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Hi Dunamis, Check out the post Justin Briggs made about How to Build Links with infographics. He does talk about the landing page for an infographic, and mentions this in relation to one specific example. This landing page removes almost all distractions, except for engaging with the content via social or embedding. It links back to the post and the site’s homepage. There is this wonderful share bar at the top, which allows visitors to easily share the graphic. It even sticks at the top as the user scrolls down the page. If you look at the link for this example, the link goes directly to the infographic with almost nothing else on the page except for social sharing. It does link back to the infographic in the context of a post, where the site looks more like a regular page on the site. Hope this gives you an idea of how other people balance the layout options you have.

You build the links with human contact. Once you've identified a site with a tool, look for yourself to make sure it's relevant, and then craft an email that is designed for that site. If you send an automated link request to my site about rc combat ships and you want me to link to window blinds, you're not going to get a response.

Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site? No Has anyone  experienced problems doing this? There are not any problems that can arise from this issue unless the target site which belongs to the SEO receives a penalty. If you stick with SEOs whom use only white hat techniques this should never be a problem. Does this negatively impact the site with the links? No. If you want to really look at this topic under a microscope then a very small amount of PR would flow from your site to the SEO's site. How small? If your site had 100 links per page and the PR flowed evenly to all links then we are talking about 1%. Google has inferred they devalue footer links so most likely it is a fraction of one percent. If the SEO is doing their job well and you are pleased with their performance, I would suggest leaving the link. If you are unhappy with the SEO's performance and would not recommend their services, remove the link. Personally, the link is something I discuss with clients upfront. I inform them exactly the words I shared in the above paragraph. If you are happy with me, leave the link and otherwise remove it.

I think that reply is pretty good at least they will consider it with the product team. Could be a easy way to get this feature implemented.

Agreed that  I would not dare use it either. You couldn't pay me enough to be part of that type of link exchange, even if all 5400 backlinks were dedicated to my exact niche (not that that many sites in my niche even exist!). If you look at the telalinks site more, you can see they do a poor job of maintaining their own site. There are multiple 404 pages when you click for an example of what a links page would look like, and in a random clicking of some of their sites in the advertising section I found a male porn site, a Chinese medicine site, and designer handbags. If they pay this little attention to their own site, I am really not going to trust what they put into a 1k text file for me to upload.

Using Ezine as a source of content will load up your domain with duplicate content.  These pages will not pull traffic unless your domain is stronger than any other domain that has the same content. If you submit content to Ezine that will put the content on a lot of other domains, most of them will remove your links and the rest probably have links that are almost worthless. I think that Ezine is a good recommend to your competitor.

Hah! first they take the "more about this place" out of the places pages, and now this. I feel like I've wasted so much time chasing after citations and directory links!! Lesson learned the hard way i guess.

And Google has just discontinued their directory, so the world will never know. Do let us know when you see it pop up in search.com, it'll be interesting to know how long that takes. Here's the article about Google Directory going down. http://searchengineland.com/final-nail-in-the-google-directory-coffin-86505

Thanks for the link for Aaron's review. Will check it out.

In general - tools like this are rarely worth the time or hassle at all, as has been said - however, thats not to say that all directory submission is a waste of time. If a directory stands up to scrutiny - then submission can be worth it, for example: It has a good DA and the subject section has a good P/A It has a relevant section to your niche It will actually give you a link and not strip it out after you post it. The page on which you link is displayed is not buried deep in the directory structure (like dmoz) The directory and its pages are not stuffed with adsense or advertising The directory is not full of dupe content. The chances of any bulk submission software or tool finding a significant number of directories that meet the above conditions are virtually non-existent, and the handful that will apply to your business and be worth getting a link on will be reasonably easy to find yourself.

Such a broad question - What industry, what country, what is your budget, what is your website and most importantly - what is your product? There are a lot of good linkbuilders are around here, but if you have a crap website and a crap product, linkbuilding isnt really going to get you ROI It should cost anything from free to $1,000,000 a month (by which i mean - it depends, there are no quick, easy answers here) But I would quote 2 days work to investigate you industry, website etc before doing any linkbuilding - so thats minimum $1000 before I start - how does that fit your budget?

thankyou so much Keri. i will check it out.

Movement from position 1 to position 4 is not that unusual. I imagine this has caused a subastatntial drop in traffic as the CTR tends to drop sharply after position 3, but I wouldn't consider this a dramatic drop in rankings caused by problems with your backlinks. It is possible that some backlinks might be devalued by Google which has caused a small drop, More likely this is caused by a Panda update. Panda wasn't a one time update, and this Search Engine Watch article suggests an update around the time of your drop (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2080631/Google-Quietly-Launches-Panda-Update-Version-2.2). This probably means that Google sees your content as a little weaker than your competitors. Based on this, I don't think you need to make any major changes. Try to get some more good content up on your site. And I'm not sure how active you are in the social realm, but more social engagement (I suspect Google is a big fan of +1's) could help. I'm not sure if your on-page efforts are also limited to two keywords, but if so, I'd consider expanding that a bit. Diversification will make your traffic and revenue less susceptible to fluxuations like this. Moving into the social media will also give you another way to produce traffic that isn't reliant on SEO, while usually increasing the efforts of your SEO.

In this case, there is nothing that needs to be done.. you are good to go but in future if there are too many bad links and you suspect negative SEO in play, and you think its affecting you, you may want to create are report and send it to Google with detailed explanation. Hopefully, in future Google allows an option in webmaster tools where you could just go and 'flag' or 'disallow' any backlink that you think is bought by competition to get you down.

Once a month we see an update to the index for OSE. I think in the coming days we will see a few update so I would hold tight. Or you can use other services to track incoming links to your website.

Agree with EGOL.  if you can create some amazing linkbait content - think viral, creative, or awesome infographic you could in theory leverage this to a short burts of traffic, inbound links etc.  depending on the site and content you could leverage on digg, reddit, stumpleupon, etc. the problem with these social sites is that you typically have to be an active member to start leveraging links and information for real value.

I appreciate your response and insight. It's very helpful. What makes this particular post so difficult is that it is a random subject that largely has nothing to do with the rest of our site. Which is part of the reason why we're so surprised it is so popular. It was unexpected, and I'm grateful for the surprise. However, it adds a layer of difficulty to channeling that energy to the rest of the site. Thanks, again.

thanks both, both very interesting links and articles.  How about something I can put in quotation marks with a maven's name behind, thinking like "I think SEO is great!" Avanish Kaushik - google.

Thanks for the input.  In this particular case, the pricing is not an issue as the client has a MAP policy in place so they will actually have a lower or exact match price to their dealers.  The issue is more about the best place for them to be visible and not so much about them selling products through the marketplace.