but not always triple A stuff but be careful with quality and anchor text ratios and you should be okay. Some further thoughts on guest posting and anchor text ratios: Safe Anchor Text Ratios for for Link Building Guest posting for SEO Hope that helps! Marcus

In guest posting you can use only fresh content if that content was not published anywhere else then you can resubmit it in other blog. If the content is yours, all you would have done is grant the owner of the other website permission to post your work. If the content is nowhere to be found, it could now hardly be considered to be a duplicate of something else.

The words between (www.)wpsecuritychecklist(.com) will be counted by google as your brand name only. That's why it is not recommended now to use keywords there. The rest of words like: wordpress backup - the plugin and the plan The WordPress Security Checklist will be just keywords but not brand name. Cheers, Russel

Thanks!  I did see it disappear after I posted the question.  It's good to know that Roger crawls about 30 days or so.

yeah you're right. I take good care of quality link building normally but in this particular case, I was experimenting a bit (some of the other similar sites reacted well to same links) but this one didn't.