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Thanks Everyone! I'll develop some stellar content.

Thanks for your reply Justin. As I posted earlier, here is what I man:  http://cl.ly/CYix I am talking about the breadcrumbs (trail) displayed in the Google results.

But as far as your onsite efforts go are you targeting keywords e.g. are your pages optimised?  If not then I'd recommend doing this first before changing any anchor text. Beyond this I would start slowly only changing  few existing backlinks from sites with high mR/mT etc and changing the anchor text on these while also focusing on building new links from high mR/mT sites.

The pagination tags should help clear things up for the spiders.

Another idea I had for a useful piece of content depends on how small your town is. If it's 800 people like my dad's hometown is, it's not going to work. But if it's 20,00+ people, try writing a guide to the neighborhoods the way the locals talk about them. I lived in the Orcutt area of Santa Maria, CA for over 20 years in the "old oak knolls" area. Everyone local knows what it means, but you won't find that area on any map. There's only two Google results for that phrase, one of them being a real estate agent who lists a lot of her properties by the development name that's now 20-40 years old and has no sign marker anywhere. When I had a friend who had moved there from Oklahoma and was looking to buy a house, I sat down with her and gave her a list of division names that were in the area that she was looking for, and divisions to avoid. There was no map or resource to go to for that. Think of how many searches you could come up for if you went through and collected some of that type of information. Another thing to do in larger cities would be to give a translation guide to the traffic reports for that area. I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over ten years, but have never been able to find anything that tells me where "the foot of the maze" vs "the parking lot" "top of the incline" etc. when it comes to backups on the bay bridge, but that's what the traffic stations call things, how stuff gets tweeted, etc. If there were someone that mapped out all of this stuff, imagine the links they could get.

I just want to publicly say that we're really trying to do a better job of endorsing answers in Public Q&A. The amount of activity since we relaunched Q&A has been beyond our wildest expectations (short-term, at least), and we really do appreciate the time our community members have spent answering each other's questions and sharing their experiences.

I really wanted to push the content marketing aspect in those slides, but I just want to add that it is a balancing act. Some manual link-building is fine - just make sure you mix in low-quality with high-quality AND make time to create solid content. In other words, just do everything simultaneously. As long as you don't need to eat or sleep, you'll be fine Seriously, carve out the content time, even if it's 20 minutes/day and it's the first thing you do in the morning. That investment will pay off. Waiting until you need content to create it is like only networking after you lose your job. It'll work, eventually, but you'll lose months.

I would definitely take a look at the list given by SEOmoz (below) and stay away from places that will sell you hundreds of links for x amount of money. Buying a bunch of spammy links can work for a little while but will bite you in the end. best of luck Holly

Thanks for the info. Much appreciated guys. Duke

Hi Brandon If you haven't seen this already, an awesome video here on SEOmoz entitled "I'm Being Outranked by a Spammer - Whiteboard Friday" is well worth a view, it was posted last Friday and Rand has some really insightful and valuable information to share. I would suspect, though obviously can't know, that the links from this .org site to your competitors will not be the reason they are ranking so highly. If those links are being counted, it will be a small part of those rankings, takes a lot more than 1 good link usually. Just because it's from a .org doesn't mean that the links carry any weight, it sounds like a site with little value from the way you've described it, I'd suggest focusing on creating and distributing some valuable content rather than chasing the links of competitors.  Link Analysis of competitors is of course important, just don't worry too much about individual links, especially if they are questionable such as in this case.  With some great content, you can attract some valuable links of your own that your competitors may not have. I hope that helps, Regards Simon

If it's just a matter of link count, I wouldn't worry about it. If the comments are clearly spammy, then I htink M.-J. is exactly right - you need to moderate and remove those comments. It is possible for a large number of spammy comments (with outbound links) to cause problems with a site. It's not just an SEO issue - it looks bad to legitimate visitors as well. If you can't moderate, nofollow would be the next best option (the only other option, really). If you've got 200 links on the page, though, and the comments are 95% legitimate, it's fine. It's just a popular post.

You do risk that those would look like duplicates, and the search engines may filter one or more copies out. If they do that, you may lose any link-juice from them (although that's a lot tougher to measure). The links could also just look low-quality, if you're "spinning" out the same article over and over. It really depends on the scope. If you did this 3-4 times with a couple of articles, I doubt you'd have any major issues. If you do it 100 times with 1 article, you may get a short-term ranking boost, only to see those links devalued a couple of months later. If you can get people to post a blurb and the link back to your site, that's definitely ideal. That's the best way to protect the content and signal that you're the source. You can also have them use the canonical tag, as Daniel mentioned (cross-domain), but my concern is that you'd lose the link-juice. I haven't seen a good study on that. In other words, you'd be seen as the source and would rank for the page, but Google might not count the link back to your site.

Yep. Remember to do the same in Bing's webmaster app too.

Hi The Open Site Explorer while exhaustive does not have all the links on the web, plus it won't have the most recent links. You could also try www.majesticseo.com. You could use a variety of advanced operators to find some more links; -site:www.mydomain.com "mydomain.com" -site:www.mydomain.com inanchor:"my site name" That might catch some more of them.  You can try adjusting the time range to get recent ones. -Dan

I want to improve my rank on .com because i think i think searches there are just as relevant. The only people that search for barneklær are norwegian speaking weather it is on .no or .com. Will it help med to get more links from .no website ?

Look for some one with a proven track history of success. The problem with some offerings of link building are that they will offer a very low quality link building, usually an indication of a low cost provider.

I don't think you will have trouble getting your articles accepted within the directories if you are writing unique, quality content. Ezinearticles.com is probably the best know. I have also used morestar.ca; it's a nice PR4 article directory. I do find most of them are a little too full of 'how to whiten your teeth" articles, but if YOur article is read and gets picked up and syndicated, that's all that matters, right? I would try ezinearticles.com first.

I have never heard of anyone being penalized for inbound links, site wide or otherwise. If one could lower the rank of a rival site by linking to  a competitor with the site wide links or  "bad neighborhood" links, well, we'd all be buying links to the other guy's site, wouldn't we? Here's what SEOs seem to believe about site wide links; they aren't worth much, if any, more than a single link from a site. I am not quite sure that's true, but 1,000 links from 1,000 domains is certainly worth a great deal more than 1,000 links from a single domain.