Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I was hesitant to even mention Pagerank; it is beneficial to you if the website is relevant to your niche.  Are you (your website) in the 'business of selling travel'?  If so, then it doesn't matter what the DA and PR are of that site, it's a smart business move.

I would be cautious with doing too much article marketing - you're at risk that search engines will see your article on multiple sites, deem it duplicate content, and then decide your article on a submission site should rank instead of the version on your own site.  With the Penguin release, Google is also taking a closer look at links from article submission sites - I wouldn't be surprised if those links become lower and lower value as time goes by. Definitely let Google discover your backlinks on its own - grow your link profile too quickly and they'll take a close look at your site to see if any of those links look suspicious. There are plenty of more valuable ways to grow your link profile.  Mike King recently had a post on this topic at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building - I suggest you check it out for new ideas on how to build links to your site.

Yes irrelevant sites are where you don't want them. Reciprocal links are now not that great of an idea. Google forbids buying links and reciprocal are almost the same thing. However, if they are generally helpful to the consumer/user then it is alright but don't make it a far stretch.

Basically a "Natural Link" is when someone links to your site for any reason without you having to ask them or pay them to link to you.  They found value in your site and wanted to share with others. It's not a type of link, but how the link was acquired.

It can depend on your link profile. If your inbound links have only a small percentage of reciprocal links then this will look natural. Just ensure you have a varied link building strategy and you should be fine. One other thing to check is the quality of your distributors websites. If they involve themselves in spammy tactics when linkbuilding or writing content and you link to them it could look bad on your site. Please make sure that you don't make all your outbound links no follow though, this WILL look un-natural and will not help at all. However, if you have good website trust then you should be fine provided that your site looks very natural.

I assume the dead links can be A. Broken or B. No longer linking to you - It may not mean the site is not linking to you as they may have moved the link to another page etc. just that the exact link that have previously been seen, is no longer. If the links gave you a rank boost, and are no longer linking to you - yes they could harm your site in terms of rank loss, otherwise I would not worry too much.

In my experience small SEO agencies sometimes have a more personal approach. Maybe it's a good idea to invite 2-3 agencies and you begin straight away with your questions. I have found myself in the same spot with a company who didn't want to tell about their methods and 3-6 months later they went out of business because they bought old authoritative domains and transformed them into blog networks/linkwheels. Nowadays when we want to hire a certain company we go to smaller agencies and tell them we don't want bla bla but easy answers in normal language and feedback. Good luck with your business.

They seem to do a very good job of not telling you how to submit suggestions or changes, which to me indicates that they're looking to deter people from submitting suggestions. They don't even include authors. I don't have a good suggestions, but I would love to hear how your attempts go and if you're successful.

Social bookmarks, directory listings and forum posts from an outsourcer are probably not good links. Good links are links you get editorially - guest blogs, linkbait, content marketing, high quality directories, etc. Good links are a lot harder to get than posting a bookmark or submitting to a directory. Don't get discouraged, though - there are a lot of good resources that can help you. Here are a few resources that come to mind: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building http://www.blueglass.com/blog/the-content-marketers-guide-to-web-content/ http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/ http://myblogguest.com/forum/about_guest_post.php

It depends what kind of curation you want to do with how Google will treat it. Are you creating a link list? Are you showing a quick blurb with your opinion? Are you re-publishing the article? For the first two, you're creating somewhat original content, and I wouldn't worry too much. (Though make sure to add your opinion on the second option.) On the third one, you can use rel=canonical to get around duplicate content.

Have you ever known anyone to do linkbuilding (or SEO for that matter) on a revenue share/commission basis.  I have not heard of this being done but it seem that a good Link Builder would not be afraid of having more upside rather than a fixed amount of money with no skin in the game. The one downside to this is how is this measured.  Does the client decided?  Does the client show the books and averages the last years revenue and anything over that average is share profit at say 80/20 . My focus is strictly e-commerce sites.

Thanks for the advice. Fortunately reciprocal links aren't an issue as the two companies were competitors of sorts but I've checked just in case.

It's pretty common to see fluctuation like this from one Linkscape index to the next. Also, SEOmoz is constantly working to improve the index, and from time to time changes the way it crawls the web. Domain Authority is calculated fresh with each new update, and it's a comparative metric based on other sites on the web. This means it's better to compare your DA to your competition with each update, than to compare small fluctuation against yourself from month to month. To your point about OSE - to improve efficiency, OSE only records the first 25 links for every domain because after the first few links, each additional link makes very little difference in rankings or correlation data.

I would say it might not hurt you in the short run but my belief is you never want to put all your eggs in one basket. What happens if that site goes down or out of business. What if Google decides their site is of low value and demotes them which can imapct their link juice. What if they get deindexed or decide to remove your links? It is best to get links from a variety of sources that way if one site goes down you still have links on other sites. I hope this helps and good luck.

More importantly, you want a healthy ratio of Followed and No Followed links.  If all of your links are followed, it will look like it was done on purpose. Look at your competition and see how many of their links are followed, vs. not followed, and try to keep a somewhat similar ratio. No Follow links are a natural part of the Internet, so if you focus your SEO on ONLY building Followed Links, you're going to be doing great Link Building, but overall horrible SEO, because your profile will look manipulated. No Follow Happens.  Embrace it.

Recently Google has been taking a closer look at anchor text, because exact keyword anchor text isn't really how "natural" links (i.e. links you didn't build) look.  Ben has a great point that natural link growth usually means anchor text that is either your brand name or your URL.  Rob Kerry recently did a Whiteboard Friday on the Penguin update that may shed some more light on your predicament: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-penguin-update-whiteboard-friday A majority of your inbound links should not have exact keyword match anchor text.  Instead, focus more on building overall link volume, both for your domain and individual pages.  Try to get links from high-authority sites, and create pieces of content that people want to share and link to - these are link building strategies that will be more successful than a hyper-focus on anchor text, whether branded, keyword or "click here." I think the steps Ben outlines above are a great start.

It's a balancing act. Google is looking for natural links, not paid or self directed. So percentages are good but you should also randamize your anchor text. If you develop a pattern, eventually the algo can determine that it is un natural. I would identify your most important keywords, maybe 5 and then mix in your brand name and the standard Click Here. Rotate them in a random way and you should be ok. Note your Brand should be the anchor text most often used. I hope this helps and good luck.

@AWCthreads: given how hugely damaging it would be to local.com to fess up to getting penalized, I'm guessing your chances of a straight answer from them are slim. Agree, though, that going to the parent newspaper would be a good possible route. For everyone, an example of the kind of directory we're talking about is here: http://directory.journal-advocate.com/alexandria+va.z.html