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Haha, sorry-

For the amount of effort you spend on such a scheme, you could do a lot better by just trying to think outside the box, and thinking more creatively than the others in your niche. When you are forced to think of a solution that is purely white hat that can achieve or outperform a grey/black approach, you often come up with a solution that whilst maybe not so quick is going to be more sustainable and add value to your users. I encourage you to think about what would be really awesome content/tools/linkbait for your industry, and what hasn't been done or done well (or not been updated for sometime - this is a good one), etc etc. Then do that. You will not be disappointed you bothered.

I can definitely see where you are coming from there. I would just say this- once you reach out to build that bridge, if that webmaster isn't buying it, then that bridge is likely burned forever. There are only so many blogs and other websites worth connecting to. I would be very deliberate in my approach to connecting with them, because you probably won't get a second chance. If you want to connect with a blogger, start by commenting on their most recent posts. Follow the blog. Read each new update and comment. Find them on twitter. Retweet what they say occasionally. See if they have other websites. Check for a linkedin profile. Really understand not just the blog, but the blogger and what they are about. Then reach out to them with an actual proposal. Offering a link exchange is probably not enough. Have an actual plan formulated and an actual proposal for how you can work together for mutual benefit. In my opinion, you can't do this 10 times a day. If I find a site I think I can work with, then it can take weeks before a connection is ever made. But if each day I find a new site, I'm working on creating a lot of those relationships simultaneously. But when I reach out, I tend to be very successful because I feel like I already know the person and they know who I am. So everyone has their own approach, but I wouldn't try to be in such a rush to build up links that you give the blog a superficial review and then go for it. That's just not my style, but everyone is different. You've actually inspired my next youmoz post with this though, so thanks for that. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as they hopefully publish it and I will offer some more tips on this.

Hi Greg, I confirm, they don't pass link juice, they are blocked by robots.txt. http://feedproxy.google.com/robots.txt Best regards, Guillaume Voyer.

I just looked up for a few examples, see attached images. DISCLAMER : I didn't do SEO for any of those websites and those results were returned from google.CA from Quebec, a province where french is commonly spoken in Canada. May be the fact that fr.wikipedia.org has lower quality content and lower domain authority makes it easier to outrank.  Still, websites that outrank it are far from being well optimized. iXSUT.jpg saJda.jpg E94dr.jpg

One obvious answer is to google seo and the town you are in e.g SEO Seattle and see which companies have managed to get themselves optimised for that. If any companies look promising try searches like company name scam, company name problems, company name reviews to see if there are any known issues with the company.

Thank you Mike, I did the same research and agree with you. There are other keywords with way higher search volumes. However, it is very easy and fast to land for "Buy Hosting" and the coversion rates for this combination are super high, since people really want to buy NOW (otherwise, they would search compare hosting or something else). As soon as I got to #1-#3 and cash starts flowing, I will take that money and tackle higher-volume terms. It's a step-by-step strategy. My guess was to start with 10 links per day. I understand that you say, it is important to have a constant growth, and that this matters for not to be percieved as spammy. I will check out MajesticSEO to see the amount of links other add. Thank you a lot, I appreciate your opinion. Kind regards

Thanks David, Monica and Lewis for your responses - I appreciate your thoughts - and I love how you all so consistently started your responses with "stop worrying" - you're right of course! I have communicated my discovery to the client and my intended course of action was pretty much as David suggests - run fast and bury those links in a sea of press releases and other high quality organic link-building. Still scratching my head as to where the links came from - but I need to stop worry about that don't I? Thanks again!

In a lot of cases I optimize the same page for several related keywords - like in your case. The only thing I follow is to place a tier one keyword and tier two, three related keywords and know/ be sure which one is which so the plan is crisp and clear. I usually optimize more for the main keyword and I use most of the on-page optimization for this particular keyword. I optimize tier two and three on the same page without cutting any modules from the main one (using some h2,h3 maybe and to be sure the page has a good % of the main keyword first and then the second and third tier ones.) The anchor text for links that will point to this page will vary and I think that is a good thing - a natural thing and it will help overall including your link diversity. It's better to have more anchor text with the links for your page and not only "student health insurance" as anchor text. Overall is a natural thing to rank for more then one keyword especially for long tail variations. However, that's just my opinion. I do that a lot in my optimization sessions and the results so far based on this strategy are good. Hope it helps.

We've seen a great potential here with some of our projects' competitors and are also thinking that there's a point to go for this strategy ... as long as you're not promoting one site that then links to your main site, but use your satellite sites to promote the main site, I believe there's a good potential.

Especially if link is from relevant page even if it is no follow I wouldn't turn it away. Search engines do see all links.