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Hi Cyrus, Thank you for your response. It certainly is frustrating and I think it has been particularly difficult for newbies this year due to the changes in the behaviour of the SE's. Having said that, I'm glad things are moving the right direction, albeit slowly. This particular site is more of a side project for me so perhaps the lack of activity has meant things not being crawled, as you suggest. It just seems strange that the pages are indexed but the links aren't recorded. And I'm particularly perplexed by the sudden disappearance of links from my WordPress.com blog. Incidentally, GWT seems to show more links than any other tools. OSE and MSE hardly show any at all. In fact, the only links that show up consistently are from my own personal site, which is just a business card with no activity or authority whatsoever. Very odd. As an engineer, when things don't make sense and can't be reasoned by logic or science, it's very difficult to move forward. Perhaps I should leave the SEO to somebody else... Anyway, thanks again for your input. I will have to get creative because I'm not keen on churning out crap just to compete with other people doing the same, whether it works or not.

Yes, these strategies still work, just not to the same degree. Start with the most relevant directories from http://www.seomoz.org/directories, submit a high quality wiki page on AboutUs.org and request for the links to be changed to follow and submit some GOOD quality articles to the best article directories out there. We've had success with linkwheels, but being in Australia I think it's just a matter of time before we catch up with the US and these are significantly diminished.

Hi Irving, so a obfuscated javascript link is ok by Google?

Hey Kenny, Thanks for writing in and for using our Open Site Explorer! I'm so sorry that you still haven't been able to see your links in Linkscape. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many of reasons, including the crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. Just so you know, here's how we compile our index:     - We grab the most recent index. - We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).                                                                                                                     - We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled 59,000,000,000 pages (which is about 25% the amount in Google's index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. Sorry! We update our Linkscape Index every 4 weeks. Crawling the entire Internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks, but our crawlers are always in motion. When we need to start processing, we grab all the data they have collected and start processing which can take up to 3 weeks to determine which of those links are the most important. You can see our most recently updated schedule here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach. Therefore we almost always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages, and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these. If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that point to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them. I hope this information helps! While the site and links may not be indexed yet, give it some time - maybe we'll see it in OSE next month. Best of luck, Chiaryn

I tend to agree with EGOL - it's a rule of thumb. See my post from last year: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many If this was a sitewide issue, like your navigation, and your site had relatively low authority, then it would be worth worrying about. If you're just talking about a couple of pages, and one of them is your HTML sitemap, then I'd probably just ignore it. Some pages naturally require a lot of links. You could split that sitemap up if you think it would have value for users, but from a purely SEO perspective, I don't think it's an issue.

Yeah, I'd agree with you. I wouldn't touch traditional article sites. I certainly have nothing against posting content on external sites that are high quality. I have seen, for example, a lot of really good industry-specific "article" sites that have a strong editorial review, high quality standards, and real readers. Especially for small site, it can definitely be worth posting some good content to quality external sites, whether the site focuses on articles, blog posts, or something else.

Just a couple of questions.... What work have you done with these clients to understand their business and determine where their products and services should be visible in search? Perhaps they need a marketing plan before linkbuilding? Also, for each query where they hope to be visible they will need a page of attractive, informative, and compelling content.  Perhaps they need content development so that each built link will hit a page that effectively promotes their business? The above might be part of the linkbuilding proposal.  It will help educate them and identify the targets and content needed for the linkbuilding to be successful.

You should be ok. if the site is in anyway relevant, it does not matter that it is in a different location.

What is a brand anchor text?

I agree. You'll be notified in GWT. Forget about trying to get you site in DMOZ. Submit it and forget about it. I have been trying to get into DMOZ for a couple years now. BUILD quality content on your landing page. Watch this WBF: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-new-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday

I don't think it'll hurt if you only do one. You'll get one more domain linking to you. Post one and move one. What I would probably do is write some kick ass content on my own blog.

building 20,000 to 90,000 links total to your backlinks could violate Google Terms of Service and get your site penalized. This is exactly what I was going to say I will admit that it is effective to build a few low-value links to a good link. For example, I wrote an guest blog piece on a legitimate, well-read blog recently, but the site posts a dozen articles per day and has a terrible internal architecture for archives. Long story short, the page never even got indexed. I pointed some social links at it, Google found it and the internal links to it, and everyone was happy. I have experience with similar services, and they are all automatic directories, blog comments, and social bookmarking sites. Read: near-zero value links. If it's about getting posts indexed - well, that's the easy part, and you damn sure don't need 20k links to do that If it's about domain authority, don't count on these links helping. That won't really surprise us when we pay less than a penny per link.

This is not a good option for long-term SEO - it won't get you anywhere. Trust me. You'll almost definitely end up with mostly footer links and some hidden links. The best you can hope for is a normal-looking link from irrelevant sites. I don't think it's a good option, because they will almost universally be read as low-quality links - that is, low placement, not meant to be seen, and not relevant. Google will see you using low-quality linking methods, and receiving low-quality links. Neither of those things are good. With strategies like linkwheels, you will probably see a short-term return, and then a plateau, and then a drop.

In short, don't worry about competitors hitting you with bad links unless you are using questionable link-building practices and bad content.

My response would essentially be the same for this question as your other question about article directories. Do the most important/niche directories first. Check/find directories where your competition is listed, specially the ones that are outranking you in the SERPS. But again, don't do just a ton of those directories in one day. I would pick the niche ones, do them randomly amongst other link initiatives.

If you're really worried about it, why not just link it to a site that has more authority.. like a social media account or an about.me profile.  Let the link juice flow that way.

Thanks Mcarle.  Good point. You're right, nothing wrong at all with mentions. My current fear is that by making the link the entrance requirement, it may be too much of a barrier and only a few people will actually enter.

Thanks Kieron, This definitely helps! It looks like guest blogging in terms of link building is significantly more effective.  Still it would be great if someone had figures on traffic/links ratio... as I’m guessing this would be more accurate than amount of articles to link ratio.