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You should also consider getting listed on some of the SEOmoz directories.  For instance the Better Business Bureau passes a lot of PR.

Finding relevant article directories is very easy. Simply go to Google and search your keyword + articles. For example, if your niche is widgets, search widget articles in Google and see what comes up. What you will find are generally sites that contain articles related to your niche. Google obviously values these sites if they are ranking them so highly. You will usually find a bunch of sites that don't accept just any author and that's fine. Some you will find you can apply or register to become an author. There you can produce an article to be published. Just some tips though, always include internal links in your article. So few article directories do this and that's why articles get dinged. Find some relevant articles on the domain to link to. Also, link out externally to more than just your website. That makes for a good article with natural links, one of them being to you. I wouldn't spend too much time on this, but if you could find a relevant article site each week and get a decent article posted on it, that's pretty good.

From Google's perspective on the matter, both versions of the url are treated equally; therefore, I can't surmise why they wouldn't pass the same amount or link juice. An excellent discussion regarding the the two versions of the url may be treated differently by redirects or how they may effect user experience can be found on the Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html Hope this helps.

Check this out i saw this video yesterday about this very question. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-myths-that-scare-seos-but-shouldnt-whiteboard-friday the answer you are looking for is his number 6

When thinking about links without keyword-rich anchor text, think about how people are linking to you on their own, without your actually building the link.  They're more likely to link either with your main brand name (AccuPOS), your domain name (AccuPOS.com) or text like "read more" "click here" etc.  That's one reason that Penguin has targeted keyword-rich anchor text links, because they aren't "natural" - i.e. it's unlikely someone would link to you with "Restaurant POS Software" unless you specifically ask them to.  So when building links it's helpful to have a good mix of these other less-specific anchor texts, to appear more natural.  If the link appears on a page that is talking about your keyword, there's some evidence to suggest that that semantic info might help in a similar way to keyword-rich anchor text.

I've noticed loads of this since Penguin, I think their hope is to catch out as many people as possible until folks catch on that it really doesn't work anymore and does more harm than good. Unfortunately while there are people out there who don't understand the right way to do things there will always be someone trying to make money from the wrong way to do it. Steve

The concept of relevancy is being drilled into my head on an almost daily basis by my  current mentor. I am supposed to cringe, hiss and run like a vampire exposed to light at the concept of linking any of my sites to non relevant sites. After the recent penalties, I would be very cautious about how you link sites together, especially in unnatural looking groups and definitely not with side-wide links if that is the offer. All my sites are currently in the process of separation if not outright divorce

Well, there's not quite enough detail in what you said for me to get a totally clear picture, but let me through some stuff out there and you can follow up to make sure you get a good answer. It sounds like you have 20 links that are exact match.  How big is your overall link profile.  If you only have about 40 links, yeah, that's a problem.  If you have thousands of links, it won't matter too much.  It sounds like you don't have a big link profile.  I'd spend most of my time right now not worrying too much about the bad links (though if you can write to webmaster of the site they are on and get them removed, it may not be a bad idea.  We've worked with people doing that before).  I'd spend most of my time building quality links.  Make sure you have the standard directory type stuff, blog links, etc.   That will help build up your profile and make sure the exact match aren't too high of a %.  Then try to build some high quality links with generic (i.e. - natural) anchor text. That's where I would start.

Well some of my link profile has this work done already. Would it be a bad idea to add a little bit more then focus on building high quality links? I mean the worst that could happen is all of the spammy links would be devalued right?

As you already know Yahoo directory, business.com and DMOZ are sites that require a review process and in the first two a large financial investment that prevents spammers from taking advantage of low hanging fruit. They have a do follow attribute when it's part of the directory not the ads. Google trusts these sites.

Take a look at the SEOMoz recommended list, that is always a good place to start! http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended

They definately do pass page rank, it is just if it is internal links or external. They would nott have pr of 100, becauce each page has its own page rank. also As i stated above, if google can tell if a sites is on the same subject or on multiple subjects. Take a look at these 2 results, the first word press conatins a sub domain in its sitelinks, but to the en(english subdomain), they can tell that that subdomain belongs to the root. https://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=wordpress&oq=wordpress&aq=f&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.1292.1292.0.1676.1.1.0.0.0.0.383.383.3-1.1.0...0.0.eJcS0C6Duts&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=7c4df592a329114b&biw=1280&bih=909 Have look at this result and yopu will see that many of these companies subdomains are listed as belonging to the same site https://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=iboats&oq=iboats&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=hp.3...146410.147314.1.147555.6.6.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0.MLsJj78G5H8&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=7c4df592a329114b&biw=1280&bih=909

No. However if all or most of your links come from resources/links pages then I would hazard a guess that you will leave behind another footprint for which you may get penalised. As a rule of thumb you should try and be on well curated resource pages. So if the webmaster will link out to anyone for a small fee then they're probably not worth getting a link from. If on the other hand it's pretty hard to get featured on their resources list then there's more of a chance that the link will actually mean something.

"other than possibly bringing you some traffic" Which is something a lot of people never consider when trying to land backlinks. If your website has backlinks that bring an endless amount of traffic, you can avoid any hiccups due to Google algo changes.

Thank you. I have done so. No need to not get the juice

Thank you for the information Khem Raj.

I would say it would be very easy to overtake that site. How many links would it take? Probably 1 good one or a handful of reasonable ones. They have their domain history on their side. It isn't great, but they've had content up at least since 2008. However I don't see that they are doing anything else that couldn't be bettered in a day.