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It's definitely a tricky question to answer, and there are a few ways of going about it. I'm a big fan of Page One Power and they do charge by hour blocks, which you've mentioned. The reason Jon Ball says they do this is because every site is different and they can't charge by the link because of that. A link is not a link. On the flip side: One of the most well known internet marketing firms that employees high profile SEO speakers charges $500 per link. A UK link building agency that is medium-well known was charging around $125 a link in 2012 A large multi-media agency based in California I know of was charging $750 a link on old domains in deep pages for their clients In my opinion the most transparent way all around is to do it in the hour-block method that Page One Power does it because all links are not created equal. In this method the link builder should report to the client at the end of the month how efficiently they spent the clients money in the 20 hours dedicated to link building that month. This method could cause initial strain in the client-consultant relationship however because the client might look at the consultant's rate (say it's $100 an hour) and compare them to other consultants. Another method is to charge by the link. The problem with this is all links are not created equal. The consultant is not incentivized in the short term to spend 5 hours to earn one extremely valuable link if they're not going to be paid any more than if they spent one hour building that link. A hybrid method could be to charge the client based on where the link was placed, but evaluating the price of each placed link every month is a lot of work and a lot of discussion. In 2014, creating super high quality content should be talked about in the same sentence as building links since they go hand in hand. So that brings us to another method, where a block of say 20 hours a month for a small-medium business is set aside to spend on content and links. Some months 70% of that 20 hours is spent on building that content piece, but then for the next 2 months 70% of the time is spend promoting that content piece. This is how I would prefer to work, and it's a win-win both ways. The SEO consultant is both incentivized to create good content and promote it at the same time. The client is ensured that their money is being spent wisely and for the right reason. I like talking about prices, it's something we need more guidance on in this industry. N8raiLH.png

Wonderfully stated.

Thanks guys for your advice. Am I best to no follow individual links or do it in the meta tag? If I no follow all links on a page will it stop internal link flow around my site. I have some pointers to relevant pages on my site in the bod of the text.

Thank You Samuel. I wished I had someone like you several years ago. Do You think there are cultural differences in seeding content? And if so, how do I adapt to them? For example, we found out that people are very responsive in Latin America if we contact them on Facebook. For me contacting people on Facebook in the US was worthless because they don't check their "other messages" and it's some kind of creepy. I already found out that it's more about developing relationships to people than creating good content (in compare to the US/Germany).

Agree with all the ones above. Just adding Open Site Explorer to this list too http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Didnt want to say on a public forum after the MBG fiasco. Look for us on social media and we can chat more

Thanks Keri and sorry for not getting back sooner Akhilesh. Keri is right that I am in the UK. As Keri has said, you really need to read the section on link building and content - If you get this wrong, you can cause yourself some big problems. Have a read of this so that you are sure what you need to be doing... http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links -Andy

I just answered this question where you asked it on another thread. In brief, sharing content does not mean copying and pasting the content, it means sharing a link or otherwise telling people about the source of the content.

Hi there Great to see a content marketing strategy generating "extra" traffic.  In order to pass on an SEO benefit, you may want internally link from within the body of the article to your core landing pages.  That may pass on "the strength" of that page, as it were.  With internal links, you can link to your landing pages with your target keywords a bit more often that you normally would when link building from external sites, but don't overdo it. (I'd say 20-25% of links with your keyword in the anchor text would be OK for internal links - please don't do that for external links!). Of course, the main objective I see would be to capture that traffic that comes in on those blog/resource pages and get it to convert.  Have you looked at running an email widget next to the blog?  Perhaps you can use an exit popup, popup, popunder or interstitial ad as well.  These methods are more aggressive and "in your face", but contrary to what you may think they really do convert. Hope this helps.

Thanks. I'm going to err on the side of caution and nofollow ALL of the links from my personal blog to my business. In the grand scheme of things, it makes up such a small percentage of links to our store. Our pagerank won't suffer. The sponsorships are literally 10 or 12 logos on a sporting club or surf club website. For those we made ourselves that I have easy access to, I have also done the nofollow as they're all living on the same bank of servers. (we donated the hosting space and websites as our sponsorship deal). Others where we have just given money or time and have no control over, I'm comfortable that they're legit and wont' get penalised. Asking a volunteer at a surf club to nofollow a hyperlink will be met by strange looks Staying away from dodgy $5 deals with a 40-foot pole.

If a site over links to itself then they are most likely creating a bad user experience. When it comes to internal links, I would always but more priority on taxonomy and the user experience, the SEO would be a result of that. Natural, diverse links from highly trusted sources is what comes to mind when I think about link building.

Hi, Pages blocked by robots.txt file will not be considered for ranking. You still see those pages in Google's index is because of their mentions on other websites. Google has been doing link discovery from websites other than these Web2.0 sites of yours. So to stop Google completely from indexing these pages, you should go in for page-levelrobots meta tag. Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en Once you implement the page-level robots meta tag to block those pages, Google will remove them from the index after the next crawl. You can expedite this process by using the link removal procedure in webmaster tools account. Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?rd=1 Good Luck to you my friend. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

Hello, My website is: www.polarpos.com I am trying to target pos system and point of sale system What can I do to improve my rankings? I think I did everything that is onsite as possible.

I'm going to agree with Dana and say "it depends".  I wanted to add as well that a 301 redirect still passes somewhere between 95-99% of the link equity, so if this were my site I wouldn't bother unless there was a huge number of links that came this way.  The exception would be if the site is doing a redirect to a page that is blocked by robots.txt and then redirecting that page to yours.  If that happens then you don't get any of the link equity and yes, I'd want it changed.  But then again, if someone is doing that, it would be on purpose and they probably wouldn't want to change it.

Alright... I can't argue with that... time to put my writing cap on and get working on some good content. Thanks again for the honest feedback and keeping my away from these pitfalls.

Google's gone after multiple link networks across the world in the last few months. Search on seroundtable.com for all the details. Google will never get rid of all these sites and they won't go away on their own. These old school methods still work very well to rank.

We have seen these domains in audits that we have done as well. However we are also finding hundreds of spin offs of this - examples seekstone.cn and chinastonecompany.com. Like you we have been disavowing them but it would be great if somehow Google could flag up that they are aware of these domains and we don't need to worry about them.

Anyone who can answer this question is going to be a very rich person! At this point, IMO, trying to do "white hat link building" in a super competitive niche where people do not tend to link naturally is going to be extremely hard.  You're right...links still count.  But the sites that are killing it in this type of niche are not the ones who are gaining links naturally but the ones that are still able to find ways to trick Google.  I think that there are some areas where it is extremely difficult to rank using just white hat methods. I don't have an answer for you unfortunately.

Thank you so much Tom Very Helpful and I really Appriciate it Exciting news about the algorithm refresh. I will keep a check on the MOZ Algorithm Change History for that then Thanks Adam

I would link "our agent" for "X Region."  We don't have exact values on how Google treats multiple links from one page to a single domain, but they have repeatedly said that there is a diminishing return.  So, limiting it to just two links will give you the majority of the value you would get anyways, and doesn't appear too spammy.