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Ahh yes! I've found it now, forgot I could click on the links to get more info, thought it would just take me to the site. Turns out most of them are coming from Google Plus which kinda makes sense now. Thanks

Hello, As long as the content is well written and the site is related to his site, a simple link to his homepage will be fine. You don't need to worry about anchor text or anything like that if the content uses specific keywords. Search engines will draw connections between the content and the link. It is best to have some internal linking on your posts and static pages, don't over do it. Also, mix up your internal links, point to specific category pages, or items. If this article is primarily focused on this other person's site, don't worry about internal linking. Here's a related article https://www.searchenginejournal.com/co-citation-and-co-occurrence-the-next-big-thing-in-seo/60724/

Thanks Michael I used screaming frog and no suspicious outbound links from my sites show but when I check linkfromdomain: on Bing the suspicious links show Hopefully this is an error with Bing

Yeah i have though about it in more detail as well. I mean i understand that link farming is not the way to go. But there are allot of persons out there having there own blog. We also had allot of past customers wrote a blog post about there experience with us which we cant really control. They have putted a link into there post, so how would google know which post is paid for which not. Of course you would always need to work together with legit hight quality blogs to secure your interested and getting onto spamming blogs.

Thanks for your responses. It would definitely be beneficial to users, so I may just get on and do it. It is a good quality link though, hence my consternation.

Hi, I know this is an old thread but I have a similar issue. The company I'm currently working with used to have 30+ subdomains all going to different versions of the same website, many with duplicate content. This was creating 30+ different google analytics accounts to look through and all sharing the same ink juice. Now I have come on board, I have rebuilt the website so that it is one main website with franchisee pages like www.mainsite.com/uk/franchisee-location Now what should be the best option for the 30+ subdomains that are left? At the moment they are all pointing to their respective page on the new website but I have a developer in the team that is adamant that Google is going to penalise us for having the 30+ subdomains pointing back to urls on the main.com website. I'm not convinced as I think this is a much cleaner way and a better user experience. My question really is, what is the best action to take with the franchisee subdomains that are out there still in the Google index? Should I keep redirecting them to their new url (www.mainsite.com/uk/frachisee-location) or should they stay as franchiseelocation.mainsite.com and will Google penalise the domain for this? Many thanks for any advice.

You bring up a good point Nico. I've had bloggers/reviewers who have no followed link to my clients and it has been a little frustrating to know you did all this communication just to know they didn't give you an equity link. What your saying is true, if its relevant why would you nofollow it. What i think it might be is that when you link to a site, you are also linking to its domain. The domain may be fine, but in the future it might start engaging in black hat seo and other things that would be detrimental. It kind of sucks to say it, but I feel like its almost like you have to make a call on the site's integrity for the future. I'm sure there are other cases, but this is what came up to my mind first. Love to hear from other people.

Hi, the higher up the architecture the links are pointing to, the more pages the authority has the potential to influence if. For example building links to the homepage will also help any pages that it links to. Building links to one page only will have a larger impact on that particular page but won't benefit others as much. Does this make sense? I hope this answers your question, unfortunately I don't know of any case studies since it can't really be compared. I'm still not 100% sure of the question if I'm honest. Craig

Oh... maybe they should be slapped for dupe content ?  

Hi there! There are a ton of link building case studies around. For starters, I'd suggest scrolling through the Link Building category on the Moz Blog; I'm seeing a handful of case studies just on the first page. https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

This is great feedback. Thanks so much, and thank you for taking the time to provide the links the articles were very helpful!!

