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I totally agree with you that affiliate links should not help rankings and many mention that they should always be nofollowed, though a lot of people don't (I probably have some followed affiliate links out there somewhere on the Internet). Philosophically I am opposed to affiliate links helping the target site rank. I've also seen some sites get into trouble for having affiliates link with followed links, so I'd be careful of it myself if i was running an affiliate program.

Google started clamping down on PBNs a long time ago... http://searchengineland.com/google-targets-sites-using-private-blog-networks-manual-action-ranking-penalties-204000

In a word, yes. However, if these links are new, I'd get the pages re-fetched. Give it a few days and check again.

Hi Brett, With content being more important now I appreciate DMOZ was a dying breed.  I also became frustrated with the lack of response from some of the editors - not much point in a human edited directory if it takes months to edit parts of it.  I should have thought about it but I just expected it to last a bit longer. I can see what you mean regarding Machine learning.  I bought echo a few months back (mainly because Google Home isn't available in UK yet) but even with their AI you can see how search is becoming more intuitive. It's an obvious advancement and one that has far greater benefit in todays society. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Byron, I am not sure, but i think if the link is in an image, the alt text becomes the "text." Matt

Brilliant, thank you.

Google's primary objective is to give users the best experience, off course they do so by crawling the entire web for the most relevant results based on their search queries. Google's Search Console is a free service that provides you with links Google the came across / found in the before mentioned proces. With this in mind, be aware that Google does not crawl the web to give you as a webmaster the most recent en relevant backlink reports. many links in Google's Search Console can therefore be old, non-existing links (even in most recent link reports) Another shortcoming of Search Console in my opinion, is that is show where links are/were FROM, but not where they link TO. I personally think paid services such as MOZ, Majestic en Ahrefs do better jobs at this, because their primary objective is to give webmasters / SEM's the best experience, not searchers.

Thanks Oleg, I'll do just that and will inform you as to the results. There has been no other promotion. I lost the rank for the past two weeks, so I'm not sure if this is holding me down or the latest Google updates. The post has been up for around 2 months now, so I think that may be long enough to take effect. Google loves ripping my efforts to pieces, literally any headway I make, they pull me right back down. Every. Single. Time. This then begs the question, how does one gain do-follow backlinks organically? It would seem to me to be near impossible.

If toptwincitiesrealtors.com has a good authority/backlink profile, it will help mnpropertygroup.com rank. If toptwincitiesrealtors.com is penalized, it may pass along that penalty.

Hi there, As a link building tactic, I think that what you're describing is perfectly fine and within Google guidelines as long as a few things are true: The resource you're linking to is genuinely valuable and high quality The pages you're getting links from a relevant, high quality and not just "made for SEOs" This type of link doesn't make up the bulk of your link profile - you should try to get links via other methods too and not just rely on this Longer term, Google may get better at working out which of these types of links are lower quality, but I don't think they will ever put a blanket rule in place to mark them all as low quality - there are just too many that are genuinely useful and relevant. I hope that helps! Paddy

Thank you so much, Hurf. That was helpful. On our 410 page, we did write a note saying we no longer provide content services. The only thing that bothers us is that those old links keep showing on our most popular pages even after we 410ed them many months back and they still appear on our Search Console crawl errors. I think disavowing those links is not a good idea either as they were credible back then. So, again does these crawl errors from the old links affect our credibility on search engines? Just want to be sure. Thanks again!

1. It's great that you haven't been manually penalized! Unfortunately, yes I have seen pages drop off the map entirely before for specific keywords. Most keyword tracking tools only search the first 100 results, so if you don't make it inside that bubble it will display a null value like (--). It basically means you need to up your game. Most often you can make it well inside those first 100 results by applying on-site SEO tactics. Update your meta data, make sure relevant pages are linking internally to the page you're trying to rank, and improve the amount of unique quality content on page. Put some focus on the user experience. 2. You can disavow them, but I would strongly recommend you first check which ones are marked nofollow. You don't want to disavow those because they're already compliant with webmaster guidelines. For the rest, communicate with the bloggers you've paid and see if they can switch it to nofollow. Give them a couple of weeks. I don't think you need to jump straight to the disavow file if you can get a significant percentage of those links marked nofollow. I generally avoid using disavow files as much as possible because it's like the nuclear option. Last resort. Moz has a pretty sweet tool with their spam score. I love how easy it makes it for the novice-intermediate SEOs to do a good job keeping their site quality up without needing a ton of oversight from a director or SEO manager. Check out Moz's article on spam score to get an idea how it works: https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk I think if you have 4 or less that's pretty rock solid. It's an approximate value, so don't hyperventilate if you can't get it down to 0. Even this blog has a spam score of 1/17.

Thank you so much for your response Ria.  I kept checking and thought of "View Source" and discovered - no follow They use an intermediary page http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://list.ly/napa/lists and the source shouws... | <a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">rel</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="nofollow" href="</a>http://list.ly/napa/lists" title="http://list.ly/napa/lists" class="gmbutton2 gmbutton2c">Continue to style="text-decoration:underline">http://list.ly/napa/lists | |   | | Just in case anyone else has this question.

First off dont use PR as a way to measure, its not been used in years and means nothing really. Moz's DA & PA are a better metric to use but even so should only be used as a hint not an authority on ranking. Ensure you are optimized fully on your site I can see a few areas you could improve, also i can see you've made a lot of landing pages for different areas this isn't the best tactic to help really. Especially as the content is the same its all just diluted. I'd recommend also doing some local citations to help you, get some people to leave you a review or two nothing spreads better then word of mouth etc. Try not to focus on what your competitors are doing and try to focus on what makes you the best electrician in Perth, e.g. you can make some guides of how to fix guides good share material etc. etc. Keep focusing on what the user would want, where the user maybe finding you and try not to focus on PR or your  competitors. Hope some of that helps.

Do you buy houses in Ukraine? I thought such business should be tied to some place, so maybe try targeting keywords relevant to the area in which you operate? By looking at your website, I have no Idea if you're buying houses in my area or in Saudi Arabia. Your main page hosts all of the content from the blog section, which is weird and bad because there's now a bunch of keywords breaking the semantic cluster. Title and H1 tags on the main page are also bad, may as well keep them empty. There are no images on the main page, and there are no images in the blog posts. It's overall a very bad website, and you should put a lot of time into it.

Hi spacecollective, I think you will be fine. The way the domain names are named themselves already show they are spammy links. The fact that they lead to 522 error confirms it. Jac

Sidebars are fantastic. They are great placed to add photos that are relevant to your content, great places to display ads, great places to promote your best content and great places to promote related content.   All of my sites have a sidebar that is right-sized for skyscraper or rectangular ad units.

In my opinion, 80 to 100 words is really really skimpy.   You would gain more by increasing the quality and detail of your post than by changing the number of external links.   Google is probably going to put more emphasis on your content and how your visitors respond to it than they will put into evaluating your external links.  In addition, I think that you will gain more from Google if you have highly-related, high-quality content on your own site and are linking to that.