Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No more is NOT better unless it adds relevance to the article.  Again, I add 2 as a rule of thumb. Also the first link is typically the one that passes any link juice if it is "do-follow". So make the first one the winner.

Well thanks guys - that sounds like a resounding 'no it's not going to hurt the site'.

Hello Brian, If you get that analysis from Open site explorer you have to understand that some information is not there, since OSE is constantly updating. I usually use more then one program to make a on-page analyze. Try Screamingfrog and lets us know if you see a more complete information about internal linking. Regards, Pedro M Pereira

Wanting a quick fix with is what got you into the mess you  are in in the first place. Maybe consider not doing more of the same Do something amazing and get lots of brand links

A lot of good advice here. Here's some actionable link building you might consider right now. Go find sites/blogs that have good content on the subject of lakes generally and visiting lake communities specifically. I just did a quick search and found: http://daviddempsey.typepad.com/ While this blog doesn't appear to be in action anymore (perhaps contact owner?), there are some decent lake blogs on the blog roll. Start to build relationships/rapport with the bloggers/webmasters/etc at these sites. Perhaps they are in need of good content for their sites. Create something useful for them, and kindly request attribution (which may include a link). I think this might be a good place to start. Good luck.

Using bitly to shorten your links works perfectly fine. In fact, that's exactly what I do :). Basically, using bitly just sets up a 301 redirect which passes most of the link juice over to your site. For a comprehensive (and awesome) look into link shorteners, be sure to read this post from Dan Shure: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-shortener-owl-li-indexed-in-google Open Site Explorer can definitely take some time to register links, so that might be your issue. I'd recommend downloading your latest links from Google Webmaster Tools to see what sort of Twitter links you have.

Sean- You are getting no link juice if they click on the PDF but you are getting some link juice if they link to the page...... It would make more sense, for SEO value, if you had the contents of the PDF on a page and then on that page you had the option to link to the PDF. Then people would be linking to the page that would allow you to get the link juice and the SEO value from the content.  More value for your efforts.......more SEO value from the additional content that Google cant index in your PDF. Hope this helps.. Mark

We've added both subdomain blogs and   .com/blog & .com/news  to start creating better content.  We have had a blog for years that lived under another name with 100's of post be find it necessary to create better quality content that lives on our site. hope that helps. Chad

Unfortunately your example is actually a good method and lots use it. If you don't want to take that route you can leave the article link free, and place it in the byline which will make it look less spammy. Like Craig said though don't generate a 100 guest posts all with the same anchor text 'car insurance', you need to mix it up, some with the keyword some with your brand name, some which are close to your target term.

Raven pulls link data from SEOmoz, Majestic and other sources. It also marks metrics such as nofollow. If you wish to upload links via a CSV file you have that option. Once again, it offers a free 30 day trial, no obligation. I am not associated with them in any way. I am suggesting you try it for yourself and see if it meets your needs.

Not necessarily.  Can you provide a link to Google SERP so I can answer this accurately? Sometime (pretty often) Google will show one page but provide the rankings due to another page. For example, I have a strong "CCTV Cameras" category page and under I have a "[Specific Type of CCTV Camera] " page. The first page is strong and he will provide me with high ranks but it dosen't mean it will be show for it. Instead, due to visitor data or/and social signals, the second page may appear if it's temporarily more popular. After it gets removed (i.e. sold out) the first page, or other trendier topic related page, will assume the position. This scenario can be discovered by looking at 100 results (use. advance search) there sometimes youll find several results from the same site, side by side - where in basic search youve saw only one single result. This is a symbiotic relationship I`m talking about. The 1st and displayed result is not the "cause" for high rank, it just "riding co-tails" of other strong pages. From what you`ve described, you see some of these too ( " take over 1 or more of the page one results in my niche...") For these, if the 1st page gets removed, another will probably take its place...

Hi steve, Thats really a good Idea. I tried using this google query : "picking a career" "education" but i am getting all very high authority sites. i know, they wont give me a link for just 150$ or 200$. I did almost 100 emails to owners about link sponsorship. ONLY 2 guys replied. And each one is demanding 600$/ month LOL. Steve, if you have little time, then please give me some google queries so that i can search them. Also, i am looking for links from middle class bloggers like my site.

@Klarke, that WBF video addresses "link diversity" which is a related but separate topic. IP diversity would address links coming from separate IPs. Often a site owner, especially on shared hosting plans, have a single IP. They can host literally dozens of sites with that IP. When multiple sites link from the same IP, it is an indicator the links are not "independent votes" but rather the same site owner repeatedly "voting" for the same site. In the early 2000s site owners were able to manipulate rankings in this manner. In the mid 2000s, search engines caught on to this type of scheme and began looking for IP diversity. Multiple links from the same IP were treated as less valuable or the links were devalued almost completely. In the late 2000s, the concept of "C-block" diversity became important. IPs take the form of numbers such as XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX where the numbers are seen in the format of AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD. An IP of 150.76.44.255 would have a C block of 44. When IPs were assigned to various web hosts, the C block mostly remained constant. Around 2010, search engines further evolved to keep up with the times. Presently it is easy for anyone to acquire a range of completely different IPs on the same server. Deeper analysis is required to catch manipulation from the same site owner. For example, often the nameserver will reveal other sites on the server, but that information can be manipulated as well. The concept of IP diversity should not be thought about unless you are venturing into black hat SEO in which case your efforts will likely fail. For the relatively few people who get away with it nowadays, there are tons who are caught.

Yes, with blended search results a video for a competitive keyword is a bit easier to rank for. Specifically, any useful videos that you can use for link bait. Helpful videos are often overlooked, but IMHO have a high roi when it comes to other strategies. Guest blogging works great as well, but would prioritize videos higher.

I wish someone had told me that before!!! Will save me bundles. Thanks Jon. Cant believe I missed that function.

Hi Luia, Ryan's answered your question in terms of detecting penalties / shady link building. I would just add that if you are going to guest post, it should be to reach the audience and less about the value of the link. Ultimately, if you can get readers to your site and interested in (and sharing) your content it's going to be much more rewarding on an ongoing basis than that single link.

Great ideas and explanations, Nakul. Thanks a bnuch!

Again, thanks for the input from everyone. One of the things that I have noticed is that they did some link building to some specific categories on our website with specific anchor text and they ranked well at the beginning and the dropped off the face of the earth while some of the other categories that they didn't do link building on have continued to rank ok. Also, about a week ago we noticed our organic search results drop significantly. Could that be an identifier that Google has penalized our site due to those potentially spammy looking links?