Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can also use the really cool freeware tool "Xenus Link Sleuth" and crawl your own page. It has a lot more featrues to offer like page depth, header information etc etc. and best of all: it is free Just crawl your site and sort by status. Then rightclick on the 404ed page and see what pages link to that page.

I would take the Pope's irrelevant link as well, if the domain authority was higher than the PR7 site. What I'm saying is that it seems there more credibility to pages with higher domain authority than Page Rank. From what I'm reading it seems like Page Rank is dead. or at least counts for only 5% of ranking algorithm today. reference page site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday So what I'm getting at is DA>relevance when it comes to ranking. Although I believe it's nice to have  High Domain Authority / Relevance sites, it's hard to get on them when you're back linking to niche keywords in a world of big brand competitors or your competition is just spam linking(which is a factor why they are number #1). They are  linked to over 2k domains while we are close to 600. I figure the more domains you are linked to the better. The better domain authority, (regardless of relevance or Page Rank) will boost your rank. I believe that Domain authority plays a bigger part in ranking than relevance. However, I do believe that Relevance will play just as equal part as domain authority in future google updates. I am also open to constructive criticism.

The domain authority may be high, but the page authority is usually fairly low. The search engines are wise to people creating thin content on sites with a high domain authority, and they realize that anyone is able to create a site on wordpress.com and take that into account.

Cheers thanks - it's a nice list alight. I'm currently working it

Thanks for the good advice. Money is not really the issue, just not a fan of all the directories online, probably somewhat affected by all the directory-services calling me trying to sell me listings for insane amounts of money. (Local services here in Norway.) Good tips on using opensiteexplorer. Will definately take a look there.

Yeah, if it's essentially just a URL-shorterner, then that should be fine. It's how Bit.ly and other shorteners work - the 301-redirect passes the link "juice" to the appropriate page. I've built my own shorteners for a couple of sites and have never had trouble. For example, this URL: http://userfx.us/xaha ...goes to... http://www.usereffect.com/topic/25-point-website-usability-checklist It's not being built on a 3rd-party platform (just home-brewed PHP).

OSE only about 25% of the size Googles index is

Christopher,  I pulled these urls and looked at them and it opened a can of worms for me. I have submitted a question as the result: http://www.seomoz.org/q/press-release-using-moz-bar-ose-is-reading-domain-not-page-how-why The url for HPWhite press releases shows up as HPWhite.com on mozBar link analysis, but as the press release url for Golfer's Advice?!?!!?? Never seen that before.

Of course the OSE domain authority isn't going to be truly representative for a domain like this. I don't think search engines would treat it so generously (it's only got a toolbar pagerank of 1)

You should be able to find these by searching on google? Have you taken a look at your competitors sites to see where they are getting their links from? This is a great way to identify relevant respected industry/niche directories and other sites.

Thanks, I'll start a new thread.

Getting the links is easy. Getting them to stay, and getting them on a relevant site and getting them to count in the search engines is the tricky part. Can you give us some more context about this request, so we can better help you? You're not likely to get what you're hoping for, but we can help you with what are some reasonable expectations and how to do this sustainably.

Forum links can be kind of tricky.  Several have a 3 month waiting time for you to be able to have links in your signature, while some require you to just be a member for a while so that they know you can be trusted.  The best place to start would probably be any forums that you actually participate in.  From there I would start searching for industry relevant forums (keyword intitle:"Forums").

Have a look at this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday   - great explanation of what page rank is. As Rand says, page rank is a very small part of Google's algorithm and shouldn't be used to judge the value of a link prospect. Page and domain authority, on the other hand, are far better metrics to consider. PA & DA alone can't be used to determine whether or not the site is dodgey. However, a score of 1 suggests that a link from this website is not going to be particularly valuable. You can do better. (It is possible that Open Site Explorer hasn't crawled their site recently and could be a little bit out of date. Their actual DA may not be exactly 1, but is unlikely to be far off)

thank you for that. i will do.

I am not aware of any such list. The closest starting point I know of would be http://www.seomoz.org/directories