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Would you dominate your competition? My bet is "yes".

I never request links. I spend 100% of my time on content and links appear as gifts from people who like what I create. So, I can tell you with great certainty about the anchor text that appears on natural links.  The links that I receive do not come from anyone who is thinking about SEO or has received any incentive to link to my site. Almost all of the links that point to my site have "mydomain.com"...... "here"...... "this"..... "video"..... "photos".... as anchor text. When the anchor text is a keyword it is usually a single word such as "Chicago" or "diamonds". So, when I hear google talking about cracking down on "overly SEOed websites"... I am thinking that they could easily do that be removing the credit given for anchor text links.  That's what would happen if I was the boss at Google.

Hi UtahTiger, I would underline the fact that link metrics are not enough to check the weight of a valuable link partnership. For example, let me show you what I look at when choosing a link partnership: 1. Does my link provide additional value to the specific page? (if so, after click-through there is a higher chance of converting) 2. Where is my link placed? (Although people can place a link randomly on their website, I prefer to have a link that fits in naturally in the text. Not only for Search Engines, but human visitors will also be more likely to click on a link in the content than one in sidebar.) 3. Is there a chance for Search Engines easily reach the page? (well you do Link exchange for gaining some link reputation, right? you don't want to miss out the search engines neither) 4. Is it follow/nofollow? 5. And only on this stage I check the link metrics. I have left the link metrics on the last position just for one reason: try to provide value with your link first and only after try to gain something in exchange (the good-old link juice). Numbers can tell you a lot, but not everything. Good luck with building good links! Gr., Istvan

let me tell all you guys from experience dont use BMR. I started SEO on a website 9 months ago, I used plenty of variety and the rankings were good, I noticed that and page getting lots of BMR links got good results very fast, so I got greedy I started to put more and more effort into BMR, as of January, I solely did BMR for the website. On Feb 25th a good an email on google webmaster about taking part in a blog network to increase my page rank. As of this weekend my website is now page 50 and I was in the top 3 keywords for Gifts, gift ideas, christmas gifts, personlised gifts. Highly competitive keywords

What about Charities? If  I earn a link from a charity clearly it's not a relevant link. How are directories relevant? Cleary DMOZ, Business etc... don’t have anything to do with your website? What if an SEO blogger writes a article on a best industry website... say "tractors.com"  this isn't a relevant link and is complete natural? What happens if a supplier links to your website... That does your CRM system? This isn't a relevant link? Secondly if your selling "Tractors" and get a link from a business blog or finance blog (with high DA) this isn't relevant, but people who read business/finance blog still buy "Trackers"? So doesn't that make them relevant? How you do determine what’s relevant and what’s not? It's very difficult to get relevant links high DA  websites if you’re in a very specific niche. I've seen business with a net worth of 100 billion... but plenty of links that are high DA, but not complete relevant links? How can a business of this size possibly take these risks? Isn't it ok to get irrelevant links along as they are not paid links?

Good example. If there is a business case to do it offline then it should be allowed online.

Thank you Ryan, your answer is really detailed and I am going to stop checking for my domain authority for a while, and thus keep more energy for finding other links ! Loïc

Hi Mike, First off, if you have a couple hours to spare, I'd start by watching a couple of videos. They are over a year old, but still contain tons of good knowledge about using Moz tools http://www.seomoz.org/dp/pro-webinar-november-2010-with-danny-dover http://www.seomoz.org/dp/webinar-february-seomoz-pro-overview Yes, fixing errors is often considered "low-hanging-fruit" and can sometimes have a quick effect on improving your rankings - but not always, unfortunately. For beginners, the On-page optimization tool is one of my favorites, because it contains so much knowlegde in a single tool. Pick a keyword, URL, and get to work. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

thank you

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're getting at. Could you give a little more of a use scenario please?

