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Hi, I would definately go for merging both of them together. Allthough WMT recently  significantly increased the number of backlinks shown, any extra information you can gather is great. I guess together they provide a pretty good overview of your backlink profile. Btw, it's ofcourse very interesting how many of the links reported in WMT and OSE overlap, and how many are unique for each one. So if you're going for option 3, please share some of the results with us! Greets, Sven Witteveen Expand Online

Hi Ryan, Regarding directories, this is an interesting one as you hear time and time again that directories are worthless, so I thought I would do an experiment some keywords. The experiment was targeting directories in my niche with 5 keywords which were not very competitive, however still had exact monthly searches ranging from 1000 - 3500. Over a 3 month period I saw SERPs increase for all keywords: Keyword 1 - Went from position 18 to 3 Keyword 2 - Went from position 9 to 3 Keyword 3 - Went from position 4 to 2 Keyword 4 - Went from position 9 to 6 keyword 5 - Went from position 9 to 6 For me this shows that directories can still work for you.

Whiter than white hat means you want to stay all ethical and relevant. Here is my idea to go with. White hat means you links should be natural and relevant to the website (if not all at least many). In order to get relevant domains, I would advise you to get list of blogs and start promoting your website through content. -          Building link through offering free content to bloggers will allow you to use diversified keyword anchor text and you will be able to use all keywords as an anchor text on different blog posts. -          Why not make a badge or something (that can easily fit your industry as far as I think) and encourage people to share on their website this will allow you to get good amount of link without much effort. -          Building a white paper (downloadable) that define the need of your services (non promotional) will encourage people to download your white paper and may link to you and talk about you on social medias. White hat link building do need time and effort but above given techniques can go long term as Google love them and no sooner coming update is going to hit this negatively. #justathought

I think that your time would be better spent working on your own site - especially after you have already gotten one or two posts on these "unspammed" blogs.

Greg's response is correct: Be consistent throughout the site - either use www or don't, but definitely don't switch back and forth. Implementing canonical tags is important, especially if you don't implement redirects as directed below (though you need to do both, preferably). I have two additional concerns: Implement redirects. There should be sitewide redirects so that if you decided to use http://domain.com and a user types in http://www.domain.com, they are redirected. This should work for subpages as well, so http://www.domain.com/subfolder/page.html is redirected to http://domain.com/subfolder/page.html Be consistent with linking as well: If you decide to go without www, then make sure all of your link building activities do not include the www. in the links you use. While people will be redirected just fine, there is a small loss in value during that redirect and we want to get as much value from the links as possible. So, use the exact url you want linked, not a secondary version.

That is certainly an interesting way of asking for a removal, but I could see a potential for it backfiring as well -- having people talk about your client having an infected site, for example. I suggest reading how Ryan Kent dealt with removing links, and keeping very detailed records of the attempts to remove links, and his ability to get part of the penalty lifted in this Q&A at http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links

You should also look into getting listed in niche lawyer sites, does not matter if they are follow or nofollow links. Look for links, citations of URL, phone number and so on.

Yes. Powerpoint files, word files, pdf documents can all be indexed, accumulate pagerank and pass link value.

It's normal to have unknow links. If you domain is new these can be links that where make in the past since GWT tends to show links to previous owned domains. If not, you should have a lots of other links and should not affect you rankings that much. It's all a matter of proportion. Personnaly I would try to browse the website with useragent turned to Googlebot since .ro sometimes ( most of) means spam/hacking if you not Romania related. Maybe you'll notice you site isn't what it looks like...

Try this strategy. let's say you are trying to rank in the UK. Find some .co.uk sites where you can build links from. You may get better rankings in google.co.uk. I wish I could help you more.

I have used Brandpoint about 10 times. Yes, they used to be called ARA content. Their writers are professional journalists and they write very high quality articles on your behalf after you fill out a questionnaire and do a phone interview with them. Their background is in creating "mat" articles for community newspaper editors to pick stories to run for the purpose of having more content to run ads around. They're still in that business but they also now offer this online service. The articles do appear on about 600 sites, and yes it is advertorial. The sites are almost entirely local TV station websites, but also some online newspapers, such as the newly added LA times. I ran a test last year, linking to a very specific term to see if it helped rank a page for a specific term and it did have a noticeable impact. You won't get any traffic from the links, but the links do show up in opensiteexplorer as good quality backlinks to your site. I've wondered if Google will devalue or penalize this now with the Panda and Penguin, but I haven't seen a problem with it yet.

Hi Robert, Unfortunately, call tracking is taboo in Local SEO. Here are some articles on this I think you will find helpful: http://searchengineland.com/be-wary-of-call-tracking-numbers-in-local-search-26895 http://searchengineland.com/for-local-seo-lack-of-call-tracking-solution-spawns-cloaking-70198 The thing is, the phone number is one of your key trust metrics with Google...equal to or greater than street address. Getting this mixed up can have pretty severe consequences, making it not really worth it to even go down the call tracking road. I understand the frustration with this, especially given how useful call tracking can be in paid search campaigns, and etc., but the best you can do with call tracking is to train the business owner and his/her phone staff to do this the old fashioned way. Train them to ask, "How did you hear about us?" Not very high tech, but it does provide some data to you to see how your work is benefiting the business. I hope the articles help, Robert. Your questions is a very important and valid one.

Hi Nakul, Thanks for the detailed suggestion again. We will take Richard's suggestion to explore the possibility of hiring  Virante if the price is right.  However, it is great learning experience to gain insight to your thought process. Have a great weekend!

I would recommend using the brand name for linking in 5 out of 8 links. Be diverse and target the user. The search engine can detect what you want to rank for with a few authoritative links and proper usage for internal linking. How to keep it looking natural... Good Question. Would you put an ad on the moon for one of your customers to find your business? Better yet would you direct a random person to the moon for no reason? Well, any link that does not belong is doing just that. It is targeting not relevant traffic to your niche, and you are placing an ad on the moon. If it makes sense then its natural and the search engine will determine this via user interaction. Use your keywords in variations and also be sure to deep link. Only place links where it makes sense, even if you have to create sense : ) Google will punish you for over optimizing and spam.. However if you are targeting customers with an ad on the moon. I feel like Google should send your site to the moon. It deserves it! lol

Thank you for your input Geoff!

What kind of links are they? Do they contain spammy, non-related anchor text? If they are simply old links that don't exist any more or are from sites that have been devalued you should not worry too much about removing them. Google simply devalues the link juice running through them to your site. It is true many sites have been devalued from Penguin, but it simply means that these sites don't pass any value onto your site - while they also do not harm your site unless they are of a bad or negative nature.

Hi Caroline, links that are no followed don't directly pass any value in the form of link juice which has a direct impact on SEO and search rankings. However they are still very valuable as they can be linked to by countless people (on their own websites and guest posts meaning potentially followed links) that become aware of your links through social exposure on twitter and similar. I did a bit of digging as I knew there was a decent Q and A on this here you go - http://www.seomoz.org/q/value-of-twitter-links

cool, thanks for the response!cool, thanks for the response Mr Fox!

"Linking root domains" is a metric we use because it correlates better with ranking than your overall link count. In other words, if you have 100 links from todd.com (even on different, non-root URLs), that counts a lot less for SEO than having links from 100 different root domains. It doesn't necessarily matter where the link is from the home-page or a deep page (home pages tend to have higher PR, but just on average). What we're really interested in is how many different/unique domains link to your site.

I say flocking to low-quality guest blogging is a bad solution to Penguin update. Penguin was not primarily about banning blog networks. It was about banning over-optimized links and link schemes. So Google will use the same tactics here: too much anchor text, too easy to identify!