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Thank you   i will give it a shot

My last unnatural links client had a backlink profile that was riddled with directory links....definitely not natural. When you get hit with an unnatural links penalty Google wants to see that you have made a huge effort to remove every single link that was made by your own hand (or by your SEO).  You definitely need to try to get rid of those directory links. You also need to thoroughly document your attempts to remove the links - emails, emails to whois email address, contact forms, etc. Don't fool yourself into thinking that the high PR links are probably ok.  I have seen that many webmasters fail their reconsideration request because they try to keep too many links.

A good and reputable site would be: http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/bulk-backlink-checker There are other sites but other sites also have spam on it

Hi, According to my experience, Open-site explorer from SEOmoz and ahrefs.com is best backlink checker tool for both HTTP and HTTPS. These both tools are very helpful to you to analysis your site's backlinks.

This is a dead link building strategy and can be dangerous nowadays (especially if not in the same niche) and can get both sites penalized, you should at very least nofollow one of the sites doing the linking. Not recommended for  boosting serps, might be viable for cross traffic if each site sells something the other does not for example.

Ya,link exchange is harmful for your site and it can also negatively impact on site's ranking. As  Keri Said " Do keep in mind that it is against Google's guidelines to buy links for the purposes of passing page rank. " According to my experience One-way link gives more link juice then link exchange. In the past same question was asked you can get more ideas from these answers about the link exchange.  http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-link-exchange-a-bad-idea

Thanks heaps Nakul. 6 month link building plan is great!

Project#Labs, I think there may actually be a couple of things at play here. One is that depending on the resolution of the screen you are viewing the image in, it may be very small. I use a high res screen on Mac and really have to squint often (and I wear glasses). As to could they be trying to get clicks, yes. As to image link versus text link, well I like infographics and we use them. But, according to Matt Cutts, Google has talked of devaluing them as they believe the intent was not always to provide a link back, etc. (I am paraphrasing grossly). Good question.

Hi Matti, First, I think you have to seriously evaluate the criteria you're using to determine whether independent pages "deserve" to exist.  If I take the example you provided literally, there is no way that individual URLs need to exist for plural versus singular versions of the same root term.  I used to see a lot of that in the online education space about 8 or 9 years ago, and it was very effective - you could get different URLs ranking for "online college" and "online colleges" just through aggressive on-page optimization, even though there was nothing materially different about the content on the pages.  Back then it was a pretty spammy tactic, but these days there's no excuse.  Depending on the extent that you pursue this strategy, you could have a lot of very low-value content on your site that paints a big bulls-eye on your site for Panda. However, taking a look at your other problem - a more general category page out-ranking the more specific product page, this often comes down to a link authority issue.  Sometimes a category page will only have one or two instances of the target keyword on it (e.g. a link to the Shoes page), but that will be the page that ends up ranking instead of the Shoes page.  An engine is trying to surface results based on 1) relevance and 2) authority, so in this case, the authority of the category page (more link juice) trumps the fact that it's less specifically relevant than to product page.  The engine is telling you that you need a link authority of X to rank for that term, and right now the category page has that level of link authority, while the product pages don't. If your product pages really do deserve to exist (e.g. address keyword markets that have search volume, provide valuable services, and present value-added content not available elsewhere on the web), then I would maintain the structure of a category page linking to individual product pages, with the product pages targeting the most specific terms. As the product pages gain link authority over time (because they're valuable and worth linking to, right?), they will displace the category page in the SERPs. Hope that helps.

No problem JP. Glad we could help out. Feel free to reach out to us if you have specific questions on link building. We've trained many folks and are happy to help out.

Thanks Nikele! Any chance you have a link to thay post? I couldn't find it by googling..

I agree 100% with you Steve. Thanks. Justin, I hope all this helps.

Thanks, Moosa!

I don't include this information on product pages because it is too long.  The product pages are short and sweet for good conversions, although a link to this additional information is obviously posted for people who view the product pages. The articles are typically over 1000 words, several photos and a video. These articles also target keywords that the product pages do not and they pull in a lot more traffic from search than the product pages.  Lots of the traffic that enters these pages moves to the product pages through obvious links and some of them buy the product.