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As has been said - natural? Something to consider when link building is the content you have that can be linked to. Then base your prospect hunt in niches with relevance specifically to your content - almost along the lines of treating every page you have as a landing page target. The more relevant your page, the more likely the visitor will stick to your site.

1. I believe the website shall be of the same niche specific industry as of my site for which i am doing link exchange.  I will not like to exchange links with any websites which do have good site or ranks etc but not of my niche industry to ensure quality get maintained. 2. I am new thus i will be doing link exchange direct not 3 or 4 ways since that must be complicated to search and practice. Do you think it shall be good enough to start link exchange or any other suggestion to it ? Also i want to know in start is it ok if i place a website link in my directory and then invite the owner to check and add my link back in exchange or i shall email them talk to them then shall proceed to link exchange. And my other question is Google Panda update against link exchange or its still worth for link exchanged to good sites for SEO and traffic reasons ? Regards! Anand

I think 301 is good especially if you bought new domains and you wish to pass on the value from your old domain/domains. I did it myself with 2 domains just the other days. Just remember it may take up to 3 months for google to properly move everything and also if you're not moving 1:1  -> every-old-url   to new-urls then you will have a loss in value.

I also dont think that same ip or same c-block is suuchh a worry. i have my own servers with only one IP, and links from the same ip seem to work as well as any other. Obviously if 90% of your links came from the same ip that would ring alarm bells. Take discountasp for example, a very large hosting organization all on the same ip number.

Thanks for the responses. I know I could have gotten the link by now. It's not a question of time but of money, but let's not get too sidetracked by that. I've paid for Yahoo, etc., directory listings and have seen some benefit, especially for new sites that I am trying to get on the map in terms of SEO. We're getting hung up on a diversion (the fact that I'm paying for the directory listing). People pay to join BBB, Chamber of Commerce, Yahoo, Business.com, etc., because the sites are authoritative directory listings. Most of them wouldn't do it without the link because they know the link carries SEO value. I would submit this isn't the same thing as paying an Indian SEO for a link from his buddy's spammy site. If you disagree, fine.  But maybe we could hold of the "don't by links" refrain for a little while. I know that some folks have been drinking the Google Kool-aid for so long that they can't think about this sort of thing logically. I'm not doing anything black hat here.  So let's forget about the paid part.  What I want to know is this: What is a worthwhile link? Assume it takes me 4 hours to get every single link and I don't pay a dime for any of them. What links are worth targeting and which aren't? Thanks again for your thoughts. Any additional comments would be appreciated.  I am new to the SEOmoz tools (still in the evaluation period) and am trying to find out if they will help me with link-building.

I will be syndicating content via ezinearticles.com. I am also looking into demand media. You brought up a good point though. I don't want my articles from those content sites to compete with my own. By taking a look at my PA, DA, DmT, mR and all metrics, I need to build DA the most. So the articles I will write are not for my main keywords on the homepage. Instead the articles will have embedded links pointing to subcategories instead of the home page. For some reason my home page PA is 45 while DA is 35. Any thoughts? By the way, thanks for helping a mozzer out. You're going to be my new mentor. Cisco

If your image link is FOLLOW, the alt tag may pass link value. But it seems that text links have a value slightly higher. That at least is what I have observed. But put the alt on your images you are linking to your site is essential.

Gyi Tsakalakis I actually went to management with three sites that ranked on page one of Google for our most important keyword and asked them to verify that the companies were our competition. Management countered me by printing out some pages from a competitor that they knew of but ranked no where near the top of Google. So I think they kind of missed the point of what I was trying to prove. So I've had some difficulty even getting off the ground.

Well, over these many people consider it fits deceived. Recently I did a 301 from a site that had a lot of anchors a keyword to another new domain. The site with many anchors was not yet well ranked. This new Domain began Rank even without a good on-page optimization for that keyword and no direct link back. I suppose it happened because the strength of anchors contained in the old domain. So in my conception, 301, transfers the force of anchor texts.

I think that Daniel and Gianluca are on track here, but I just wanted to try to structure it a bit. Google has over 200 ranking factors now, and we use "natural" link profile to cover a pretty big chunk of them. Generally, I think natural means: (1) From a diversity of sources (blogs, forums, PR, etc.) (2) Using a diversity of tactics (comments, contextual links, etc.) (3) Having a diversity of anchor text, including keyword-targeted and brand-targeted. This is probably one of the easier cues for "unnatural" links. If you're SEO'ing for "medium blue widgets" and 99% of your anchor text is "medium blue widgets", it's not natural. (4) From topically relevant sites. This is a nice-to-have, but it's not clear how well Google can measure relevance. General authority and "trust" may be more important, although I think relevance will matter more over time. (5) Not from paid sources. Technically, ads should be nofollow'ed, and some paid placements are a lot easier to spot. If you're right under a "Sponsors" banner, in a box with 10 links from wildly irrelevant and disconnected sites, or in a sitewide footer, your link is going to look unnatural).

There's a lot of shades of gray to this question. The more spam-like versions most likely would be discounted, while guest posts on strong websites would still drive link value. For example, if I wrote an article or story that was picked up by the mainstream news and placed on a site like ESPN, USA Today, NYT, etc. the link in the story would be valuable. If the site that picked up my article or story was a paid repository of low quality content then the link would likely count for much less or could possibly be considered spam if the website was considered a bad neighborhood in regards to linking.

Thank you everyone! Appreciate the focused advice and insights.

are you a linking company??

Thanks for the replies! I'll go ahead and let the links pass power with a proper disclosure on the page. If it all goes south I'll post an update here.

Yes each link text will help you rank for thet lihnk text. but if your page is not optimized for that term it mayy be a waste of effort. I often send links to my clients sites buy using the brand names of his coompeditors in link text. this brings him  up underneath them on search engines which is better then nothing, but he will never beat them as his page is not optimized for the term.

Strange I didn't notice that. (Maybe due to the fact I didn't have that many blogrolls to have significant impact). The only way to find out is to test it.