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sorry, yes the txt. :))

Cheers. Makes sense.

This is the current flow of redirects: 1. northamericahvac.com -> (301) -> 2. www.northamericahvac.com -> (301) -> 3. http://www.northamericahvac.com/servlet/StoreFront Assuming you can't fix the /storefront redirect, I would point the links to the www domain (number 2 URL) as that's your canonical domain (the non-www domain redirects to it). It's nicer to look at and there's less chance the URLs in backlinks will be spelt incorrectly than if you were linking to /storefront (number 3 URL). It's also likely to be the domain you will end up with once you fix the platform issue. In practice I'm not sure it really matters which domain you point to, as your 301s are set up properly and your /storefront URL will be appearing in SERPs as it is. If you did migrate from the number 3 URL to the number 2 URL in future then you would have to set up a 301 in the reverse direction anyway. George @methodicalweb

Hello David If you have only a couple of hundred backlinks to analyze, you're probably better off doing the analysis yourself "by hand". If, on the other hand, you have many hundreds/thousands of links, you may use an automated tool such as: http://www.linkdetox.com/tour/. I haven't used the tool myself, but seems to cover most of the operations necessary to get rid of links. Good Luck Jorge

Nope No value. Another SMB scam tactic...

It will help drive some traffic though you need to have high quality articles that are informative and provides value to the reader.  The links are no follow but who cares your using it to gain traffic based on the article. Quit trying to game google and build useful content for the internet.

If you have mod_rewrite enabled on your server you could try something like this in your .htaccess file: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.).htm$ RewriteRule ^(.) /$1.php [R=301,L]

Unfortunately, generic directories are close to useless for link building. I know exactly why they feel useful - you can get a link with about two minutes of effort. The problem is, search engines these days's don't particularly care for them. There's a good reason for that: when was the last time you used a directory like www.the-web-directory.co.uk or botw.org.uk to actually find something? I'm willing to bet that the answer is "never". So directories have almost no value for users, and at the end of the day search engines want to know you're providing value for users. So I'm afraid that rather than answering your question I'm going to join Chris in saying "that's not the way to go". Having said that, there is one type of directory that does get used: the local directory. If you have a Google Plus business listing (and if you don't then setting one up needs to be your first action after reading this) then complementing this with results in directories like FreeIndex, HotFrog, or All In London will help the search engines to confirm your business name, address, and telephone number are correct and so may give you a boost in the local rankings - which is rather useful as I imagine a lot of your customers use local terms like "birthday cakes London". You'll run out of local directories fairly quickly, though, so the big question is "what do we do next"? The answer, as it so often is, is "create and share content". I know what you think whenever somebody says that. "Creating content takes loads of time - time that I could be baking cakes" but there's something yo should probably know. Your cakes are remarkable. I mean that. Looking at your site, the cakes you have produced are amazing. And from the number of them that there are and the skill it takes to make them I imagine you're pretty passionate about baking. The great thing is, if you produce remarkable content then people are going to want to remark on it. On Facebook, on Twitter, on your website. You already produce content that people want to talk about and share, so all you need to do is get the conversation started. Invest some time in social media. Talk to people about baking, commend other people on their work (both pro's and amateurs). Find the Moz for bakers - the place online where they all hang out - and answer their questions, write blog posts, and let them in to one or two of your secrets. Comment on their blog posts, correct them if they get things wrong, and build up your reputation among other bakers. Doing this is a lot more work than just getting some directory links, but they bring about a whole lot more benefit  And by benefit I don't just mean better search engine rankings, I also mean more website visits, people spreading the word about you themselves, and much, much more return on the investment of your time. And speaking from experience, social media is much more fun than trawling through the web looking for dubious directories.

This should go a long way to answering your question - http://moz.com/community/q/what-are-the-good-strategies-using-satellite-sites-in-seo

You have to remember the point of your website is to communicate something or to sell something. Commenting in relevant forums or blogs, with useful information, is always going to be beneficial as the quality of traffic will be high--even if the link is no-follow. The most important thing is that you get qualified visitors.

While it's nice to have the link counted by Moz, Google and Bing and the other search engines don't listen to us, so whether or not we see it won't affect your ranking. Go into Google and Bing Webmaster Tools and see if your link is listed there. And even if you don't see it there -- do a site: search in Google for that directory structure and search for your anchor text. If Google see that, you know they've at least indexed the page and are aware of it.

In most cases, Google sees a sitewide link as just a single vote for a site.  "Too many sitewide links" really wouldn't be the issue.  But, "too many domains with unnatural links" could cause a problem.  Here's more on John Mueller talking about how sitewide links are treated by Google: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/are-sitewide-links-bad/

Moeez, Internal linking with anchor text is fine but it should be done in a manner that assists the visitor, not in a manner that hits them over the head with spammy anchor text links all over every page.  When it's appropriate to link to another page because information on that page is helpful to the reader, it's worthwhile.  Keep in mind, anchor text can help a bit with relevance of the page being linked to but it will not be a super-strong signal, regardless of how it's implemented. Matt Cutts mentions that there isn't any penalty for having too many anchor text links from within your domain pointing to any given page.  You can also take this to mean that there's really no particular value being derived by having a bunch of anchor text links pointing to a page.  On closer inspection, you may find that there is some other reason that your competitor's page is ranking the way it is. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-internal-links-anchor-text-16864.html

Hey Carson, Thanks for the response. 404/410ing was going to be my game plan initially, but I was curious if a 302 was "better" than returning dead pages. In either case, it's only a few pages so I don't think it matters much. Our traffic was from this page being used across our local citations which did receive referral traffic. They've since been changed to our root URL, so no worries on not 301'ing or 302'ing that link. 404 it is. The majority of the bad links are to our root domain, so I've been busy lately sending removal requests and such and preparing out disavow sheets. I was hoping for an "easier" fix to simply get rid of the dead pages, but killing them does indeed seem best. I guess I'll go with the original plan to kill the pages which have the bulk of the spammy links, 301 the "cleaner" old structures without links aimed at them, and continue trying to remove the spammy links to the root URL. Thanks for the input!

Forum links have little value, so I would not participate just for the links.  But if you've something to say, can build your authority as a source of good knowledge. you'd get a weak sniff of link juice and possible referral traffic - and possible linking opportunities elsewhere on the back of that work through relationship building. There is some excellent stuff in here - http://moz.com/community/q/best-to-spend-marketing-budget-on-high-quality-articles-or-link-building-services that might help sculpt your attitude/approach to a strategy. A new site can dance all over the place and stable good rankings are dependent on so many factors including competition architecture content optimisation link profile authority and on...

You're welcome. Peter

Just realized I forgot to add the link to the article, my bad!  http://www.wowinternet.co.uk/blog/100-dollar-link-building/ The best link building is creating good content and having an audience to share it with.  If your content is good, the links will build themselves organically.

Thanks for the reply. Was just trying to assess the impact of a link from a domain of high authority, nothing more!

I don't think Google would want the negative PR from penalizing people for creating legitimate scholarships. An alternative to creating a scholarship is to curate a list of relevant scholarships in your niche. There are scholarships for almost anything you can think of. Then go to sites that link to scholarships and let them know that you curated a comprehensive list of X scholarships.

I think affiliates are basically advertising that is paid based on performance and we know that Google wants advertising links to be no-followed. No-following the links would be the safe route to take.