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Hey Josh, Wasting more time on it is what I was going back and forth on this morning when I saw where they placed our site. I'm kind of scratching me head as to why they would completely ignore the category that I had requested. Our company offers both products and services but our core business is our services, so says our home page and supporting content. Not sure why they placed us in a category for our products. It's a little disappointing but the pages PR is the same.

Ok .. cheers for the responses and clearing that up

Love most Masala so I shall.... Thanks

Thank you very much, did not know that list existed.

This sounds wonderful! Can you give an example?

You should do both but when you can have a custom anchor, you should link to the page it correspond since it will create more juice to this page. This is call deeplinking. Link to your homepage when you can't set an custom anchor and that you can only use Site title or something like this. Try to use variations of your site title when doing it so you can achieve a broader range of related queries.

I agree with Ryan. Those spammy links will cost you time and money - and it is a gamble that they will work long term. Invest that money in a quality attack that will benefit you long term and beyond.

Josh - thanks for those inputs. I am going to get deeper into this with the SEO agency - my hunch is that it is poor link building as we normally update our site with fresh and relevant content almost every day. But when quizzed, the agency said that it is natural for back links to die and didn't seem to make any sense

Hello Jeff and welcome to the land of Moz. As to sub domains, yes www is a subdomain of www.example.com. But, my.example.com is a sub domain of example.com and your.domain.com is a subdomain of example.com. So, based on your question I am going to give you a question: Have you set a preferred domain in GWMT, Bing, etc.? You need to tell them whether or not you prefer www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com otherwise these are seen as two sites. Now, the other thing you need to do is correctly set them in your .htaccess file if you are using Apache for example. If you are unsure of how, let the community know here or in another question. Once that is done. Assuming you are only using your domain and not a sub domain, you will simply submit your preferred domain. The reason for this is: For ranking purposes, a domain and a sub domain are not treated as a single site/entity; they are treated as separate domains. So a link to one does not attribute anything to the other per se. Hope it helps,

Karan, I would suggest that you may want to go back and take a look as if you believed it were just the opposite. When you see it as though there is no effect on inner page value does the change in perspective change what you see? When you think about it, a highly ranked Home Page can be the result of popularity and strong content throughout a site. Such that, the content and popularity cause more people to go to that home page (an easy first thought is media like CNN.com). Because I know they have some news I like, I go to their home page first and most people will bookmark that page. By virtue of that, when I get there, I go to other pages on the site. (Note, some of these will have PR=1) Now, if we take a look at a site that gets tons of pub when a business first opens or has a new offering and the home page is the target url, you will often see lots of lower ranked pages behind it. I have seen this a lot when a company is in a competitive space trying to catch up in some way and they do a big spend to drive traffic. They get an increase in Home PR, but as people go into the site they leave due to poor development, navigation issues, not what they were looking for, etc. The result is less internal pages with backlinks and/or traffic and subsequent lower rank. If you look at mozRank which is a corollary to the SE algorithms, it shows this better IMHO. Such that, you will see Domains that rank highly (often because of history/longevity of domain causing more links, traffic to home page) along with Pages that out rank the home page, because they are getting more traffic/links, etc. than home page sometimes because site is newer and the traffic was developed to a specific product or service as opposed to the home page. What one has to be careful of is that if you are trying to increase your page rank of your home page in order to affect the PR of the inner pages, are you losing valuable commercial traffic in the interim by not instead taking care of the money making pages? If you take care of them, the home page will gain naturally from the traffic due to human behavior like bookmarking, remembering the domain name url as opposed to the inner due to ease of shorter url, etc. So, I can see how you would arrive at that assumption; however, I would recheck the premise. Best to you on a great question.

Cheers Phil, Nice reply and very helpful. I've taken this on board regarding my guest blogging activity. Cheers again.

The value of links from all large directories like BOTW is debatable. We know that Google has devalued these links over the pass few years, but some webmasters feel they still pass enough value to justify the cost. One thing is for certain: they are no longer the "must have" links like they used to be. You can group DMOZ and Yahoo directory in this category as well. If it's within your budget, these links certainly don't hurt and, of course, they are fairly easy to acquire. In my personal opinion, (and this does not represent an official Moz stance) if you actively and successfully peruse other link-building opportunities, it may not be worth the expense of these types of directory links.

Submit a reconsideration request explaining the situation in as much detail as you can. Worst case scenario you will find out if it's a manual or algorithmic penalty. If no manual action has been taken then you will have no other option but to try harder to remove the links from dodgy sites.

Be sure to check Facebook's rules as well, they likely have even more guidelines than G+ does. I believe you also need to run the contest off of FB, but not sure of the exact details.

JC Pennys got in trouble for this. Matt Cutts manually deranked them: http://searchengineland.com/new-york-times-exposes-j-c-penney-link-scheme-that-causes-plummeting-rankings-in-google-64529 Just don't overdo your act. Throw in variations of the keyword. Try and make it look more natural. Also, use your Google Analytics to find keywords that may actually be converting at a higher rate.

It sounds like you need to find someone to help you with all this work. It might be worthwhile looking at finding a VA in your local area especially someone with SEO or copy writing experience. There are a growing number of Virtual assistants in the recession with people working only part time hours. Use a site like Craigslist or ask your business contacts or networking group if they might be able to recommend someone to help you during busier periods.

Hi there, If it's only a few thousand links, try this: https://seogadget.co.uk/categorising-your-links/ You can create your own link categories too. Richard

We are just getting into guest blogging for our real estate clients and have found it to be very helpful.  I had an additional question that I was wondering if you guys could help answer.  We were kicking around the idea of adding a guest post page on our clients' sites to attract potential partners with which to work with on content creation and guest blogging.  Have any of you ever used this tactic? We would obviously have to have strict guidelines of content quality to allow guest posts on our sites, but it seems like a potential link building opportunity if the arrangement is that we get to guest post on their site.  Seems that Rand has stated that you would not get penalized for reciprocal link building as long as the two sites linking to each other are topical and the links are in related content and not on an external links page.  As opposed to manually building a list of guest post opportunities alone, this seems like a good way to attract potential linking partners.  Thoughts?