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Here are some resources for you.  Some old and some recent.  I personally only add links to a page that are helpful to anyone on that is on that particular page. How Many Links on a Page: Rand Fishkin talking about footer links for user experience. Dr. Pete talking about the number of links and how many is too many Jennifer Slegg of Search Engine Watch talking about how many links per page Footer Link Info: John Doherty, formerly with Distilled, wrote a good linking blog on Moz and it had good info on Footer links.  He also did an awesome White Board Friday on Internal Linking Moz Help with Internal Links: Here is Moz's own take on internal links.  http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link I hope some or all of this helps! Darin

Thank you

Hi Berner, Good question and some thoughtful answers here. I'll chime in with my 2 pesos. A citation is defined as a web-based reference to a local business' complete or partial NAP (name, address, phone). A citation does not have to include a link the company website. For example, a blogger could mention your restaurant's name and address, leave out the phone number and not link to the restaurant's website and that would still count as a citation, meaning that the business owner must be certain that the blogger has accurately published the restaurant's name and address. On more standardized platforms, like local business directories, nearly all allow you to include a link to your website. This does count as a link, but whether it is nofollowed or not is up to the individual directory. So, this does bear on how much 'juice' a given link is passing your way. Regardless, if your business is a local one, citations are a core part of the work you will be doing to promote your business on the Internet. If your business model isn't truly local, then citations aren't really meant for you. I think you'll really enjoy reading the great section in the new Moz Local Learning Center that covers the ins and outs of citations. Tons of great resources here for you: http://moz.com/learn/local/listings Hope this will help, and kudos to all on the good responses on this thread!

Snap! So many of our new clients have been penalised through paid link building.

That's great, thanks so much Nishadha

SEO tools are an indicator. Never rely on one exclusively. Also, Moz looks at white hat factors. Your competition may not be playing by the rules. If that's the case, just hope Google handles them and keep doing your thing the right way.

Hi Benjamin, Eduardo and Kevin are right - Link Detox's cache will be a bit old, hence why it's showing you data that's out of date. Google crawls much faster than most commercial tools (Moz's OSE included), so it's likely that those bad sites / pages have dropped out of its index already. Search for those page's URLs to make sure they're not still cached in Google's index. If they are, you'll have to wait it out (but it shouldn't take long for them to disappear if they're returning 404 or 410 status codes).

Hi there, Google and Yandex operate in very different ways, so comparing rankings between the two is not a very accurate practice. David is correct that point B is much more relevant / likely than point A though. I would try to avoid drawing comparisons between your rankings on both search engines however.

Very welcome Tom - hope all gets sorted. -Andy

Directly no...but indirectly yes. The links going to your site will boost your domain authority. While it will not boost your homepages page authority, it will boost the domain authority which can help with your ranks

Check the homepage to see if it ranks for some other things; the domain name without the www the domain name with the www the title tag with the title: operator cut and paste a string of text (maybe 12-15 words) and search for it in quotes the OLD brand term (you said this was a re-brand as well?) the OLD domain name What do those all return? Further; Does the homepage show as a landing page in webmaster tools? Does it show getting traffic from search in analytics? Does it rank for anything in Bing or Yahoo? It sounds like more diagnostics are needed before we can conclude anything

Hi Bob, There are a few others, the main one being Wordtracker (which comes with very good reviews). Wordtracker has a good reputation, but it's worth noting that some smaller tools do not have access to a large dataset to pull their numbers from, so you're not necessarily getting a true picture. Although Google's numbers are almost certainly a bit wonky (deliberately), at least you are getting them from the source and can have confidence in comparing volume. By that, I mean that if the tool says 10,000 people per month in the US search for [hypnosis] and 2,000 search for [hynotherapy] (these are totally made up numbers), then you can be somewhat confident that [hynotherapy] is 1/5th as popular as [hypnosis], even though you can't rely on the 10,000 / 2,000 figures. Cheers, Jane

Thanks Sam and Matt, Great responses and I'll now get going on disavowing the project I'm working on. Much appreciated.

There is amazing trust flow with press distribution and it is VERY possible to rank certain queries with Press alone (read low comp local), however, ignoring the branding and view/traffic potential is a mistake. Do not believe the hype that they are ineffective as an inclusion to your ranking strategy.

Hi again David, I haven't heard of this particular company - could be good if the 40 penalties stat is true, but get your research in and you should be fine. Also check out the Recommended Providers list - there could be some good options on there too.

