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Yup i just checked again and its definitely been hit. I also have some clients who are ranking very well and they are on this directory, however we are not seeing a negative effect.

EGOL is essentially correct - DA and PA are measures of ranking power, essentially (they both factor in multiple variables), but we don't currently model things like the likelihood of a link to be spammy - although we're working on that. So, it is definitely possible for a site to have high authority in theory but devalued by Google in practice. It also depends on whether you mean "trust" in a broad sense or specifically something like TrustRank. Our MozTrust metric was intended to approximate TrustRank, which essentially measure how far a site is from a seed set of trusted sites. That's a way we believe Google has quantified "trust" in the past. I don't believe that PA/DA factor in MozTrust, but I'm not entirely sure on that one. In terms of link value, DA and PA can both matter, and it depends a bit on the situation - even both metrics are only a small piece of the puzzle. If the numbers are similar and low (like 20/34 or 34/20), I wouldn't obsess about it. It's when they differ quite a bit that you might want to consider both. A weak page on a very strong domain or a very strong page on a weak domain both have potential value as link sources.

if you buy SEO for money site it will kill you :)) but ... if you buy for 2nd or 3rd tiers so far so good

Nice, thank you for pointing that one out!

Again, thank you very very much.

If you have the opportunity to get those type of links without paying for them and you feel it would get your site on the radar of the audience they have then go for it. If your asking should you spend money to get those links from sites with low da that dont have an engaged following i would say no. hope that helps

The site all follow good practices, so I don't foresee an issue and those are not the only backlinks they have. Thanks guys!

Thanks Dennis, Always looking for good angles.

Reason is that there is a real, legitimate value as a developer to have my credit there for users that see the site and would like inquire about having design a similar site. I'm just looking for a way though that this won't affect my own site negatively. I'm thinking either 1. Do a NoFollow link directly to the site, or 2. Point the link to an internal page on the client site, and from there point to my own site.

It's likely that your competition is going to be a mix of large book sellers, online outlets, the author's or publishing house's pages or sites, review sites (after the book is released - and this can include major newspapers and magazines). You can get a good idea of who these are actually going to be by looking at the author and publishing house and searching for books they've published in the past. What do those SERPs look like? Getting in first with a landing page on a good website is a good piece of the battle, so definitely create your pages about the book early. If there are press releases or interest from readers in the lead-up to the release, your site should be one of the only resources ranking early if you get in before the big retailers and newspapers. Amazon is particularly strong for some book queries, but Google would ideally prefer to rank diverse websites (not three or four Amazon URLs on the first page, which I have seen happen for book names).

Feel absolutely free to link out as often as you like to as many sources, as long as those sources are high-quality. I personally do not recommend nofollowing links "just in case" they are spammy in the future; the vast majority of the links you create will be to sites that will never suffer a spam problem (and if you are ever worried, perform a check on your site's outbound links once or twice a year). As Anirban says, a site that links out to trustworthy sites makes itself look more trustworthy in return. A very simplistic way of looking at this is that spam websites link to spam websites and to trustworthy websites. Trustworthy websites _only _link out to other trustworthy websites. So while you're not giving the sort of positive signal that likely results in improved rankings, you are failing to give a negative signal. If the links are user-generated, place a nofollow tag on them, but if they are editorial and added by you because you appreciate the resource, you can do this as often as you like (within reason, still don't create massive pages with thousands of outbound links!).

What you sort a list of web directories and only use ones with high PR and DA? Well, if I were going the directory route I'd first look at the relevancy of each directory to what I'm selling, meaning that I'd look specifically for sites in my niche. From those, I'd use PR and DA to determine strength and possible penalties (i.e. if the DA is insanely high and the PR is non-existent, perhaps steer clear). PR isn't a great metric, as it's updated infrequently and may well be sometimes obfuscated to avoid it being used as a link-selling metric but comparing it to other things like number of links and Moz figures can be useful still. I'd then progress to more generic directories that had categories relevant to me and do the same thing - order them in terms of perceived strength and likelihood that their intended user-base was interested in what I sold. From the directories I chose, I'd look very carefully through their links - you're judged on who you're linked to alongside, so get rid of any that link to what you'd call low-quality sites, parked domains, etc. I would be willing to bet that sites with good rankings who have gone in for directory SEO are ranking largely because of other factors, as directories are not something Google likes to put a lot of weight into anymore, and has become better at picking out. And as "holistic" as it sounds, I'd choose directories based off of whether I'd want to be listed there if SEO didn't exist. It's just a case of this tactic having been used so many times for spammy purposes that search engines end up devaluing it or being quite suspicious of it. What is the difference between web directories and page where donors/sponsors are mentioned with anchor text and dofollow link? Not very much in that a Google rep would likely tell you that sponsors / donors' links should be nofollowed because money changed hands in establishing the relationship. But this will likely be just one page on a website, and for many businesses the number of links won't be astronomically high. If the outbound link numbers are very high, they might attract webspam team attention. As an SEO, I've done FAR more to encourage sponsor linking than go around trying to nofollow these links, however, as have most people. We haven't got to the stage yet where Google has put out memos about this being not-white-hat, but that's what a webspam team member would likely say. I'd still not link out from a site to my sponsors using their commercial anchor text ("car insurance", "mobile phones") - I'd link with their names.

It depends how quick you want to get a penalty. Any link you can go out and get in numbers is very unlikely to be off any value, and may get you penalized now or in the future. Search Engines are simply not interested in these sort of links.

Hi Karen If you drop us an email - hello @ linkrisk.com i will arrange for a trial account so you can give LinkRisk a try Maria - You are 100% correct - No tool will get you to the finish line - If we can get people 75-80% there then a manual review to eliminate false positives then you are on the right track - You would not believe what we see disavowed! Alex - I would love to see a list of the 22 link sources - We have hunted far and wide and we did not get to 22 Happy to be proven wrong though - Also happy to answer any questions any of you may have Thanks Gareth (it is Paul's name on the account!)

Great, thanks so much for your tips and help!

Update on this issue........ I ended up restoring a few of the links I removed but none of the truly crappy ones. It seems though I was just needing to be a little patient. This latest algo update shot be back up to 8th after I had dropped to 30th (after removing a ton of links). So it seems those links were still passing pagerank even though they were total garbage and didn't offer any value whatsoever. I think this is evidence that Google's quality standard when it comes to links definitely went up. Which I guess goes without saying but it's good to have proof. I also hadn't done anything else to the site for the last couple months other than remove those links so there shouldn't have been any other variables at play.

You should definitely be able to ignore these as they're quite common (not specifically these websites, but these types of links). That said, if you are under penalty and can't work out which links are causing it, having cleaned up all the rest, I'd go for a disavowal. If you are 100% certain that the penalty is due to Penguin, approaching the manual webspam team isn't likely to help you at all. But getting that disavowal in before the next Penguin update (which, despite Google's updates of this week - Panda and "payday loans" - can't be far away) might help.

Actually, you are correct. Google's PageRank algorithm has always been all about links. Check it - PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. More on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. This being said, Google's toolbar PR is not nearly as influential as a ranking factor as it has been in years past.

HI Diego, You don't need to worry too much about whether the pages are tags or categories, but could you give me examples of the URLs you plan to use?