Hi Wardy, Usually, there would be value to redirect an expired domain, but it depends on the age, what the domain previously held, and whether there is revelance to your new domain. With a 301 redirect, any "link juice" (hate the term, but it's got to be used!) will be passed down the line to your new site, so as long as the link and old domain is valuable, the answer is yes, there would be some slight benefit. Also, check in "open site explorer" to see if there are any other valuable links to your old domain. If there are several valuable links, buy the domain and redirect before someone else buys it. If there's just the one valuable link, write to the site and ask them to amend the destination URL. Hope that helps. Matt

Hey Erick, The new YouTube profile structure is a pain in the ass - unfortunately it's now "nofollow" across the board, which comes as no surprise (as so many people were spamming it), but nonetheless prevents you from passing Pagerank off the back of a popular channel. I'm afraid that I don't think there's an easy solution or alternative easy to game site that will provide the same value, so contrite as it is to say, I think we're back to the "build great content" manifesto in order to generate the same high quality followed links. The list Charles gives away there is unfortunately redundant in the main, as it's from several years ago and most of those sites are now unrecognisably different. There are some video submission sites out there, but none of those are going to be a replacement for the YouTube profile link strategy, which was extremely easy to game and at huge scale. However, there is a new thing you can do to get value out of  YouTube and that is getting "as seen on" attribution (which is a link to a blog where the video has been featured - visible in the bottom right of any video). Find videos with thousands/millions of views that currently don't have an "as seen on" attribution and embed them on a high authority blog with supporting text. You'll then get the "as seen on" attribution, which is a followed link through a 303 redirect - so probably doesn't pass any Pagerank - but is still a referring link, which can be valuable if you scale it up significantly. Hope that's useful. Cheers, Phil

Lots of excellent answers here deserving of many thumbs up, so I'll just throw in my 2 cents. OSE generally reports anywhere from 40-90% of the links found in Google Webmaster Tools. Because of the emphasis on quality over quantity, it doesn't list every link. That said, the SEOmoz Linkscape team is working hard at delivering an index that may be 3x the size of the current index - which means a ton of links. W00t! Check out this interview with Rand where he talks about this - http://pointblankseo.com/rand-fishkin Regardless, it does seem odd that a site with good link metrics would have none of its outbound links counted. One possibility is that even though Linkscape knows about the high authority page through other inbound links (and can therefor assign metrics such as MozRank and MozTrust to it) the URL itself has blocked Linkscape from crawling. In this case, you would see data for the high authority URL just like you described, but OSE would have no record of the outbound links on the page, because it wasn't allowed to crawl. This is only one possible explanation out of many. You could check the robots.txt or meta data of the URL and questions and see if anything is blocked. It's hard to tell from this end without knowing the exact URL. Regardless, I hope this sheds some light on the issue. Best of luck!

What about a once a year fee? Local neighborhood associations http://jingletown.org/ Local Art Associations http://www.proartsgallery.org/ Local small business affiliats http://www.oaklandgrown.org/ Local Chaimber of Commerce http://www.oaklandchamber.com/ Local new outlets (these guys have a monthly, but I'm sure you can get a yearly rate) http://oaklandlocal.com/ Look in your area for these type of organisations to join up, they get you links, service, community enrichment & maybe even a few clients. Not all of these will fit every solution but they do range in value as well as price from 25.00/year to 200+/year.

concentrating on new domains +3 adding links from already linked domains +2 adding new pages to my main domain +1 (I do realize that not all domains are created equal) I'll get to work on that.

Thanks a lot - very helpful

You should always (by always I mean whenever possible) use the keywords in the link to your site, regardless of whether they are coming from the external or internal source. There is a very good example of how much it might help with your SEO campaign. If you type in Google 'click here' you will find that top of the list is Adobe Reader download page. The reason why it ranks so well for this, rather unusual keyword is because many websites, which offer PDF download also put the sentence saying something along these lines: "...click here if you haven't got it already installed on your computer...' where 'click here' is the text of the link to the Adobe's page with the Reader download. Now - when you put a link on page A to page B - you give the keyword credit to page B, but also page A, because the keywords actually appears within the content of page A as well as points to the other one. I might be a bit confusing, but at the end of the day you are building a keyword rich website.

Vahe, I accidentally clicked 'Good Answer' twice for EGOL Your answer was informative. I will be sure and get you next time.