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Even if you do a link: search in Google for a major brand it will still omit the majority of the results. I've seen a brand with 1,000's on linking domains bring back 8 listings in Google using link:www... so if you know the links are there it's not something you need to worry about. There are many more ranking factors than just links so you may need to do a full audit on your site: Refresh content, improve structure, review meta data, review internal/external linking, trim any bad links coming into your site, resolve duplicate/thin content, check for broken links and redirect, improve site speed, enhance your brand with social sites.....there's a long list of things you could be doing and it might be just the sites around you are doing all of this better. Kind Regards

This is probably the side of the fence that I fall on in terms of this issue. If I see that obtaining links from paid directories isn't only not hurting our major competitors, but actually seemingly helping them rank on the first page and outrank us for many keywords, then I am natually going to assume that those links are helping their rankings. One of our major competitors outranks us for more than one of our main targetted keywords and, having checked their link profile again today, they clearly invest a lot in obtaining links from directories, not many of them are relevant, what you would call reputable on first look and one is French, not even being in the site's own language! Furthermore, although they don't do it for every link they have on directory sites, they have many links that use keyword-specific anchor text. Now, this is something that I would hesitate doing as often as they do, rather I would use branded anchor text when unsure of the validity of a link as I would expect that to carry less of a penalty if that were to happen, but it's clearly not hurting their rankings, instead seeming to help them. In any case, this is why I referred to the use of directory links as somewhat of a grey area - it's not completely clear as to whether it's a viable link-building option or not. Given what I've seen of our competitors, I have to come to the conclusion that it's worth the risk.

Thanks for the advice Pixel by Pixel. Sounds good to me!

Either way is good.  Just as an FYI I likely won't be able to respond until tomorrow morning as my little one will be waking up from her nap soon and the rest of today (being a Sunday) is family time for us.  Thanks! Marie

Thank you for answering my question.

Yes it does - thank you!

When you say "link profiles" it leads me to believe that you are using Open Site Explorer or some other SEO Tool. No SEO tool can crawl every page on the web, which is why the link may not show up on some client's backlink reports. See if it is reported in Google Webmaster Tools or if the page is indexed by Google. If the page is indexed, you know Google is aware of the link.

That's a good point. It's a residual, so the first year may not be horrific. However, if I compile over 5 years, I could definitely see where we could better target our efforts. Thanks for the insights and the clarification! Ruben

I think that only works for the google news bot but does not work for general crawling and passing pr, But I could be wrong. But if Martijn is correct, the question is does the uk times allow google bot allow access to that page. A quick test would be search for a line of text from the article and see if google links to the correct page. If it does not get a hit then either google has not crawled that page yet or can't crawl the page. And if its  been a few weeks and it still can't get a hit in google search then it most likely that its not crawlable ( as is a big site you would expect a normal page to have been well crawled in that time frame) Side note: I think it would be a good test for someone to setup a paywall page which links to a page with no other back links and see if google can pick that page up ( maybe give it anchor text of a load of jibberish and see if that page ranks for that jibberish)

Exact match/partial match TLDs have been losing weight for a while now. They're still somewhat important, but is it important enough to fragment your efforts? The hyphenated stuff should be right out, especially for what you're considering. Without knowing the main site you're working on, I can say that you should focus on one property. If you were a general, would you rather commit your resources to two fronts, or one? It sounds like you would head down the road of constantly new domains. Don't do that. That approach is a disadvantage for both your client and yourself. Not only would there be diminishing returns on your efforts, there would be diminishing returns from The Googles algorithm. It sounds like you're going to have to fight the decreasing weight of a partial match or exact match domain to begin with. Focus on one property. Make a new section. You will probably save on development time. No one on the face of the planet saves on content time.

I would suggest brushing up your knowledge on link building before starting on this activity. Some useful links below for your reference. Growing Popularity and Links - Moz Link Building Resources - Point Blank SEO Hope this helps, Cheers, SEO5..

Here are a couple of posts about performing an audit on your site to help diagnose problems, and they may help get you started: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit http://moz.com/blog/how-to-do-a-site-audit

Thanks Chris Makes complete sense

Is it a good page? Is it helpful to people? Is it related to the link's destination? Would you trust the page? If the search engines disappeared or stopped using links in rankings, would you still want the link?

Start putting your disavow file together.  And where are you getting your list of those links from?

Hi, In additional to having a natural link profile, nofollow links have other benefits ,aside from thinking SEO, such as driving traffic and getting more brand visibility for your website.  If you're getting more traffic from visitors who wants to learn more about your site, even if it's a nofollow link, it's definitely beneficial to your business. In SEO regards, by getting more traffic and these visitors spending more time on your site might give Search Engine a signal that your site is relevant and brings value to your visitors. However, nofollow links can still affect your link building if you're doing some black hat tricks with it such as commenting in every article.  You might get a manual penalty.  You can learn more on how nofollow links affect your ranking here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSEqypgIJME  That's my 2 cents.

I believe you're asking that if you have backlinks created that include your specific keyword in the anchor text, will it be beneficial to your SERPs ranking? Yes and no. You want to have backlinks created naturally and not force backlinks all into a specific anchor text. Concentrate on writing value-added, high quality content about the keyword you're targeting. Then spread that article around to outlets and try to get other sites to talk about your article. I.e. you do an in-depth write up on a specific topic that includes detailed examples and lots of content that people can refer too - they in turn write their own posts and sometimes cite your awesome examples and info - now you have high quality backlinks on the topic you're targeting.

Thank you Donna!

Probably to some extend it will be classed as a reciprocal link. But it would have been worse if the same page would have linked back to the Web site that is linking to your page. That's what a real reciprocal link would be.

Sorry for the slow reply on this, Rmoov is good and there's a bunch of others in the blog post that you might find useful: http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal Hope this helps, Craig