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I don't have any hard numbers as what is too much, so I can't speak to that. My approach to building backlinks is try and act like a user of my site. Go to sites that have blogs, or forums that discuss your industry and add links where appropriate. For new sites, I try to build a link a day. For established sites, I try and get a link a week. If your users are engaging, you should encourage them with your content to help build the links for you. Maybe I have a little to much faith in Search Engines, but it is their job to know when a site is relevant to a specific query. You do your part on creating a good user experience on your site and your customers / consumers should be reacting to it positively by speaking about it on forums, blogs, and social media, these are also known indicators to search engines about the value of your specific page or site in regards to the topic being discussed. Google has been cracking down on link networks, link rings, spam sites and the like. For a long time sites were manipulating the natural back links by buying or exchanging links with each other. This you can understand Google must take seriously with people's livelihood at stake. If you're a new site, then spend some extra time getting the word out about your site. If you're established, time maybe better spent improving content, adding cool tools or features and making your users want to link to it for you.

ok sorry allow me to clarify. Yes, I am aware that it would be easy to include a link into the footer of a template with a link back to wherever I am trying to build links to.  My dilemma is this; is there a service or place that I can submit my template to that will spread the templates to lots of different Wordpress template sites where users browse to install templates they would like on there blogs/sites.

I have been guest posting for a little while now and I can tell you from experience good sites (authoritative ones as listed above) are not easy to guest blog on. You will need to give the author of the website something valuable to his readers. I noticed you are focusing on little details on what Google counts and what they dont. IMO forget all that, give the users something valuable so that they will like your site, mention it, and bookmark it. If users like your site so will Google!

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/about There's a video link beneath the search box too (which I haven't watched...): http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Take a look on visual.ly You can filter graphics by category and if you find one you like, lookup the creators website/details

Hi Sajad, Very good questions, and very relevant given recent industry updates. I thing Google is starting to get it right, and your decision to come over to the light side is a good signal of that. Bring your friends! In my opinion, the key to implementing good SEO practices is to think like your target demographic... consumers and internet users that aren't involved in the digital marketing space, and simply want to find helpful, entertaining, relevant content as quickly and easily as possible. I don't think any of the methods you listed would be considered black-hat, as long as you're doing them in moderation, on relevant sites, and not just for the sake of the linkjuice you're hoping to gain. If you post something you think is genuinely helpful and original on a high authority blog, there's nothing wrong with linking back to your site and using a social bookmarking service to help users (and Google) find the content faster. No need for a hundred bookmarks though. I think top directory submissions are absolutely white-hat. Yahoo and DMoz are still very trusted by Google. These sites are meant to be a place that users can find a business that provides the product or service they're looking for. There's absolutely nothing wrong with submitting your site to directories like these so that customers can easily find you. If Google were to penalize your for this, it would be like penalizing you for listing your business in the Yellow Pages, which nearly every business used to do. Top directories are just the digital versions of the old school phone book we still find on our doorstep once a year, and are viable forms of advertising. What you DEFINITELY want to AVOID are the "Submit your site to 50,000 directories for $5!" services. That's the kind of thing that Google is starting to penalize webmasters for. Same thing with article directories, don't submit randomly generated keyword-stuffed crap to thousands of directories. If you have quality, original content then submit it to the trusted directories and give it a little time to be organically spread across the web by people who find it useful or entertaining enough to link to it. As far as creating blogs on WP, Tumbler, etc goes... again just do it in moderation. I'd concentrate on a single blog and provide quality content and useful links to other resources as well as links to your own content. Three hundred blog posts about how your company is the best in the world for this keyword and that keyword looks spammy and totally untrustworthy to both users and Google. The same principles apply for guest posts on quality blogs... if you've got a useful comment to post, by all means post it. Just don't post fake, disingenuous, spam on every do-follow blog you can find. I think you'll find creating quality content, making your site attractive and easy to use, and engaging your customers will be a much better use of your time than filling the world's servers with gigabytes and gigabytes of useless information. There's no need to trick Google into increasing your rankings... if you provide content that's worth visiting, the visitors will come. Hope this helps and good luck. Life just got a lot easier Thanks, Anthony

