Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Not so much anymore as others have said...plus, we track heavily our inbound traffic and honestly, it's been YEARS since I ever noticed a DMOZ referral for any of our clients... Might have been a real prize...but not so much anymore, eh!

Hi, start with implementing technical seo into the website and onpage optimization, than you start with off page strategy, like linkbuilding. Grtz, Leonie

The key point to me in any anchor text discussion is this: Google doesn't want you to control your IBLs. Most sites that link naturally will not use the same anchors over & over. If your link profile is natural and you don't control a whole lot of it, yes anchor text is very valuable. If you control most of it and you're adding to the same stuff over & over, it's very bad for you and can result in your rankings dropping. This is the exact reason SEO can be so difficult.  The same link, the same anchor, the same page on the same PR site linked at the same time = everything 100% the same = can still have two very different effects on a business depending on what the existing site, profile and anchors look like. So there's no clear answer to many SEO questions like this. The answer is "it depends."

Thanks.  Our domain has been set to www since it launched last year in GWT.  That is fine and working as it should.  Hopefully some of these guys will be willing to change to add the www.

If you are publishing "fresh news" about subjects that appear on other websites, it can be extremely difficult to rank because of the immediate volume of content being published, much of it on powerful sites. I can have established articles on my site, that have been there for years, this is a site with a DA of 76.  These articles can be swamped in the SERPs by content being published on the New York Times, CNN, LA Times, and many other very powerful and very popular sites.  My rankings will come back eventually, when the content is either deleted from the news sites or it is buried deep in their site as fresher news is added.

Local directories are good for local companies. Yes that is a good approach. You may want to look at Yext whitelabel package for marketing this service to your local clients.

Thank you so much Moz Community! Really appreciate all the input here.

1) What is the best way to regular check backlinks? Depends on your "style" you can use the following tools - Majestic SEO Ahref Open site explorer Google Webmaster tools All of the above 2) what to do if a spammy link appears Firstly ensure it is "spammy" sometimes links are seen to be spammy when they are not (it might just be a customer with a blog who really wants to say how great your brand it but they can't create a great looking website) if you are sure they are spammy though you can either drop the webmaster an email and ask them to either remove the link or change it to a no-follow link or you can disavow the link, you can also do both (which i recommend). Remember No-follow link - no worries. 3) What to do about directories that link to us Directories are not all bad, if they are in your niche and are helping really users find you then they are fine but if you are not sure try the above advice (point 2) 4) What to do with old links that are not good quality Remember a website is diverse it is meant to have low and high quality links and everything in between. If a website only has high quality it can look suspicious so unless they are spam so long as they are in the right niche and on point with your site they are fine. 5) Now I have to check number of links and quality of links of website so which is the best method check? See point 1. I would also recommend things like the Moz tool bar for a "at a glance" look of things. Look into Moz Page & domain authority or Majestic trust and citation flow etc. each brand has their own version which can help you judge a websites authority. Hope that helps.

Couldn't agree more with you Ryan! This guy knows his stuff!

Great add Joseph! Totally agree with you that there is much more to it than just creating quality content from the link earning perspective. I was just making the point that focusing on your sites DA & PA shouldn't be the focal point of one's efforts. I could have elaborated more but I appreciate you doing so! Cheers!

Great answer Andy, had already posted my previous response to Don. We do have design resources in house so this is not an issue, I guess that in the past we have been pretty tied up in grasping at straws to find a post that can relate in some way to a new product. I get the whole concept of content being king but I do also get that there is the notion that in the past we have maybe tried too had to draw parallels between an article and a product in the thin hope of that article bringing in convertable traffic. Again, a really helpful post that I will certainly look to expand upon further and will be more than happy to feedback any results. As for the tracking, thats exactly how we do track the conversions from the blog so yes please, would really appreciate any guidance in being able to track customers from the blog better. Thanks, Tim

In my opinion this is a very obvious case of negative SEO against your client domain More information about  Negative SEO here: http://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo I would really NOT wait to see if this links affects the rankings and do disavow as soon as possible.Why? Because it´s possible that the domain is still not penalized because "Penguin" has not checked your client domain yet, but once the domain get caught, domain reputation will be ruined. Good luck

I'll add to this that generally you're adding keyword rich anchor text to these links. If I was Google, this is something I would look for when determining if a site is relevant. It likely is 1 of the 200+ factors and likely what site you are linking to and how relevant is are other factors.

Thanks Ryan, They are URL's that we would like to have indexed, so any visitor could find them. They don't change often, but if a SKU for example changes, the cart automatically changes the URL to match the new SKU, but does not generate a 301. I'll look into this, thanks for the tip.

Do you have a Knowledge Base or FAQ section on your site? I would add content like this in one of those places. If you don't have something like this built in, I would recommend using the category pages. This kind of content is great for user experience. My only hesitation would be that more likely than not, most of the content would be below the fold, and it might not get as much view as it would if it had its own page on your site. Can you split content on your category pages? Maybe show one paragraph above the products and the rest below. Or, if you can add JS to the page, use a script to hide a portion of the content behind a read more button. Ideally, content like this should really have a page all its own. If you can manipulate how content is displayed on the category pages, you should be able to make it work there as well.

It could, but it's mostly a broken way to go about doing it. Per Google's guide on it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708, "Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found])."  So it's best to fix them to either return a custom 404 page, redirect via 301, or correctly land on a page of content without the 404.

Mostly no on iFrames, or not in a reliable way. Redirect 303 is more uncommon, but similar to a 302. Either one is not the way to permanently send old content to new. Google has a guide on redirection here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633, and iFrames here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34445.  Cheers!

First thing: Your sites authority will not decrease because you add an external link (otherwise no one would ever link) Second thing: Exactly how much is passed is a little hard to determine and is not revealed by Moz, someone asked a similar question earlier this month and this has got some great responses and I don't want to duplicate their work http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-domain-authority-is-passed-on-through-a-link-from-a-page-with-low-authority Thanks Andy

Chaotic link building looks natural, google like natural things

Nothing, in my opinion it´s good. Creating backlinks in a new website is not a good idea IMO! Wait at least 1 month and be sure to have content/indexed urls before starting with the link building campain