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Brian Dean wrote: "Outbound Link Quality: Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites helps send trust signals to Google." In another article, he explained that he generally links to 4 authority sites in his articles.

If you have a nice landing page that highlights the content and benefits of the White Paper, people will have no problem linking to the page with a form on it. Be sure you are giving your outreach targets a copy of the Whitepaper without making them have to download it. Make it as easy as possible for them to check out your content and decide if it's something they want to recommend. I would recommend you try to make them feel special. Tell them it's brand new and you want to give them a sneak peak. Ask them for feedback on your whitepaper. After you get their feedback, you've got them invested enough in your content that you can request that they share it or link to it.

Thanks both.

Thanks guys! I think I'll approach it with the DMCA side first. I was reading the disavow tool should be a last ditch effort. This is a portfolio that I really don't want any traffic to and it is essentially content scraping for all intensive purposes, they are just putting the PDFs in a viewer rather than posting the actual content to the pages. I also suspect it's some sort of network of sites because they've all popped up recently and they're all using the same documents. There's literally no need to drive traffic to this part of my site, it's a portfolio for clients only.

Hi Claudia, The first H1 one is for the blog and the second one is for the article. It seems to be right because if you go to the blog main page there are many H1. One for the blog page and then one for each article. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks Armin

I agree that keyword rankings just aren't all that important in the scheme of things.  However - if that is what they care about at least that part of your job will be very easy.  They will rank - of this there is no doubt. You are more than welcome for the suggestions - I hope it works out for you (and your client). Cheers

HARO's great when a journalist posts a request to it, but the limitation is that only a very small portion of journalists post for sources before writing their story. But almost all journalists are tweeting about and writing about what they're interested in, which is why we built Muck Rack (I'm the founder, so a little bias obviously). We index all the tweet and articles of journalists, let you search them to build a media list, and then enable you to pitch them through our messaging system or by email. We also have an email alert tool that will notify you whenever a journalist tweets about or shares a story with your keyword.

Honestly, it depends a lot on the business case. In many cases, consolidating to one site has advantages, but there was some reason you split the sites, and I don't know that history. So, it can be tough to say whether you should abandon one site. Certainly, if you do, and if you 301-redirect those pages from the abandoned site (which you should, unless that site was penalized), then that content on the stronger site should do well.

Thank you Keri - I suspected that this was the case. It is good to have it confirmed by you.

No backlink checker is perfect, unfortunately. Nobody has the resource of Google to crawl the entire web (even Google only crawls a section of it). In my experience Majestic & AHREFs have the largest backlink counts, and Moz can show some of your newer links through their "Recently Discovered" tab. If you can afford them all, it's best to combine data from all sources and de-dupe them. Bing Webmaster Tools can provide some additional backlink data as well.

I completely agree that the evaluation of the link should look at increasing your visibility in the niche, and gaining more visits that may turn into conversions.

Awesome.  Thanks so much Wesley.

After doing tons of local search and tons of seo for a few sites, this is what I have found. Local search really helps with distribution of your targeted keyword and linking it to your business name. Therefore it helps with brand building and associating your brand to a particular keyword. Local search can have no bearing on your site ranking for organic keywords. My findings: I have two sites #1 for very specific keywords (white hat only) and one has about 100 local citations and the other has 5. Keywords are both equally competitive. Citations are great for brand building and help reinforce your keyword greatly, but the waters are quickly getting muddied as large local citation companies are starting one main local citation site and creating hundreds of mini sites they also own.  This practice if forcing you to pay for their service to update local search information on tons of their mini sites or you have to waste tons of your time to fix them and most you can't fix anyway without their service or they will just take half a year to update the info or you have to submit a support ticket, which they don't answer. Their is no way to keep up with this process as more sites are being added by these companies weekly. I found all of this out because I had one of my companies have an address change, which was #1 for local search for a specific keyword and had hundreds of local citations. Now after the address change it is on page 4. Since the large citation companies are constantly pulling data, they will pull data from one you haven't updated just yet and you start all over again as they redistribute the info to 30 more sites. I have also run into situations where it is updated in their system, but the page with the old info is archived and can't be removed without repeated contact and they never contact you back. It comes down to is the ROI worth the countless hours spent on a nearly impossible task. My Ultimate Advice: Pick the top 10 citation sources most relevant to your business and make those amazing by linking to them with additional great resources. Citation companies are going to auto create more for you anyway and if you have any changes in address, url, photos etc. the clean up may be possible? Or it may still take you 100 hours to complete and still not be correct. It is a crap shoot!!

This question is probably best to ask in its own question, rather than appending on to this one (as it's about a year old). If you can add some more context, that'd be really helpful. Thanks!

Thanks guys. Appreciate the input. I think I know how to handle these now.

Hi Anders, I would expect that Google would see and understand the jquery menu links.  They've been able to find links in simple Jscript for several years now, and certainly jquery is one of the most common libraries out there, so I'd be surprised if they're not already all over that. MC

I would also run their site or their client's site through Moz tools to see for yourself how well they do things.

As Martijn said before me it's very important that the anchor text is natural. Nowadays Google also looks at surrounding text so the actual anchor text has lost it's value. I would recommend that your bloggers link better than they do now. A click here link is indeed not the best approach. The company name should be find if it's to the homepage, but for a product page it would be better to use the product name or something relevant. (Nimbus 2000 VS Broom for example) Don't over optimize though. Google doesn't like manipulators, just let your reviewers make up the anchor texts. Most you can do is to ask them to place the link in a more appropriate sentence than 'click here'.

All is fine then. Category pages are very often noindexed to reduce duplication issues, so really don't worry about this. It certainly doesn't sound like there are any penalties going on there. That said, do a little social activity around your post as well and get it promoted. -Andy

We just went through this exact same change for marketing reasons. With a combination of 301 redirects and a ton of new content we found our organic dropped significantly on day one but after a period of about two weeks now things have bounced back and in some cases the new content has allowed us to rank better. Our previous site had tons of outdated code and was not particularly clean. Pages now load much faster, the new look seems to have increased the number of pages per visit as well as time on site. If we had to do it over again tomorrow we certainly would. Sometimes not renovating the site I think costs you more in the long run. Hope this helps. Gary