Any domain that has been around for a long time will have some reciprocal links. Many sites will also have some multi-way links, even if they weren't sought out on purpose. I don't recall ever agreeing to a multiway link, but we have a lot of links, so there may be some that google will identify that way. You can't control what other people do, only what you do. I don't recommend doing any of those, but if you have a few, I doubt they will hurt you. Also, and this is where google has a problem, if you link out to another site, and they decided it would be a good thing to pump up the power of your page that links to them, they may have added multiple links or even link wheels to your page, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Thanks again for sharing. At this point, we also lean towards building good quality links as what Ivaylo suggested.

I would say myarticlenetwork.com should be another one that will be getting crapped on my Google soon.  It' main focus seems to be spun content so go figure!

Unfortunately, we are experiencing a delay, due to an attempt to expand and improve the crawl. I don't have an exact ETA, but this is our TOP priority and we definitely regret the issues people are having. I would double-check that Google has indexed and re-cached the page with the link on it. It's not instantaneous, in practice. Also make sure the link isn't nofollow'ed, etc.

The other solution is to start your own personal search and you can find good quality writers. It then depends on you having your own set of guidelines and requirements that they must adhere too. amount to a copywriter.

Well you would want to make the page link worthy, i know that is not always easy to do, not everything can be wow whoopy exciting. You can also make sure your internal links use the keywoprds in the link text, and link to it often from othe rpages, do go un-natural, but makes sure the link juice flows to it This page may be a help http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

First time, I saw such a long organized list - it's just what we are looking for!  Thank you!

Hi Kandice, Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank well in search results. More in this article here: [http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority](Hi Mark, Appreciate your answer, but I think there might be some confusion as to what Page Authority represents. Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank well in search results. More in this article here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority Unfortunately, PA isn't influenced by on-page optimization (although this is certainly an important factor for SEO) and links from .edu sites do not inherently boost your PA more than links from other sites. But we all love links from .edu sites. :)) Unfortunately, PA isn't influenced by on-page optimization (although this is certainly an important factor for SEO) and links from .edu sites do not inherently boost your PA more than links from other sites. But we all love links from .edu sites. In short, the best way to increase PA is to get links from other pages with high PA (or many links from pages with lower PA) These can often be internal links from your own pages, but you'll often see better results from getting external links to these pages. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

The short answer is "no". There's no safe way (i.e. that doesn't look like cloaking) to NOINDEX just a few links, and nofollow doesn't work for internal PR-sculpting anymore. When you're talking about something like an archive - a long list of resources - I wouldn't get too hung up on it. It's really an issue of balance. If every page on your site has 200 navigation links, you're spreading yourself really thin. If one page of your site references 100 blog posts in a list, that's pretty natural. You could paginate that list and use rel=prev/next or something like that, but there's always a trade-off (the first page would probably pass more PR and the later pages less). The other option would be to have two archives - A Top 25/50/etc. that has the posts you most want to pass internal PR to, and then link that to an archive with everything. That would give the main posts more prominence. Always a bit hard to say without seeing the site/page, but in this case, I don't think I'd lose sleep over it.

I think that such a practice can be quite good if you do it well and if you have a good product or site to be reviewed. You don't even need such platforms to do that. We call it Blogger outreach campaign: Simply shortlist a few hundreds (or even less) of good blogs in the industry and market you want to focus on. Think of a what offer you can give to them. Money most probably won't work. You can incentivise them with an affiliate offer or something really touchy and personal. Put that in your email to them or on their contact us forms or call them. You will see that most of  the guys will reply and will be happy to cooperate. This works much better than any platform if you are going for the quality links not for the quantity.