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Hi Healeyman, Tom has pretty much nailed the answer above. Just one thing to add. If the blogs in question meet all of the criteria Tom has mentioned in his first paragraph and are likely to bring you referral traffic, perfect. If you are just thinking about the possibility that they might influence search engine rankings, your time would probably be better spent looking for opportunities that have a potential to bring people to your site. Sha

Thank you - very helpful

Thank you folks !!!! Kind Regards

Thanks! Stability and success go hand-in-hand. It's all about the long-term goal. You're correct with that finding - 33% of people will only click a link in Google's top three organic results.

Hi there, Yes affiliate links (widgets etc.) should be no-follow there was a good few penalties floating around for this. Regards to the "paid links" if your doing all white-hat then yes they should be no-follow but really this a bit of a grey area and down to a bit of personal choice. I tend to follow links like this (with in reason) what a good idea can be is to have one main follow link (e.g.on home page) and if you have site wide links make them no follow. In theory though Google doesn't like "paid links" but you will find a lot of people "bend" the rules a bit.  Unless you have hundreds of links a think a few links from sponsors won't do you any harm and as long as its not site wide follow links I would let them sit as follow links but if you want to stick to the guidelines (precisely) then they should be no-follow. Hope that helps a bit

Thanks everyone for the suggestions and links- Jim-you're the best....seriously!

You are aware of the latest Pigeon updates, right? And the move of directories into a higher valuation by Google for serps? Here's how I blogged about same - http://www.canuckseo.com/index.php/2014/08/google-pigeon-update-gotta-know/ and a quick Google for "pigeon update favors directories" shows many more SEO practitioners with the same view... Yelp has especially been moved up in my own client roster serps....

It does get counted. You might even see the bit.ly link show. Bots can crawl and follow these shorteners.

Not looking for on-page content, site errors fixing or anything realted to insite (well online to optimize insite content or structure if its not already 100% optimized) but looking for someone to get me white hat methods to get backlinks and rank for my keywords im interested in i dont mean entirely hands-off last seo we had, we didnt check his work for 2 last months and he did 0 work, so yea i would be checking month by month the work being done to be sure theres proper work being done at the end mostly look for a seo who can get me higher rankings for specific keywords overall

Why not convert the PDF to HTML yet still have a download PDF button for clients if desired?  Heck there are lots of free tools to do this, but check the code.  Or you could just use an ALT tag which aren't just for images but for objects.  Not sure if PDF's with ALT tag give much link juice, and if I HAD to keep it as a PDF, I'd convert it to a compressed JPG file and use an ALT tag so that Google knows what the object is and keyterms.

Yes, I think that may be the best use of the company's past investment in that content.

No more needed than EGOL's answer

Some great advice above. Just to echo the following: Your orphan page idea does sound like the best way to direct the flow of link juice to where you want it to be I've done something similar to this in the past and can confirm the value will flow from .edu -> landing page -> focus pages you link to.

You mention they're driving traffic, but it is highly doubtful that any of that traffic will convert to leads. Have you been tracking the lead form on that page? I would be a little concerned about receiving a lot of links from web cam directories, or links about surfing, to a marketing company website. It's just too unrelated. However, as long as these only represent a small part of your overall backlink profile (think single digit percentages) you will probably be OK.

Hi Bruce, thanks for responding again, no we're not running adwords, we have some products that google doesn't like. I've looked through the sources, it's literally just the google traffic that's died a death, although in general the conversion rate on the traffic is abysmal, circa 1% when my site is more like 3% for very similar products..

Thanks for posting those sites. They charge a fee but hopefully worth the money if they can help with better rankings.

Maybe try linking to the linked pages from your site you're trying to get links from. I think posting them on social media like Twitter could help too to let the SERPs know they're relevant links.

The ethics of the Internet dictate that you crawl politely, obey robots.txt and properly identify yourself This isn't a new issue. Link networks and sites have blocked crawlers and manipulated Google for years. Fortuneatly, it's only a small fraction of the web. Also, it unlikely links from those networks have much value, so crawl priority would be super low anyway. Actually, it could be viewed as beneficial when blackhat sites block OSE and aHrefs, because those sites often get penalized by Google, but 3rd party crawlers have no way to know this, so blocking effectively keeps them out of the indexes.

And that you get a list of links they built. If they're on the Moz recommended list, they should be the type of company that does that, but it's just a general note. You want to be wary of the ones who say they're giving away secrets by telling you the links they've made.

It doesn't really matter as long as it is high authority sites. Getting your news quoted by another major news site is always a big plus. We once got quoted on Yahoo which not only brought us a buttload of traffic, but also gave us a solid link back which boosted our authority. With news sites, its all about the content, and I have to say with 3 editors, you should be popping out a lot more than 5 articles. That's a pretty low amount for a news site. I can work alone for an hour a day and do more than that. On a side note, if you'd like to write a summary of a news story in 150 words, and submit it to me, I can put this on the relevant SearchBuzz Media website that I run, and have you listed as the original source - it's a completely genuine link back. Email me if interested - info@searchbuzzmedia.com