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It wasn't really all or nothing.  Most of these were near the top of the second page or somewhere near the middle of the second page.  They all sort of entered the first page one after the other.  I'm not really sure if anything was done off page to cause this sort of penalty.  We do try to build links but I don't know if some of these were looked at as bad links or if some lost a lot of value.  I know that at the time the drop took place we did have some technical problems with our site that took a while to fix.  I can't say for sure if those problems cause the penalty either. Aside from doing a lot of SEO in-house we also have a low cost provider and they assured us that all of their activities were legit. I know we have some bad links that were mostly due to scrapers who stole some of our content, re-wrote it and left a portion of our URL on a page.  I think this sort of thing happens to all sites.  The vast majority of our links should be good though.  WMT tools shows that we have a little over 220,000 links to our pages.

Thanks Alan

I agree. Looks like we are all on the same page. However, again depending on the link profile of the client, I wouldn't do 1 style of links only. I would suggest doing all kinds of links, follow, nofollow, directory links, guest blog posts, press releases, donations scattered all over the web over a period of time. As long as they are all related links, they all add up. Plus you don't want competition to see which links helped you. A natural link profile will have all kinds of links, not just mostly directory links or mostly comment spam and so on. I would suggest not overdoing any 1 style of links. That does not look natural in the SERPS.

There are "legit" link builders that can help you with this. They will look up websites relevant to your subject and post links etc to them. Furthermore i would not know what other methods there are then directory submission, in context linking on website, two way linking, three way linking etc.

If you want to dabble with guest posting without initially having to over-commit, you could try a couple of the blog networks like myblogguest.  These get bloggers and publishers together, so practically remove the need to the usual outreach.  The nature of them does mean that you have a much smaller pool to work with though, so it's not the most scaleable approach. For the writing you could find freelance writers with specialist knowledge.  Try the usual freelance places (I quite like peopleperhour for this sort of thing), but advertise specifically for writers with topical expertise.  Ensure that stipulates that they must provide a topical writing sample - you will soon figure out which applicants actually know the topic rather than those just trying to wing it.

HI Andrew. I have two more open queries on http://www.seomoz.org/q/rss-feeds#post-68299 and http://www.seomoz.org/q/linklicious-and-crawl-rates. Please help me out there Thanks, KS__

Thanks James. It's probably a newbie question, but I appreciate the answer. Oddly, the link was working earlier.

Thank you for your response! Yes I think is a good idea to tell Google to remove that listing because I'm not going to use it.

Based on the industry or competition and the value of top rankings, I would be worried that a site could implement bad link building for competitor sites along with their normal good link building practice for their website.  The goal is to get to the top spot.

Hi, thanks for the response, but exporting and then ploughing through Excel seems such a manual way of doing things. Rand and the team must have thought of the process when they designed these tools...I get the feeling I'm missing something. Link building is such a key part of what we do somebody in the SEOMoz community must have figured out a neat way of using the available tools?

Thanks David, appreciate your advice.

Here are a few examples of linkbuilding companies - http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended#link-building

Hey Gabe, Unfortunately, building links through link directories can give you a mixed bag of results. The best links with the most stability are going to be non-directory links. And sometimes, all it takes is a nice email asking someone to link your site. Though if you're still looking for directories, check out Cyrus' post on how to find quality directories and best practices in your linking.

Thanks for your feedback everyone. The business owner is going to communicate directly with the reporter since they met while the video was taken.

I had a big laugh with your May 2011 entry. These are definately shareable/viral, especially in the hvac community (hvac-talk.com and other forums). You really do need to add share buttons all over the page. Being a local air conditioner service business, I can sympathize with how dull our content can be. I too get traffic from all over but few links or shares. You should be miles ahead because of your humor (my posts tend to be pedantic). I wouldn't mind sending a link your way in a future blog post.

Thanks everyone.  This has all been very helpful.

Don't do directory submissions if that's what you are talking about, especially if your site is new. Link building is important, but don't get fooled into thinking the more links from link directories is going to get your site ranking. A lot of them are straight out spammy sites anyway. Instead do some manual directory submissions using this: http://www.seomoz.org/directories  I would recommend to build one real link and one directory submission at a time. Focus on writing KICK ASS content and people will link to you. I have Universities link to me and I have nothing to do with education. But these Universities link because they find the information useful for there students. I suggest reading the Beginners Guide: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links PS, I, along with everyone in this forum, have been waiting 2 years for DMOZ to index our sites. Submit and move on.

If I create articles with my keyword phrases and find sites to post them on, will this help wiith my search engine rankings for keyword phrases? It will invite new competitors into your SERPs. Are you up for that?

Hi, how many visit do you have? is the bounce rate high? First impression about your website - it's boring form marketing and human point of view. But frankly speaking when i did quick research in the Polish internet it looks almost the same. Maybe first thing to do is to differentiate from competition. On that site my graphics designer used dog's muzzle to "good nose" for real estate searching - it's real estate agent  site Now many people don't remember the name of this agency but everybody remembers  them  as "that one with dog"  http://www.salvanto.pl/ Maybe it is not about SEo but the world does not begin and end with the SEO Be different from others on the market