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Spamming, or doing something really awesome - a quick look at the links themselves and the ratio of new links to linking sites should give you an idea. If it's 2000 solid links from 2000 sites then they have knocked it out of the park else if it's more like 2000 anchored links from 20 sites then they have likely just bought themselves a spell in the penguin cage.

I Agree with Keri that your posts should be high quality and focused to provide information to user instead of getting a link from the desired anchor text!

There was a YouMoz post last year at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-win-tweets-and-influence-search-engines-with-paywithatweet that explored using PWAT.

thanks for that. I was just wondering as when i checked another website i could see a few links coming from there and it puzzled me

sorry

Thank you for sharing that story. It all makes sense. Using an automated link building script to create spam links with "natural" anchor text. I wonder how the site owners will react when Google improves their algorithm next and all the old links PLUS all the new ones need to be removed. What a mess.

Folks commonly link with hastags, and I believe they pass as much link juice as any other type of link. Google is pretty good at figuring out they belong to the same page, but the canonical never hurts. (well, it can, but probably not in this situation.)

They get natural links very slowly.  Maybe 1 natural link every week. Double the content.  They you get more traffic and 2 natural links per week. Kick up the content with humor, video, great photos, useful stuff, higher quality... then you get 4 natural links per month.

If the links are exact anchors (which I assume they are if you were doing link exchanges) and are in the footer, I would get them removed. I have not heard of anyone linkbuilding their way out of Penguin; only by removing bad links have people recovere. So yes, I would remove these links if they are this way. Branded links are usually fine, unless they are something like what WPMU dealt with and they were too close to exact anchors. Penguin seems to mean that there are specific links that Google does not like. Go look at the posts that have been written for the different types they don't like, and look through your backlink profile to find the money terms where you might have too many exact anchors. Good luck.

You might also check out elance.com.  I have hired web designers from here before and had pretty good experiences

Hi Pontus, The 3 metrics are measuring links pointing to specific place. Page : In the example you gave that is looking only at links pointing to familjesmycken.se - no sub pages, other domain etc. Subdomain: This will include links to any other pages on that subdomain, so a link to  familjesmycken.se/somepage.htm or familjesmycken.se/myfolder/somepage.html would also be counted AS WELL AS the ones for that page. Root domain: This would count links pointing to any other subdomain on the familjesmycken.se domain as well. So links to www.familjesmycken.se www.familjesmycken.se/mypage.html sub.familjesmycken.se/folder/page.htm etc would all count Is that any clearer?

Thank you for the response. "I'd build a new adsense site on Lowcarddiet.com but I'd host it with a different company so I don't get penalized for having the same C block address for both sites." That damn Adsense is always a problem.  Making new entities is such a pain in California with the $800 LLC fee.  But it can be done, with or without an LLC.  I've faced this before and always end up thinking it's not worth the hassle. "Finally the most important question is whether you already have a presence on the first page for that keyword, if you've got the number one spot I would justify making the effort of getting another site there, if not then your time might be better spent improving your rank for that keyword." It's in the top five now, however, this keyword is going to be getting a ton more competition in the near future, and I'm thinking the EMD would really help.

Good quality directories are indeed a perfect fit for your needs, but I would not use that company or any company at all. Do your own research for quality directories in your niche and/or locale/country/state, which will take a while, but IS worth it. Try not to use general directories, as there are so many directories out there it is hardly necessary. Do not use any kind of list made available anywhere, just check for "your niche directory" and if you find some high quality ones, do a related:domain.com search, both to check for new opportunities and to check what Google thinks of that directory. If related:domain.com doesn't return any results or returns websites that are not about that niche or locale, I would not submit to that one. Then check if the exact page your link will be on is indexed in Bing, if it is, then it is pretty likely of good enough quality to carry some weight as Bing only seems to index high quality pages and leaves all the low quality out of the index, in stark contract to Google which indexes every crappy page their bot sees. This way I find it still safe and functional to use directories, as Google sees that directory as part of your niche/locale AND Bing thinks the quality of the specific page is enough to be indexed. If both these conditions are met, the directory link will carry weight and because you can specify the anchor text, you will make your backlink profile more natural. Many people are saying don't use directories, but don't believe everything you read, do your own research. If you do enough research you will find good ones and they will help you.

I agree with Anthony, his comments are accepted guidelines. However, it really depends on what the content is you are talking about. If it is a blog, as Anthony assumes, then he is right. But, sometimes sites want to offer a service or product that does not squarely fall within the product categories currently represented on the site, and they choose to use a subdomain. You may also want to glance at this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain

Just make sure you have a nice site that's updated. If you are talking about www.shiftins.com, then it looks okay to me. Make sure there are no 404s or anything like that. BTW, I think BBB is better than Yahoo Directory since BBB gives more credibility. Get both if you can afford it.

To add to that ahrefs.com is another service that has a pretty good sized database, but is of course not 'all of the internet' either.

Thank you Joel!

Hi Lawrence, You're more than welcome - I hope the posts give you some actionable ideas for your campaigns whoever you decide to go with. Of course! : ) Our website is www.designbysoap.co.uk - you can see our client list at www.designbysoap.co.uk/clients. The website for SEOGadget is www.seogadget.co.uk Thanks Lawrence, hope you have a nice weekend

My bet is that the people who do this bookmarking don't give a hoot about your site.  They are only doing this as a task... and the only traffic that you will get from these bookmarks is the person who visits your site one time to make them. I would not call these spam links.  I would call them dangerous spam links.

Google will value the 'trust' factor of a site as a whole.  If you manage to get a backlink on say, newyorktimes.com, on a page that is well buried, that is still considered a good backlink because it's coming from a trusted source. I have stopped looking at pagerank (toolbar) altogether, and focus on the overall quality of a website now when doing my link building.