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The quality of the site is more important than the TLD, I don't think it should be much of a consideration. You may see some benefit regarding localization in terms of getting high number of appropriate country specific TLDs. But, once again, quality still counts. However, I often notice that sites with poor backlink profiles tend to have a lot of .info domains from directories.

Do "Branded" urls work the same way as exact match url's in google eyes? Is there any harm in doing this myself? What would be the easiest way to setup a single page, have somone host it, and have re-direct link to my homepage or inner pages? Thanks!!

I mean that no more than 50% of your links should have KW anchor text.

can you check your inbox again thanks

Thanks Dan, I was really hoping of just a general checklist for any industry any blog. For instance, once a post gets published, the author should: Promote their post on G+ and FB, and our company Twitter account. Add the page to their del.icio.us account. Other "bookmark" sites. Connect with Top 10 "blogger friends" and let them know the post is up. Promote on reddit. Do a couple of general searches around the web and see if any other blog posts would benefit from the content you just posted. etc. etc. We could take this list, clean it up, and boom, might have a pretty darn good publishing/promoting list or infografic for aspiring seo professionals....

Yes Follow No Follow, as well as all other link options, (broad links) (exact backlinks), blogs, PRs' Blog comments, directory submissions, PR1-PR8-9(ifpossible). Reason I ask is b/c I have a competitor how is doing everything wrong yet ranking SO WELL. Im pulling my hair out, analyzing their links they are 80% directory submissions, 70-80% exact match backlinks, and they pages are so stuffed with keywords its not even funny, yet google places them within the top 10-20. Thanks guys!

Nash I would suggest building a very good balance of links between your homepage and the inner page(s). Do not just build links to one of your internal pages. For example, you could/should probably have some incoming links to your http://www.motorsonwheels.com/vehicles / Inventory page as well. Similar, any other pages/sub-pages that make sense. Let's say Honda came up with a new model of a car, you could potentially do an information article on your page, maybe a press release etc with a link to your check our Honda ABC Inventory, Buy Honda Used Cars in Houston, Houston Car Finance, Houston Used Car Finance and so on. I hope this helps and ignites some thoughts :).

WOW $1000 a link from a PR3 site is quite expensive, you can buy a few blog sites with PR3 for that amount or a PR4/5 domain name. The best links that you can get are the natural links by writing great, useful and interesting content. It will take longer of course to get the natural links vs the paid links but in my opinion they are far more valuable. Also with that $1000 I would invest into infographics, if you have someone create an interesting inforgraphic with useful data/information related to your business it could spread like wildfire and get you a good amount of natural links...

Hey, This WBF might be of some use: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-sitewide-reciprocal-and-directory-links The one thing I would add is to make sure the anchor text is pretty natural, i.e. your brand term. I have also seen it suggested to have one 'partners' page then sitewide link to this page and only have the one external link on this page. All the best

I would suggest not to over do any one kinds of link building. Like you mentioned 100 more articles for article marketing. I woud continue to build quality content instead. Are users interacting with your content ? Can you do a listing in some other authority websites ? Look into the possibility of some info-graphics in the Depression/Anxiety niche.

All you have to do is when you build any links, use natural variations of the anchor text. Business Name Location Business Name Keyword Keyword Location Business Name Business Abbreviation City And so on. Too many links with the same anchor text are always unnatural to me. They scream manipulation.

There could be a variety of factors that could influence your rankings and a drop of just 1 keyword is not enough to guage the magnitude of the problem. Did you rankings drop for other keywords as well ? Are you noticing both an upward and downward move in the rankings or just downward ? If downward only, I would suggest you check all your On-page SEO as well as Off-page and do a complete SEO Audit. Again, don't use a drop in 1 keyword's ranking as a decision maker for other actions.

IMO the only way to get 300 quality backlinks in a short period of time would be to have some content go SUPER viral and create natural links to your site. Rebekah's right.  If you get 300 links because you sponsored an event, those very well could be considered paid links.

I'd avoid trying to score links on profiles (including on seomoz) just for the sake of it. What I would absolutely take is if Rand or any of the writers were to mention any of my sites in passing while discussing a related topic or making a recommendation on something that isn't necessarily SEO. They do that all the time, and it's the type of links Google loves. They also often praise sites which are doing content marketing well, like OKCupid for example or those which have a great design or other features.

I decided to noindex all the pages, but I brought the links back that point to these pages but added the nofollow attribute as well to all of those. From a Google standpoint these pages are not worth indexing, but for user experience the links are needed. Thanks

Been some time since I changed this and had no luck - any ideas?

If your homepage is not penalized an idea that could help you out would be change the urls of the penalized pages and start over on trying to put quality content on those pages, and getting natural quality links to them. Do not run any redirects from the old pages as those will carry your penalty with you. If your homepage is no longer appearing, you could try to clean up as many of the links as you can. It will be time consuming process but can work. I would only follow a re-consideration notice after trying to clean up all the poor quality links first. Best of luck and stay away from using low quality spammers!