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The link: command in Google only shows a small sample of the links to your site. You'll get a better (but still not complete) report by verifying your site in Google Webmaster Tools and looking at your links through there.

Hi Daniel! Nofollow links are often used for comments in blog posts, to minimize the amount of "spam-comments-to-get-links". But sometimes you can get a recommendation or an award for something, maybe you have a cooperation with someone, then the nofollow link might come from a high quality site. These types of links will give positive signals to Google and in a long term affect ranking, even if the link has nofollow. Do a good job and recieve recommendations, make contacts and you will get valuable links.

Another good indication is whether or not they link to your competitor. I mostly find directories from looking at competitors' back link profiles. Most of them are industry specific and, assuming they are still maintained, worth the couple of minutes it takes to submit.

You might not get a boost in rankings but if it is a popular article that leads to a steady stream of free referral traffic, that can be almost as sweet.

No, varied anchor texts are the way to go, just make sure you have "used tires" in that order. "used tires" "keyword used tires" "used tires keyword" "keyword used tires keyword" Also internal linking on your site should have proper anchor texts as well. I would concentrate on that first, and stay away from paid linking.

thank you Shelly - I appreciate it.

By the way, if you need some help with excel and vlookup, check this link outl http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/ These links may help you also; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-inside-look-at-competitors-backlinks-with-open-site-explorer http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profiling-with-open-site-explorer http://www.seomoz.org/blog/weed-out-your-lowest-performing-pages

Thanks for the clarification. It sounds like you have created island pages specifically for your campaign. The island pages are contained on your site and link to your site, but you cannot move from your site to the island page unless you either know the URL or enter the proper Google/Bing search. A few things to consider: you can include your island pages as part of your site. If the pages are well written, have good content and otherwise add value to your site, I would recommend including the pages in your site's navigation or otherwise making them accessible. you could have valid reasons to exclude the page from your site. I have a client who has a page designed to address a negative publicity issue. The client does not wish the page to be reachable from his site, but he wants it to appear in SERPs so if a search is specifically designed to locate negative information about his company, that page is found and the story is shared from the company's point of view. If you use a CMS or otherwise offer a site search function, you need to make a business decision whether to exclude this type of island page from site searches. IIf you desire this page to be indexed, it is then critical an updated sitemap is offered to search engines. While a site with solid navigation does not need to submit a sitemap at all, a site with island pages is dependent upon sitemaps if they wish those pages to be indexed. I was wondering if Google (in particular) would punish them for not being a big part of the main site structure. The site isn't punished at all. The pages would not be indexed unless they are either included in a sitemap, receive an internal or external link which a crawler can read, or otherwise is made known to search engines such as social media links. Clearly if the page is included in a PPC campaign the page is known by Google/Bing, but they keep their PPC and Organic searches separate. To the best of my knowledge a page is not indexed based solely on a PPC ad.

edit(i forgot to answer your question of where my sites are): I have used this strategy with several sites, dittoeffect.com which currently is over a year old and gets about 1million+ hits a year as well as another site which I will not share the name of which is only a month old competing with some 10 year old credit card sites for some decent terms in the top 10 (3000 a month search volume terms). Sometimes it may seem that way however the way I see it is that sometimes a tumblr blog is not very popular or does not have a lot of links and page rank going to it so it won't be crawled for quite some time (even up to 60 days sometimes). Because of this you can see a fairly regular stream of links coming in. Also I doubt you would be as obsessed with it as I was as I was building close to 700 likes a day (700 or more links a day) so I could focus my attention on this over a short period of time. Being really good with searching on google and through other means I also used this to get links from high page rank sites including 400-800 over PR4-6 page links included in those. The higher page rank pages do get crawled faster though so sometimes it may be wise to avoid getting more than one from a domain. Also since these links are virtually endless, limited by the time and effort put into it, you can just get like 20 a day in a couple minutes and then just forget about it to keep it looking really natural. Make sure to look at the rules for tumblr as self promotion is not something they support. A good thing to do though which I don't even really see as self promotion is to search in google: inurl:tumblr.com "your keywords" in my opinion by liking relevant pages to your site you are then avoiding self promotion as you would obviously have interest in these pages as well as the added bonus of being able to add 1000s of relevant links. Another important note is that your blog can be something like ditto-effect.tumblr.com and the links you get show up as ditto-effect. google sees these as links with the anchor text "ditto effect" without the hyphen so thats great too. Only fall back is that these can only link to your main page and only one tumblr account can be pointed to a domain. Its hard to say the value of some of these links because its not in content though at the very least this is a great way to get page rank to go up as well as get your site crawled like crazy. If you have any more questions don't hesitate to ask

Once you've chosen your domain of choice as Tommy as explained by using 301 re-directs. It's probably a good idea to throw the other domain in link building occasionally. For example if you settle with http://www.footballboots.co.uk then your link building should focus around using that URL, but you should also use http://footballboots.co.uk sometimes as it helps to make your link profile look more natural. If you imagine that other people were creating natural links to your site, they're not always going to use the URL you prefer are they?

Thanks Matthew for the well thought out response. That's the kind of direction that I need and is greatly appreciated. You're correct, I'm at that awkward experience level where I'm forced to do too much copying of others rather than original creative thought. Just going through this painful exercise is opening my mind to a number of new possibilities.

The thing is, lots of really crappy techniques like links from really awfully spun articles do work and did so even more historically. That said, it is in no way a reason for you to build these kind of links as the engines are focused on getting this garbage out of the index and you will just end up chasing your tail. There are a couple of ways to get in content links but the big job is creating the opportunity by building a relationship with the owners of the website. Try identifying some link candidates, emailing the site owners or maybe following them on twitter and try to get into a position where you could offer some guest content (with a link back of course). Not easy but take solace in the fact that if your competitors links are garbage, they are easier to beat. Hope it helps Marcus

no - google is not able to go behind a log in

Agreed, if you hire a third party, you can never fully be aware of the who/what you're getting for your dollar. I would point to the most recent mess involving J.C. Penny for an example of what can happen if there is poor oversight. Even if you do pay or hire a "reputable" company, there is still the potential for mistakes if the work is not closely monitored. Unfortuantely, link-building is a tedious, tiresome, often thankless task! Before you decide to hire someone, be sure to look at all of your personal resources for linking opportunities: customers, vendors, professional contacts, friends who blog, etc. These might be easier and more reliable sources for potential links than hiring a temp, etc.

The general rule I work to in all aspects of life is, if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is. These types of links are very low quality and your probably sharing the links with spammy pharma, porn, watches and amsterdam esorts links. Don't do it! For $30 I can get an amazing article written in any given niche, and for an extra hour of my time, could probably promote it and attract the same amount of links! And clean ones at that!

activitysuper, I do link building research by finding a strong competitor site: I use opensite explorer with these settings only followed links only external links You will find some pretty good links for free (or for a reasonable $ or effort) and you will also learn about what type of content and persona that site projects. Good luck.

Has anyone experimented with linking to the pages that link to you (not from your site) but from other means in an effort to boost their quality? What benefit does this activity have for users? None. When you focus your efforts on activities that do not offer any benefit to users, but instead the primary focus is to manipulate search results, it is called Black Hat SEO. This activity is establishing a link network. Search engines such as Google are very aware of this method and, when you are caught, your site will receive a penalty. I would recommend focusing your time and effort on activities which benefit visitors.

Wahey! Great Stuff Keri. Didn't realise that! Thanks