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Hello Jason, I understand where you are coming from. I was in a similar boat. My site is under a year old and I am in the Real Estate industry which is extremely competitive online. My tactic is multifaceted. Write Great Content Market site & Content on all social media platforms Host or Sponsor a local event and then write a press release and send to your local reporters. Blog like crazy, Google loves fresh content Make sure your internal link structure is set up properly. Network with other local websites Guest Blog on similar sites as yours Pay Per Click Campaign is a good temp option Focus on Conversions, better 10 visitors and 7 sales than 1000 visitors and no sale. Be patient, SEO is a long term commitment. I hope this helps. Good Luck

Thank you so much for your time and valuable help. I was reading how important it was to write quality content , but where where do I get the proper guidelines. I am glad I am here at SEOMOZ. It seems like this is where I will get the proper education and direction I need. So, if I cleaned up my website and took some of the obvious blatant keywords out , should I expect to lose some ranking ? Or is that part of the puzzle not even neccesary ? Also, Is it possible you may have a website url of some examples of a website done and written really well ? Thank you Once Again. I cannot express how much I appreciate the help.

Yes you can submit the same video to as many different video sharing websites as you want. I would suggest writing a unique description for each video. One question to ask yourself is are you providing users/viewers with quality content or are you just creating spam...something to consider anyways.

If I would be at your place I would have use the verity of anchor text instead of just one anchor text that is Nike… why not change to set the verity of key phrases like Nike Shoes, Nike with area name, Nike with country name and other that go fit with your website. Try to get links from different and unique domains instead of getting multiple links from the same domain and this will help you… The kind of decrease sometimes is just the result of fluctuation so check before you actually start implementing massive links on the page. The idea to run a small promotional activity that is relevant to your category can also help! #justsaying hope this helps!

First of all, is it a problem for you?  Have you seen random spammy links to your site and a drop in SERP?   If it isn't, don't sweat it.   It would takea lot of time or money for a competitor to create enough bad links to hurt you.  Unless you're in a Hatfields and McCoys situation with a competitor, I think it's unlikely. If you're really worried about it, do a lot of White Hat link building.  At least then you have something to balance out a competitor's sabotage.

Same as before just in a marketing way not the spammy way - Only drop a link in a way and place you think people will click it to come to your site.

I'd like to say, and although most links from forums are no follow, they still help. They can also drive good traffic, if you have an e-com site or goals its worth checking for referring sites that lead to or assist conversion. Take a look at your competitors link profile to see if its something they have that you don't for a quick answer. To answer the overall question, yes they help with link building from a different stand point. You can use the forum posts to understand the theme of questions your target market has and produce good quality content from that. Your then producing content people want to share. Networking is a base ingredient for good link building. As Mr Fox states. You may often stumble across a post months old with a questions unanswered. These are content goldmines, love them and use them. Maybe stop thinking about how you can get links and start thinking about giving people content they want, need or would like to share.

As others here have addressed the merits of directory links, let me address your question more narrowly. Do deep links, if they are from the same page, count? Short answer, yes. Results from several experiments over the years have shown that Google only counts the first link on a page to a particular URL, but links to multiple URLs still count. (although there are ways to get around this as well.) Think of them like links on your homepage, all pointing to various internal pages on your site. Each link passes value, although certain links pass more weight than others. Almost always, the first link in any price of editorial content carries more weight than all the others. Multiple links to the same domain carry much, much less value. Best advice: Deep linking from directories may carry value, but in light of Penguin and Google's mass de-listing of several directories, I'd be careful to only obtain links from the highest quality of human-edited niche and specialty directories. I'm no longer a fan of general directories at all, although more testing needs to be done.

Hey Alan - Great question here. I honestly do not know if that htaccess trick will work. I've heard it postulated that it will, but have not seen anything conclusive on it! Unfortunately reinclusion requests take some time. If you think that you have been targeted unfairly, I'd recommend making as much noise publicly as possible. Get in front of Google and plead your case. As far as I see it, here are your options for the spammy links - If it's a KEYWORD-SPECIFIC penalty to that page, 404 the page to disavow the links and build a new page on your domain targeting that term. Build good links to this. If it's a sitewide drop in traffic, then you need to remove as many of the links as possible. There are tools out there to help with this, but generally you need to find low-PA/DA, exact anchors. These are going to be the ones that are hurting you most. Also look for sitewides with exact anchors that can be seen as manipulative. Google wants to see "good faith" in getting links removed. So document all sites that you contact, the sites that get back to you, the links you get removed, and the links you know about that you have not been able to get removed, including reasons for why (ie 4 emails sent, no reply, cannot find an email on WhoIs, etc). You have to be completely transparent. One tip for you is to share all of these links in a Google Doc, which you link to from the reinclusion request. Then, shorten the link within the reinclusion using a bit.ly link so that you can see if/when they look at the links. Good luck man. I know how hard it is to wait on hearing back, having gone through it a few times myself. John

