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I agree with the previous responses that the blog should probably be a subsection. A key question to ask is whether the blog will attract links either naturally or through a link building program.  A blog that stands a change of obtaining significant traffic and links, and features content that is independent from the main website is a candidate for a root level domain. However, from your brief descriiption, this does not seem to be the case with your blog

Hi Leigh. This will depend on a number of things. How old is the site? Have you been link building? What else have you done in terms of SEO? If the site is new and you have only recently begun working on the site it may take a month or two for Open Site Explorer/Linkscape to pickup your site.

There is data out there that suggests Google updates rankings for less competitive keywords less often. So even though your backlinks may have disappeared a long time ago, its possible your position in the SERPs is only now being adjusted. Its also possible that you or sites linking to you were hit by the panda update. In terms of what to do about it, I wouldn't advise going "wild" with backlinks, like you say above. Use some of the strategies you can find here on SEOmoz to develop quality backlinks and a good user experience.

You are very welcome!

Thanks for you input, Derek.

PA = Page Authority and DA = Domain Authority. These are values SEOmoz use to "emulate" PageRank (emulate may not be the best choice of words). you can get access to these metrics via the SEOmoz toolbar or opensiteexplorer

While not 100% effective you can tell Google to ignore the ?dealer parameter in Webmaster Tools but that would involve setting up the parameter differently so it looks like ?dealer=1234 rather than ?dealer1234, so not sure how big a pain that is. Otherwise you can set up a canonical tag so that the canonical version of the page is always /index.aspx for every parameter. Ideally do both if it will help you get the links in. You should lose very little of the link juice by ignoring the parameter and using canonical. EDIT: Here's a little bit on parameter handling - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=147959 - complete with clever Barenaked Ladies reference

This has been the way for ages now. As Alan said, YSE is okay, OSE is great, but nowhere can you get a full list, especially not an up-to-date one.

Great question. It really depends on the directory. As a general rule, if the directory is advertising that is "sells links," those links are likely to be valueless, or potentially even detrimental. On the other hand, directories that have fees for "editorial review" (i.e. dir.yahoo.com, etc), are less likely to have that problem. Generally speaking, if a directory is specifically relevant to your site (i.e. content and/or geography), the directory will likely have more value than a general biz, or non-relevant directory. I also like to stick to relevant directories with DA equal to or higher than the site that I'm submitting. In my humble opinion, the value of submitting to a large number of low quality directories, as well as, article directories, is very low if not non-existent. However, if you find higher quality directory links in your competitors' back link profiles, they may be worth the investment.

That's a highly valid point. Same goes for if it's a clients site.

A fair few of our clients don't use PPC at all... they tend to be the smaller businesses and they just don't have the budget for both. Of course they would do better with both but they do pretty good with just organic. But yeah, I do get disillusioned at times too... not about the PPC side of things but when random, inexplicable and seemingly illogical stuff happens. Actually, disillusioned probably isn't the right word for me, I'd say more like upset and rageful lol.

lol.... Good story, Steve.  Thanks for sharing it. I got a message from a professor who asked why we didn't have an article on Subject XYZ because it was so important, etc. etc. etc. (just reading his rant I could tell that he knew his stuff......  So I asked him to write one and got a great piece of content.

Hey Domaon, This happened to me once and I was furious.  I would contact the publisher and show them this article. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ Basically it explains that the site gains no additional PR to it's other links by  nofollowing your links.   Who knows maybe they'll chance their stance on nofollowing links to use submitted articles. That said there are good reasons why a link can have a nofollow attached to it.  However, if you contributed an article to an ezine that selectively publishes user submitted content you deserve a "dofollow" link.

What I do, is to check the link structure of my competitors. Get a list of their backlinks and their anchor texts. Diversification of anchor text got quiet important nowadays. This allows you to see which anchors are used and in which ratio. Then I check the link list for structure. Often you can easily see where the basic links like directories social networks etc come from and where the real juicy links are comming from. Once you know the structure of your competitor you can easily build links in a similar structure or adjust this strategy according to your needs. But the best trick is to deliver content the users are starving for. Once you did this. They will spread links all over the internet. Another good way is to start a linkbait and offer something bloggers love Please excuse my english as I am German native and have to do some phone calls beside writing ;D

Thanks for the input. For the company I'm working for we're doing a new blog and I plan on linking back to certain pages of the main site that are relevant to the blogpost.

Hey waynekolenchuk, I'm so sorry that you still haven't been able to see your links in Linkscape. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for a plethora of reasons, including crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. Just so you know, here's how we do our index: we take the last index, take the 10 billion URLs with the highest mozrank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains), and start crawling from the top-down until we've crawled 40,000,000,000 pages (which is about 1/4 of the amount in Google's index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index I hope this information helps! While the site and links may not be indexed yet, give it some time - maybe we'll see it in OSE next month.

Thanks EGOL, Kevin and Alan - that last mention from EGOL is along the lines of what I am worried could happen because of the motivations behind the posts, which is to cite each other. Their authority on the subjects where they intersect is legitimate - but these articles would be generated because of those intersections. If I didn't have a blue widget client then the red widget client would have little impetus to write a blog post that extols blue widgets. Even though there's nothing in the posts that isn't true and all clients are qualified authorities to be cited as described. It's just that the posts would be written because the SEO guy (me) sat down and said "how can these clients cite each other legitimately?" rather than red widget guy writing an article on blue widgets and then being lucky enough to have someone (me) who can put them in touch with a blue widget company to cite and be cited by. They're all on different IP's so that should be okay. I think I'm going to go ahead with this but I'll tread lightly as recommended. Thanks again, thumbs up for all!

lol.... NO!

I can afford both, so both it will be. Thanks a lot.