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Rand talked about spammy links the other day.  His thoughts were that Google probably doesn't penalize them per say, or you could easily link bomb your competitor.  Rather they just ignore them, so they are really not worth your time. Your efforts are better spend making wicked content and syndicating it through a combined communication and marketing strategy, that will generate a much higher ROI

Thank you all for the answers! I want to give you more details about the sites/domains. All of them have original content, but the majority are small sites, less than 10 pages and these ones to not provide such value to users. The sites are about wine, some sites offer information about all types of wine, other provide information about places to visit and buy, see, try wine, one is a portal and one or two are about wine cellars. I know Goole knows that all domains are mine. I think reasonable and if a user comes to a site, why isn't ok to drive him on other site to find some other information? So you, as an user land on a page, and from that page i can drive you to my main site, which is an online shop that sells all types of wine. If i let the links dofollow between sites/domains, it can be interpreted as a manipulative tactic for increasing the PR, but users will find other informations about that big subject - wine. I know that Google disagree this tactic if your domains are not related and they are more than 2-3, maybe more, but ther information found on all sites is about the same thing, and they are so related. I will wait more answers and points of view from you, guys!

Hi I'd maybe create the pages from the second site on the first site (if it fits)and set-up multiple 301 redirects.  If you have any anchor text links the 301 redirects will match them up on the new site. site2.com/wood-rafts >> 301 >> site1.com/wood-rafts site2.com >> 301 >> site1.com whether its a good idea depends on your business goals etc hope this helps/makes sense.

I would suggest giving them a snippet of html code to use, that includes your brand name as an anchored backlink. Brand links are quite important these days in my opinion, and I think this may work quite well, especially if you just sent them the snippet of code to use, and they didn't have to do much other than copy/paste. It may be worth varying the anchor text you give to each site owner at least a little bit... so; www.your-domain.com http://www.your-domain.com Your Domain Your Domain - Your Service 'Your Service' - From 'Your Domain' (the the last example, vary the 'Your Service' - using your keywords, but use a different keyword for different sites). If that makes sense?! That's my opinion anyway!

Competitor Link Research use http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ to look at the links your competition has...then go after those.  Thats the easiest place to start.

Google has published multiple times that running pay-per-click ads in no way influence your organic rank. I cannot imagine there is any difference with those ads if they show up in SERP's or on the content network. The only benefit i have seen with running pay-per-click ads in regards to organic is that your content gets re-indexed faster.

Hi , Thanks for your help. Dave

I think the pest control space offers huge potential for link bait and viral marketing as well! The papers here in London are always writing articles on the rat population exploding and "taking over the city".  I guess people just love reading about that stuff.

I think that an agency's blog provides a good barometer of their quality at earning links. Are their blog articles great and do they attract links? Also, you want to check their link profile to see the quality of their backlinks. Some agencies that I would consider top-tier are Portent Interactive, Seer Interactive, and Distilled.

I agree with EGOL. It should still help the rest of your site, although having the blog in a subfolder is better at passing link juice to the rest of your site. Speaking of blog directories, I recommend submitting to AllTop.com. They are a pretty high authority blog directory and it may actually send you traffic.

In my experience, if they haven't replied within a week then they are most likely not going to reply.

Thank you for the reply. Yes, they are great and authoritative links so was finding it strange that they weren't being picked up. Looking forward to the 4th of Jan