The value of a link is a complex thing, to be honest. Your 2m 'no follow' links can have a variety of value depending on The number of domains those are placed on The position of those links on the linking site The value of the page the link is placed on The actual anchor text in that link. Also try not to think of links purely in terms of ranking. At the end of the day, ranking is great, but what you really want is traffic. A 'natural' link profile will have some nofollow links in it (in most cases) and you may find some nofollows are great at driving traffic. On the flip side you also want a good proportion of followed links as these represent a 'full value vote' for your site, rather than somewhat of a disassociation, which a nofollow can imply. So get a variety of links from a variety of sources in  a variety of ways but don't ignore a potential linking opportunity just because it may be nofollow as there may be other advantages to be gained that purely ranking.

In the old days, microsites could be powerful tools for exact match domains with sufficient keyword volumes. Today, Google has worked to minimize the potential advantage of exact match domains, so unless you're launching a product that you want to differentiate from your main brand, it usually doesn't make sense to use microsites. For one, you still have to build links to the microsites in order for them to rank. And if the sites are for competitive terms, it may take a significant amount of authority to get them visible in search results. For example, the SEOmoz keyword analysis tool shows that "Hilton Conference" scores a keyword difficulty of 55%. It would take a significant amount of domain authority to rank in the top 3 for that keyword, no matter what the domain. These are some older videos, but they stand up pretty well in terms of explaining this concept: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites In the 2-3 years since these videos were made, microsites have become even less effective than what they were. In the end, your best bet is to build pages/directories on your own related site. If this means starting a new site (because your current site isn't related) it's still much easier to build up the popularity of one site, than 5 or 10. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.

I'm interested in finding new avenues to promote our long term storage foods we manufacture. Contact me at www.survivalcavefood.com thanks,

As John Pring put it, OSE doesn't update instantly or "often" - you might want to try out Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing's inbound link tool is remarkable. It's showing links to my site that I've never seen before (and I've tried OSE, Google's, and a few other "back link reporting" tools)

Depends. Typically not, but depending on what you are doing you may have to rely on some of these to meet mkt objectives. Here is an example, for industrial b2b, ThomasNet, Globalspec & MacRae's are paid directories that are typically used because of the amount of prospects using them. So in a way it is a paid link to your website that Google frowns upon even though a firm may not be using it for that purpose. In a grand scheme of things, Google is a paid directory via adwords.

I am in the real estate business, and I am trying to get three key phrases to rank well for azbestlistings.com homes for sale in casa grande az, homes for sale in mesa az, and homes for sale in yuma az. These three key phrases are cities that I and two other realtors work separately. We all have our own city on the team. Hence, I want to get myself into the first 5. However, I am coming nowhere near page 1 for these key phrases, so I figured from what everybody tells me I need back links. I work all day long as a realtor, so my brain is not super focused by the time I sit down to do my seo work. Basically working two long jobs, so if somebody says go back linking I say ok, but just where do I do it in the quickest and smartest way since I do not have a ton of time to do it. Each agent is responsible for working their city or city pages.

Right, but the question is more about the ethics of paid placement than the quality of the link, isn't it?  Obviously manipulative = bad because it's more likely to be caught.  Discretely placed links = better because they're harder to detect and seemingly add value.  That all skirts the fundamental ethical issue, though. Would the link exist without payment? Is there an effort to manipulate search rankings with the link? Google would say that if you really cared about the context of the link and wanted the traffic it would send, you'd have no problem nofollowing it.  In that case, paid placement should be fine.  If you're letting it pass authority, it shouldn't be paid.  There's really not any wiggle room in the TOS. It all comes down to a risk / reward calculation.  If your link is legitimately contextually relevant, the content you supply is good, the site it's published on is high quality, and the site being linked to is likewise a quality site, there's minimal risk.