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Thanks for chiming in. This does clear up quite a bit for me. Ideally, I would like a balance of relevant links & general high authority links. With that being said, can anyone suggest any high authority sites other than dmoz that I can add my site to that would help?

YES!  Especially from your homepage.  Tell everybody that visits your site! YES!  Every quality links helps the authority of your entire domain. If you have superb linkbait then share it will other people by tweeting to your friends, posting on facebook, ask your mum to tell visitors to her blog, share it with reddit, put a sign on your dog.....  but I don't think that I would buy any stumbles... because if your link bait is really good it should get tons of stumbles without paying for them.

I'm not seeing any signs of indexation problems or issues with true duplicate content (duplicate URLs of the same page, essentially). I'm also not seeing many direct links to this page, so a link-based penalty (just on this page) is very unlikely. Unfortunately, we often don't report deep or low-quality links in OSE, so it could be that there are links we're not seeing that look spammy. The other possibility is an anchor-text penalty, if you were hitting "bet365" too hard, but again, I'm not seeing evidence of that. Even across the whole site, your anchor text is fairly diverse. I'm seeing you at #11 for "bet365" on Google.dk for this page: http://www.betxpert.com/tvguide/bet365 Realistically, it's got a shorter URL, hits "bet365" in headers and text, and seems to have higher Page Authority. I think your internal links to that page might be stronger. I think your just making that page look stronger to Google. It's really dangerous to try to de-rank a page - you can end up harming it in other ways. You could tone down the on-page cues a bit. You could also link this page directly to the page you want to rank. Currently, though, you're sending Google subtle cues that this page is stronger. You could also just try to build a few inbound links to the desired page - since neither page has many, a couple of links can make a difference.

I suppose that your main keyword would be in the H1 tag, your second most important in the H2 tag etc etc. Can you have more that one H1 tag?

Hi Slava, Yes, that's a good point - I'll definitely look to re-purpose it after I'm satisfied I've promoted it as well as I can.

I agree with EGOL's suggestion to have an expert look at the situation. We really don't have enough information here to be able to tell you for sure what has happened to your site, and what the best course of action is.

I'd suggest Google searches using your keywords plus words like forum or online community. Here's a small business finance forum at http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=37 where you can see what kinds of questions people are asking. You can go in and provide some advice in answers, or even use the questions as ideas for your own blog post. A note of caution is that the owner of that forum is a known and respected SEO and will easily see through any attempts at blatant link drops; it's not one to try to spam.

Hi Timothy, What you're looking at is the Toolbar Page Rank for an individual URL on your site. That's a number that's updated 2-4 times a year, and is only a semi-accurate representation of the internal ranking that Google keeps. Like Steve says, you want to focus on if your traffic, rankings, conversions, etc. have changed.

The best way from what I understand is to continue link building, but do so from high authority sites with an anchor text to that specific page. Anchor text being, "patio umbrellas". Blogs are a great place for that, because often your links will end up on the home page, at least for a short time, which will significantly improve results. Try guest blog posts if you have time and have a network and link from authority sites blog rolls as well if you have them available. Other than that, pray and hope.

When the new SEOmoz list of directories came out, Cyrus did a post about best practices when building links for directories. You might want to check it out at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices.

Appreciate the wealth of information, Harald!. Thanks for the massive list of back link sources and for the comments regarding good vs. poor back link quality.

C) Spammy with a capital S Yes i would say thanks, but no thanks.

Yes it would, every hop leaks link juice, bing will not pass link juice thought 2 hops at all. http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-redirection-response-results-in-another-redirection As for .org and .com. it does not matter. What does matter is how you handle googlebot when it comes to your site? Youy should send googlebot along with USA users

I agree with Gareth, it's extremely difficult to impossible in many cases to have these backlinks removed from other sites.  I had the same thing happen to a company and have spent countless hours emailing websites and their hosts with little success and to this day have probably only had 10-20% of them removed.  I've had to force myself to forget about them and simply try harder to achieve high quality backlinks to neutralize the negative effects of the bad ones. Needless to say, it's a sucky position to be in... be careful about hiring an SEO company.  There are more bad ones than good.

I've seen nofollow in a bio at the bottom of guest articles, it can happen

I've never seen it before.. looks proper spam-tastic

HI csblev, Forum links / blog links are very important. For 2 reasons. A. They typically are text anchor links like... you should try "Open Site Explorer". This gives Search Engines text to relate to the page based on what other people think is important about your page. Compared to a link directory which usually is just your company name or url linked to your home page.. little value for any specific keywords except your company name which you probably have locked up anyway. B. Secondly on forums / blogs that relate to your industry is where you want to be for direct customer purposes. I've given this advice before, but I'll do it again. Personally, if you have the time I would invest it in your business appropriate forums  and blogs. Find where your potential customers interact with each other, go to their forum and "engage" the community. Offer them free advice, answer questions and in general share your knowledge. By proving yourself helpful and when it is appropriate you can drop a link to a product page or an article on your site. The biggest caveat I can say is don't run around hitting up forums and spamming them, every forum that you want to be on has some sort of moderator that will remove your post. And personally if I'm on a community site and I see a blatant spam post, not only will I not click it, I will make a mental note to never go there. I don't know what industry you're in, but if your site is much better and a leading authority then these types of forums should be picking up on you on their own. And your users / customers should already be generating some of these links for you, if not.. you need to ask yourself why not?. Sometimes forums need a push so it certainly doesn't' hurt to follow my advice above, but you may need to focus some attention on what you can do to make people want to link to you, rather then going out and doing it yourself.

Excellent! Seems like you have most bases covered - this is good. Some people find links from high DA but low PA useful, others find the opposite useful. As always, there should be a bit of both. Try not to pick a strategy that puts all your eggs in one basket. I would prioritize the high PA first but dont forget about the high DA and low PA links, come back to these at a later stage Also, make sure that there are other backlink strategies in place other than directory listings. There are lots of ways to gather links, directories are just one slice of the pie. Feel free to send me a private message should you need assistance or add me to skype, the info is on my profile Matt