Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Sam, Sorry that you are having some issues connecting to OSE. The issue with Chrome is a known issue and can usually be fixed by clearing your cache and cookies and restarting your browser. I would recommend clearing your cookies for all time. That should help. As for IE, we aren't really optimized for use in IE so that may be causing the issue. Did you try to diagnose the connection issue? That might help us to know what would be causing the connection issue with that browser. I would also recommend that you make sure that third-party cookies are activated in your browser (I know it seems basic, but it really does help). This is how you do this inChrome: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95647 If that still doesn't work, please let us know. -Chiaryn

Online Gambling is always going to be very black hat and difficult to rank for 'legitimately'  I found that using the wayback machine (http://archive.org/web/web.php) can help rat out spammy Gambling sites that have changed around. As well as this it is just a matter of searching and finding those hidden gems or pushing some kind of high quality viral / media campaign where you can get into the higher quality websites. Gambling and Pills are always going to be very blackhat so maybe you need to change hat slightly.

This has given me something to focus on, I know most of this stuff in the back on my head but haven't understood where to go. This is great. Thanks again

I was expecting you! Thanks for the input

Blogger.com belongs to Google

yes if you have specific pages with different names you could serve that up as the anchor text. unless you can do that it's not worth your time because that anchor phrase will just get penalized and you won't rank for it

Instead of putting all of your money into one link that you may not even get you could try and get 3, or four links from other higher rated directories that cost less.

Hi, thanks for responding! I'm certainly aware that many directories were affected by Penguin, but we tend to use trustworthy, hyper-specific directories that really do generate new clients for us. Since directories like this (webdesignfinders for web design, for example) are less for the link and more for the lead potential, I thought they might be more likely to be in the clear, post-Penguin. Is anyone else adjusting their lead-generation strategies to accommodate this?

I think you could be right.  I've seen a lot of people saying their SERPS are moving (either up or down) and of course everybody starts to wonder if something is happening Penguin wise.  But as the day moves on, I'm seeing more Panda related issues in the forum than Penguin.

If the image links or any links are from the Display Network, Google can identify this and will not pass any link juice to the site. Essentially, if those links counted then it would be like buying links to rank higher on SERPs. I would also thoroughly search the page to make sure that your competitor's image link isn't also in the body of page.

oh..okay, thanks...can't be shown up as url, because it's not used in href or src attribute... thanks greg for your help! @all other experience are welcome

In short, yes. You're much more likely to get penalised by Google (particularly Penguin) as the natural links you'll gain will link with your keywords in the anchor text. You'd have to produce lots of varied content that would naturally attract a wide variety of anchor texts to over come this. Also exact match domains are only good at targeting a handful of keywords. Sites that gain the most from SEO get traffic from a huge variation of keywords.

Awesome. Thanks!

A good way to look at this is through OSE, looking at the anchor text tab.

Thanks Greg, can't find any links that point to http://jonnyt.me/index.html now, think these were old links I had. Thanks for the advice!

You could try to block the URL in robots.txt like Sanket says below, but at the end of the day, the link's still pointing to your website and therefore Google will still see it. If I'm not mistaken, Bing has launched their disavow tool already (Ref: http://www.serperture.com/blog/link-building/disavow-link-tool-block-bad-incoming-links), so perhaps you should at least start there?

Unless your talking about the "show links ungrouped" option... This will show the top 25 links per domain, and your own domain always comes up first. Greg

Cool. I will check this one out!

OK, I learned something today. I looked closely.  Linked in is using a temporary redirect, that apparently results in the same as a nofollow.

Some are; some are not. .edu is not necessarily better than some .com.  If the link is from a university's law school resources pages and links to your site on law books, this may be more valuable, than a student's page with a lot of links to and discussions about what beer is best for getting drunk the quickest. The Google algorithm does consider the trust factor on domain names.  Because just anyone of the street can't get on GoDaddy and buy example.edu, it will automatically get a trust boost. Some discussion of the different values of the .edu can be found at:  http://searchengineland.com/explaining-edu-link-value-with-examples-64012