That's such an interesting point, because it happened a few years ago. Check this out: this story went up on Search Engine land in 2010 about a company that appeared to be seeking negative publicity because the brand mentions looked like they were helping the company rank - http://searchengineland.com/googles-gold-standard-results-take-hit-new-york-times-57081 Google didn't take kindly to that. http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html http://searchengineland.com/the-decor-my-eyes-fiasco-local-reviews-tactics-57725 http://searchengineland.com/no-you-cant-rank-well-just-by-cultivating-terrible-reviews-57333 The bloke involved ended up in prison.  http://searchengineland.com/decormyeyes-merchant-vitaly-borker-sentenced-to-four-years-in-federal-prison-132434 So yep, Google attempts to decide on intent in mentions as well, and I would guess that they have worked hard on that since the DecorMyEyes fiasco, which was a few years ago now. They definitely need to be careful that companies who are often talked about negatively don't benefit from it, although there are some examples of largely negative press companies doing quite well after those companies are also often linked to - Ryanair does crazy-well (even though they claim to only have just started doing SEO last year) with mostly negative press. My former agency did a good study on the travel industry a couple of years ago - see the PDF here. This screenshot shows the companies in the UK flights industry who were performing best in June 2011. Ryanair was the best-ranked airline, outperforming "legit" airlines. I see you're in the UK so you don't need it explained to you why that's pretty crazy! I can't get into Ayima's system to see how Ryanair perform today, but they're still page 1 for a few of the high value keywords I checked. Suffice to say it's a difficult task for Google, but since they created and subsequently are trying to destroy the linking ecosystem, they need to work hard on it.

I'm not sure. But just an observation, you have more linking root domains nofollow or not for the first three specific generic anchor text money phrases than for branded terms. That seems a bit unnatural to me 1. because of the brand vs. generic contrast for 3 highly related terms and 2. because its exact match for high traffic generic and then the number of linking route domains for related anchor text terms drops off significantly instead of a smoother curve I'm not saying its penalty level unnatural. But in the context of the well known brands you're competing with, of which most of them above you I recognize, they likely beat you out on the brand metrics. Additionally, your first money terms are much more competitive from what I can see in terms of search volume than your second terms. Like clothes drying rack is getting 4000+ searches a month while the umbrella one is listed as 30. And trends confirms that contrast:  http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q="clothes drying rack"%2C"outdoor umbrella clothesline" I don't really believe in getting rid of links unless I'm walking into a clients site already penalized. Maybe one or two if I have control over them over time. I think you should pivot into brand building and testing different content assets for deeper links, video maybe? If they don't perform naturally at all, cut them or revise/enhance them. That will insulate you better from the risk of aggressive link building that's been done and help raise all phrases over time. And nofollow does matter. A lot. As well as nofollow vs. follow break down across brand vs generic anchor text in the context of your industry. A strong natural link profile example in your industry would be hard to find because your so niche competing with conglomerates. But being extremely natural (ie. not trying to have any control over the anchor text of sites linking to you at all)

If you're actively link building to those pages from external sites using that sort of optimised anchor text.  You'd want to stop that immediately. Internally, there's not a pressing need to do this, but I would stick to a rule of natural flow: is the anchor naturally integrated into the sentence, and would the text be there if you didn't want the link to be there? In general, I'd definitely stay away from doing this in every post you write. Only do it sporadically and only if it truly makes sense to the flow of the text. If it looks in any way unnatural, don't link like that. You can pass just as much authority around a site using "click here" as you do with "voucher codes" and you avoid looking like your internal optimisation is too search-engine focused if this sort of linking is not too common.

I think that you have to understand why these people deleted your links. A) Are they reading Matt Cutts and worrked that he is going to slap them for linking to you? B) Are you posting things on your site that they don't like? C) Did you competitor contact them and say something that made them take down your links. D) Do they think that their site looks better without links to other websites. E) Are they afraid of losing traffic to you or leaking linkjuice. F) Some other crazy idea in their head. So, maybe the first action would be to get in touch with them to find out why the links were taken down...  This would be a hard message to write but maybe you could ask if you did something to offend them and were writing to see if that was the reason.

Hello there Whilst these links are followed (or at least some of them are - it depends on how you're sharing your content) my view would be that they aren't particularly valuable in terms of improving your rankings. This is for a couple of reasons: It's too easy to manipulate. If these links really 'counted' all you'd need to do is post hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of times to dominate the SERPs. This is not the sort of activity that Google wishes to reward. These are links from specific properties (which Google own). Whilst these links are followed, you've no clue how their handled by the algorithm. Despite being followed, they may not actually be 'counted'. Moreover it's really easy for Google to switch this off i.e. - they could very easily decide to make all of these links no-follow. I hope this helps, Hannah