Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I made some changes in the webmastertools settings for the site, yesterday (region, domain) and now I have information about links from external sites (from around 50 different webs like flickr, youtube, etc, facebook, etc). I used also the google command link: in the search, and I've got many results also. So, as far as I understand this means that the backlinks info is properly indexed within google. The problem is I think this linking info is not counting, somehow, because I tried again with SEOmoz / MarketSamurai / OpenSiteExplorer and there is no backlinkg info, just 8 or 9 links, from very unknown sites (not youtube, flickr, facebook, etc.). So I really dont understand what is happening.... Thanks again!!

Hi Pedro, SEOmoz just updated the way they calculate PA and DA yesterday, along with a new release of the OSE index. Check out Rand's post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/2nd-november-index-update-our-broadest-index-yet-and-new-pada-scores-are-live for more information.

Thanks for the tip about HARO! Most of our clients are competing for a very specific set of keywords and we are mainly focused on the success (rank / position) of their keywords. We have followed the recommendations of Matt Cuts related to blogs and articles within those blogs containing natural content that points back to the sites. The article marketing is basically just backlinking the blog articles to get them better PR and more traffic. But your comment creates some good thought about the use of our articles and the energy we put into them.

Yes,  Blog commenting and similar website link requests is in my roadmap.

Oh absolutely - not only blogs. I am starting to struggle though to come up with ideas as to which places to "aquire" links from. There are tons of catalogues but i am afraid to just add 10 of them at a time also.

1. Yes, that's what many SEOs believe. 2. Use both plural and singular forms in your content, internal links and strive to obtain external links with both. 3. Make sure you aren't over-optimizing (I tend in that direction sometimes and am trying to break the habit. ) and be sure to use the keywords naturally on the page near the photos.

CafePress is right on. Your position may also benefit from links to your page with your target text nearby, so cafepress' suggestion of Boat Covers from [Company] or similarly   [Company] Boat Covers should be on the right track.

Linkscape, which powers Open Site Explorer, only crawls the top 25% or so of the web right now. Also, the crawl is done once a month, so that's why it can take some time to show up. We're working on getting the crawls faster, but that is why things are slower than Google. We have a few less servers than they do at our disposal to make the crawls. We did just have an update this morning, you might want to check out the blog post from Rand for more information. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/2nd-november-index-update-our-broadest-index-yet-and-new-pada-scores-are-live

As with most things in SEO, it depends. High domain authority is only one of many metrics you should be using to determine which sites to target for link building.  Quality websites operating in your niche/industry/vertical are the ones you should target first.  Find these sites, and then if you want to prioritize them by highest DA to lowest, fine. Also look for sites that target the same keyword groups you do and sites that accept guest content, and stay away from sites that look spammy, scrape content from other sites, have more ads than anything else, etc. In other words, you need to take a more nuanced view of your link targets than just DA.  A high DA site with tons of crummy links and scraped content is never better than a low DA site with tons of original content targeting the same audience you are trying to reach.

thanks for the answer - much appreciated

It depends. Directories are not all bad. Think about it beyond the SEO perspective - any business should list itself in directories that would bring customers. One thing you should never do is pay for a directory listing - that's a paid link and we all know how Google feels about those. Regarding your competitors, there are so many other factors that could be contributing to their rankings (domain age, keywords in URL, site architecture, unique linking domains, quality of on-site content, social media sharing) that I would not consider the directories as a major source of juice.

Thank you. Peter

I think "no" is just popular answer. You should buy links if you need it, but in big business thinking about content is more important.

Hi there, I have found that very high quality content submitted to StumbleUpon can attract a huge amount of traffic in a short period of time. The traffic will never truly dry up either: you'll continue getting traffic for months or even years after the initial push (although the number of visits won't be as high as at the beginning). Reddit.com is another place to source traffic: find the "subreddit" (section of the site) most relevant to your content and submit there. Bear in mind, however, that most Reddit users are very much against marketing, so your submission should look as natural as possible. It is advisable to take part in the communities on Reddit that deal with your topic, not to just submit articles and wait for traffic: you should become a regular contributor, commenter and submitter, and not just a submitter of your own content. Your other ideas are also good, although I doubt you will get much traffic from directories: these are going to be for link building purposes, far more than for visibility. Cheers, Jane

You are correct in thinking that. Nofollow links are used to say "we do not endorse this external reference", which means no PR value is passed (although, Google still reserves the right to actually pass some PR if it feels the external reference is worthy), but the external site will be crawled.  Nofollow does not stop the bots from accessing the referenced URL. With that said, you need a proper ratio of dofollow to nofollow backlinks to keep your incoming links looking organic.  For example, if 99% of your backlinks are dofollow, Google might see that as being a little fishy.  The biggest mistake people make is to not go for a backlink just because it has a nofollow tag on it.  With all the social media out there these days, and the large majority of them applying nofollow tags on all external url's, it doesn't make sense to not get your links out there regardless.  Google still sees these backlinks and recognizes them as a reference to your site/company, and there is a large signal in their current algo for that. So don't dwell on it, trust me.  You will find you're just investing too much time for something that you cannot control.  Just focus on creating relationships with relevant sites and the rest will fall into place.  Pay no attention to the nofollow tag.  Take it from a guy who used to be OBSESSED haha.  I read more source-code than actual page content for years! End note: when it comes down to it, to help put things in perspective, consider a _nofollow_backlink to your site coming from wikipedia.com or something like that.  And then consider a dofollow backlink coming from some no-name, or less reputable site than that.  You're going to see a significant increase in popularity from that one nofollow backlink than any other dofollow backlinks, no what I mean?