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It seems to usually take 2 weeks at most.

You've made some great points here David! I agree there is no way they built those links last month, that's for sure! And by no means did I mean to imply that waiting around for Google is only course of action. Just figured I'd share the link. It certainly can't hurt! I like the point you made about risk tolerance. Risk vs Reward is all around us in business. I just feel that it could become a slippery slope in regards to following what we know is not best practices regarding website optimization. Cheers!!

I've taken a quick look at your link profile, and it looks to me like you still have some fairly spammy links live; in addition to some advertising links which are followed (rather than no-followed) which may be what's causing the issues.

Follow is better than nofollow but both are good. What's more important is the relevance and authority of the site you are getting your link from. Links should point to the most relevant page on your site given the context of the link. In general, a majority of your links should be pointing at your homepage with your brand name.

For broken link opportunities for link building you can't go wrong with: http://moz.com/blog/the-broken-link-building-bible http://moz.com/blog/broken-link-building-bible-new-testament

Hi Tom, Thanks a lot for your response, this has really helped! I've just set up about 10 recipes on IFTTT after discovering what it does, amazing tool, can't believe I didn't know about it before! I haven't successfully set up the Moz side of it as it stands because Moz keeps telling me there is a redirect loop, but I look forward to trialling that out. Thanks again for the tips. Sam

There is no value in not disavowing those spammy links. I would disavow every poor link that you can find linking to your site. That way, google won't be confused as they don't always crawl the deal links (if they still show up in serp)

Some have analyzed that: http://www.coconutheadphones.com/how-to-estimate-how-many-links-you-need/ But I would take it with a grain of salt.

Thanks for responses, everybody. Very insightful, as usual.

I have been tasked with fixing SEO issues through multiple site (been learning since July and loving it). They have multiple blogs for SEO which helps to drive traffic to the main eCommerce site and they planned to keep this strategy going in the future. After the webinar today and seeing that this was considered a link scheme, I analyzed GA and they have not been hit yet on any of the algorithm updates. I know they eventually will get hit and I would like to keep this from happening. Most of the content on the blogs are good and rank very well. Stats across the board are getting better as I have been cleaning out the thin content and making the good ranking content better. Should I just do a "nofollow" on all outbound links so we do not eventually get nailed? Would that solve the issue?

Thank you for this good discussion. We have a town website we developed and recently I removed our footer link. Instead, at the bottom of the homepage I put a quick line of text that says Designed By "Company Name". Now only the homepage links to us so it is ok to utilize this highest PR ranking page of their site to boost one of our keywords. We have no official tests but we have made tremendous leaps for that keyword recently. In summary, rather than not being able to use keywords in anchor text and gaining a ton of links all at one time (if its a large site) doesn't it make more sense to make a link in the body at the bottom of the highest PR page of the site or even homepage that says Designed By "Company Name"? Granted placing this on only a handful of pages will reduce your overall brand exposure.

Hmm, interesting. I had a feeling it was a kind of "yes and no" answer from similar questions I saw on other sites. Thanks for the help, everyone!

I personally would not. From what I have gathered about the latest Penguin update, it really targeted link neighborhoods. That is what you are describing when you are talking about the link profile of this other site. Ask yourself this, does it look natural? Is there a relevancy from this site to mine? True it is just one link, but is it worth risking your link profiles integrity? My answer is always no.

Keep in mind internal linking doesn't bring much value these days, generating backlinks for those keywords would be much more valuable. Or you can try to rank for these different keywords using different landing pages, on-page optimized for those keywords.

Pretty sure google knows of domains like that already. If your link profile is already solid, then that's irrelevant. You should spend your time on other more important things. If you just want to do it now, then disavow it. It won't really change anything since you have a solid link profile already.

If we understand that a major portion of SEO is link building, I would say that url text (only) is not a link and does not offer any direct SEO value. If the url is to good content that you're trying to amplify, someone else could see it and re-post it in other places which would (in some cases) provide SEO value. Just my two cents...

Hello, 1. DONT PANIC! 2. Why not all of the above? As you've mentioned no-follow means no worries but if you are worried and want to sleep better you can add them to the disavow tool. You can also work on getting the links removed from the website so it won't show up in tools like open site explorer etc. as for other action you could try to work out WHY but good luck with that. Over time it happens to sites so don't sweat it too much it won't hurt any rankings most search engines respect no-follow so deal with it in a way that will make you feel better. Hope that helps and good luck

Thanks guys! I used your responses to test few other keywords and the results are similar. It is really not the backlinks alone. Surprisingly, for one my tests, only quality content and keyword competitiveness did the trick as i had no backlink for the page except 2 internal links (Wikipedia). Regards

Thank you all for your responses.

Did you mean that you want to get your new links to get indexed? Send good links (not just bookmarks)  to them, that'll work. I can't really recommend the old school (when they send a new link 200 bookmarks) way of getting links indexed.