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Thanks for your insights! My challenge is that my site allows members to create private family websites, so all content they create is not indexed. I do plan on creating a public community section over the next few months that I think would be more aligned with your ideas. Leveraging my existing user base is definitely something I need to put some more thought into, so thanks for the idea!

There are better ways to make money from your site. Worst case outcome? Manual action by Google. Best case scenario? Algorithmic PageRank reduction where your toolbar PageRank goes down by 1/3. e.g. PR6 -> PR4 making it less appealing for link buyers. Indirectly by linking out to random sites can put you in a bad neighborhood and reduce your websites reputation and trust by search engines.

I would like to add one point many people forget - disclosure. Google is pretty forgiving in terms of linking of own websites if the disclosure is clearly stated and it doesn't look like an SEOs attempt to manipulate link signals. My suggestion is to link to your other site via a specific page on your first site and explain their relationship. This is a good practice in general, not just search engines.

I'm suggesting that you should focus on inbound links rather than internal links at this point.  You've got a strong base given that you're hovering in such high positions already for the home page.  Building on this through inbound link and social media efforts would be the primary place to put your link building energy and resources.  And again, even in that scenario, work on a mix of links pointing to both the home page and inner pages. If you do this, over time, you'll find you may bounce back and forth for a while between the home page and inner pages showing up in ranking, yet ultimately you'll get both the home and inner pages showing up in the results. If you then also seed in brand related anchor text from external sources and social media, you'll also achieve the ultimate results for your brand - having Google SiteLinks show up with your brand in the #1 position AND having other site pages show up in the mix further down.

that's a cracking article - many thanks

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

You're welcome Luke, glad to have helped

We would actually have to see the results to give a specific analysis of the situation, as well as the stats of the website/url/domain you're trying to get to rank.  If your domain is relatively new, with no stats, it may be somewhat difficult considering the domain authority of the results.  On the other side of that, you may very well be able to get some excellent quality links and boost your stats and it may not be too difficult.  It's all very hard to say without specifics.  Could you provide more information?  If not, you're more than welcome to DM in private about it.

There has been a long-time recommendation of 100 links or less. I honestly don't pay any attention to the number of links on a page.  Most of my sites have way more then 100 links on a page.  And, I have some pages that are resource lists - for example, linking out to employers in a certain category.  I have pages like that with hundreds of links per page and they rank #1 in google with better than moderate competition.

The same holds true for order of keywords as for plural and varients. You will rank for all, but highest for the actual. Image the text in a website "you can phone mobile mechanics day and night" and on another website "mobile phone deals" should they rank as high for each phrase? no, i dont think they should

This often happens to my link profiles too, easy to get paranoid and come to the conclusion that search engines only show us the links they want us to see ......shame Yahoo open Site Explorer gone now too. Try looking in Alexa or Google Webmaster tools .

Thanks for that advice! Jacob

Google does not show a list of all links they track for a site.  It's only a sampling.

Great - thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated

You're welcome   You're right there, those links most likely won't be passing on any link juice or benefit .  They could potentially be harmful though as there are not any high quality good links pointing in, though there's also the chance that they won't have any negative effect.  Cannot know either way with 100% certainty, just can be sure that some high quality relevant authoritive links will help for sure. Sounds like you're doing things in the right order;  getting your website in shape by addressing the on-site issues that you mention, with focusing on the link building once that is sorted out. Hope it all works out well, Simon