HI Stephen, As somebody who has worked with eCommerce sites with lots of products I can appreciate where you're at and what you've gone through to get there. My next step would be to fill up the site with content that sets you apart from competitors. Really easy advise to give, hard to implement. What I like to do is take my favorite online shop and compare what I have against them. My goal is figure out what I could do that they aren't doing, or how in general I could compete with them. For me my favorite online shop for just about everything is Amazon (yours maybe different) , then I say why would somebody buy from me instead of Amazon. Since Amazon is my personal favorite site, it removes the bias I may have towards my own shop. Can I offer better prices or value? Can I offer items they don't sell? Can I offer better support? Can I offer faster or cheaper delivery? Can I show better content? Better reviews? Can I offer a better shopping experience? With these questions, most sites I come to the conclusion is Amazon has set the bar so high, it is very difficult to compete even if I have a huge budget. In your case, Amazon may have many of the items you sell, so you have to get creative on how you market them and make sure your content is on par with theirs. That means add reviews, add your own personal description of items, your own images, customer images, and make sure you are where your customers are (social media). I can't tell anybody how to run a business, but I can say that being creative when your up against such big money is the best way to make a name for yourself. Good luck, Don

Thank you that's really useful insight. Cheers. Isaac.

Hi Trevor, Math in linkbuilding is complicated. I believe that you should not get attached to any idea like: "Only high PA links" or "As many links as possible". It should be a mix of those ideas. The linkbuilding target should always be "diversificate", make it look natural. Although we know that linkbuilding isn´t always natural. I prefer getting some high authority links, some low athority links, some medium authority.. all those separated in time, some days/weeks in between. "make it look natural" Never forget to mix anchors, exact URL, dofollow, noFollow and irrational anchors (sourche, click here, more info) Hope this is useful for you bye

Yes - backlinks and their anchors are also factor for ranking. For example there are few Google Bombs -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb where many sites give backlink to other site for specific anchors and this make "victim" site N:1 for this keywords. So - you can evaluate backlinks and their anchors with many tools: Moz OpenSiteExplorer Majestic Ahrefs WebMeUp So far from all tools OSE is free, all other require monthly subscription. This make OSE N:1 in this list. OSE also provide "Link Opportunity".

Hi Heather - I think I understand what you're asking, and if I do you are asking about a way to flag certain links that you find while reverse engineering other websites as "potential links" that you could reach out to in some way to gain a link? To my knowledge Moz tools do not offer a "Flag for Prospecting" option that saves a URL so you can come back to it later as a potential link lead.  Our outreach team (link builders) use Google Docs to keep spreadsheets of links that we either attempted to build, or that we found that we should build, or obvious links that we didn't have, and then we color code those spreadsheets based on what our success was with that link.  Red being an outright failure - such as a paid link that we disregarded once we found out they wanted to be paid - or maybe Yellow being a link that we reached out to and it might go up some day but we hadn't heard back and don't want to spend too much time chasing if it's a lost cause. What you're talking about (I think) would require you to be able to flag links across multiple researched sites, and I just don't know of a tool that has a "mark for later" type setting in the link analysis.

Hi Neil, Don't host the video in two separate locations. You don't want to publish it to Youtube and also store it on your own server, for example. In light of your latest comment, I'd suggest you publish the videos to Youtube, embed those videos on your site, and encourage the hotels to do the same. You should associate the Youtube channel with your own site, and provide links back to your site from the videos (as Andy suggested). Follow the steps outlined in Youtube's guide. In an ideal world -- a world where all 90 hotels were happy to link to your website -- this advice might be different. Ideally, you'd have links to your site. But if you self-host, it seems likely that you'll have hardly any views: your hotel partners won't link to the videos, and the videos won't be easily discoverable. By hosting on Youtube and encouraging video embeds among your hotel partners, you can at least, as you said, generate a lot of interest around the content. Google does favour Youtube videos in SERPs, so this strategy should help your Youtube channel perform well for queries related to your partner hotels. You can use cards or annotations in the Youtube videos to direct visitors to your site, as well as providing a link in the description.

Yes - I guess I did know that deep down It's just strange that it dropped like that as I didn't remove any content.. and even stranger that it suddenly moved back up... Maybe my site is just a bit too thin and that's why it's fluctuating so much at the moment??? Anyway - thanks for your help... I should probably get back to content creation now

This doesn't sound like buying links to me but rather giving a donation and receiving a link as a by product as a charitable deed. Would be surprised if this didn't do you more good than harm as stated above.