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Thanks AWSthreads, That was a really helpful answer, as I was trying to verify a proper method to analysing a company's links. I tried a link analysis of  a couple of websites myself, and noticed that there was a mixture of branded and commercial links and Image links, is this what your talk about when you say that you would pick out the links you think you can benefit from (or would you actually be basing that wholly on link authority). With hope, I will gain enough knowledge so I can attend a link building workshop and start learning at the next level! Thanks for your time, Janaya

My client only sells to their dealers, not to the public. So, if I were a dealer, I would gladly link to the manufacturer who is working hard to provide better information about the products. I am going to approach them about making a form letter to either mail out or email out and we can link them to a private page to get the badges.... see what happens. I will most likely report my findings on SEOmoz

Hi Ron, Just to reiterate Keith's response... The NoFollow links won't harm nor help your rankings! But like keith said it is important to have a diverse and natural link portfolio both in terms of follow/nofollow and anchor text. Had your advertising campaign used followed, links you may have had a problem as Google could view these as paid links.

It would appear you are trying to become the Brazilian eHow. Given that they are not favorites of Google, etc. I would say be careful. You are already starting off using some questionable methodologies - Paid links as a starter. As to the sidebar links, they are discounted, so you need to stay after it for real quality links. If you dont mind spending a few dollars, Yahoo Directory ($295) could be a good direction. I would also insure that you are tight on local and are on every citation site you can find. There is a good list: http://www.seomoz.org/directories and here is a great Cyrus Shepard post around web directories and linking.  Obviously, your biggest challenge will be to have content around How To. So, you have your work cut out for you. Hope this helps a bit,

I suppose you might also add: Product Data Feed Optimization & Submission Multiple Location Data Feed Submission

I looked at the site for a couple of minutes, but there are a few more on page tweaks that could be done, have a look here: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.musicliveuk.com/WbGhsMXk Also, your site is hosted in Germany, it would help if it was hosted in the UK.

Thanks for the discussion. I have been outsourcing data gathering and assigning it to a sub-user in Raven Tools. The user identifies relevance from a list I have gathered using Raven Tools by visiting their site- also applies to free directories and assigns links back to me when data is gathered so I can approach prospects via social media and send very personalized emails. It feels like a very comprehensive service atm. I like its feature that provides a list of 'multiple citations' of sites that link to competitors. Offers a lot of data without having to do a lot of data manipulation- saving time. I just wasn't getting enough highly relevant link prospects from Ontolo because I probably wasn't using it properly.

301s pass most PR, but not necessarily all. This process also takes a bit of time. That said, I have heard of people doing this and it does seem to be a good thing to do, provided there's some similarity to the new site in terms of content (i.e. 301 a tire domain to a real estate domain and it might not give you much long term benefit). The endgame for you should be to add the old domain's momentum to your own.

Hi Martin, the tool is also available in english I just checked it (I dot know why they dont translate the website :-)) This is the link to get a free account if u want to: http://www.linkbird.de/kostenloses-testlogin/?tracking_id=55 Harry

It certainly won't hurt, as long as you keep the following in mind: Not every directory link is right for your site. Be selective and don't go for every link out there. Pace yourself. A good hint I got from Ian Lurie's Fat Free Guide is the 2:1 rule: for every two directory links you build, make sure to build one genuinely natural link. This helps to keep your link profile looking “natural”. Research. Understand where your link will be placed before you go after it. Check Google’s cache of the page to make sure they are indexing it. Large directories are often plagued by bad SEO, and not every link carries the weight it should. Seek relevancy. Ask yourself if this link has the potential to send qualified traffic to your site. Even if it's a small amount of traffic, it's probably worth the effort. I originally wrote these tips in a blog post published a few months ago. According to rule #2, you should be safe with a couple of directory links - but if you are just getting started I wouldn't push it further than this. To really add value, try to ensure they are related to your niche. The harder it is to get into a directory, the more value it adds.

If you have a link on your page, and it's not to a shady website, best practice is to leave it normal.  As Mr. Hussaini said, "Adding Nofollow couple of years ago could have saved your SEO juice and passed on to other dofollow pages, but as of now, that nofollow goes into a blackhole".

For informational and educational websites like wikihow.com - links come naturally and easily as compared to other biz/ecom websites. Wikihow has over 1,800 backlinks from Educational / university sites, and over 200 links from Government sites and that speaks a lot about their content. This is not to say that they can skip link building strategies, but it is just a lot easier to get links for such websites. Mashable links to them: http://mashable.com/2009/02/18/how-to-guide/ , and so does Google: http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/ In short, the quantity and the quality of their content does the link building for them to a major extent.

I agree...  If you hire somebody to get links for you... the week after you pay him he can go to one of your competitors and acquire a similar load of links... then you get a message from him.... "Need more links?  :-)"

Thanks for that info... Assuming that your competitor is sitting on his butt doing nothing.... then you should have him beaten in six months or so - maybe sooner.   From my experience good links take effect quickly.  I have seen my pages move up in rankings within a few days after getting a really good link. Good luck.

It has been my experience that using a 301 redirect does not pass 100% of the ‘Google Juice’.  However, if your existing backlinks are ‘not substantial’ then I would not expect the domain authority to suffer from your change. When performing similar projects I have gone through the existing backlinks and contacted the webmasters for links I deemed worthy and alerted them to our change, asking them to update their link:  I would suggest you do the same.  It can be a bit tedious but I consider it a best practice.

No problem. You can use OSE update calendar to see when is the next update.

Thanks so much for your response! Very helpful. So I've since removed the outgoing links to sites that don't make sense, and hoping they will notice and remove me from their sites.  I will from now on not try and cheat my way into getting links. Is it likely that Google will punish me for having my site on a a few hundred directories? I manually submitted and paid to get my way in.  Do I need to take the time to ask to be removed from all these directory sites? 90% are related to the topic of my site, but most are free directory sites, and I'm sure some of them are on the verge of being spammy. Thanks again.