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Hi Laurie, 8 hours per month is going to limit your options a lot! Personally I think it is virtually impossible to do a proper job in that small amount of time, so perhaps client education on the benefits of what you are proposing is in order first? If you can bump it up to 16 hours a month that would give you the option of doing 4 hours a week which will allow you time to plan things better and to reflect on the previous week's actions and possible results. 8 hours a month all on one day is like month 1: analysis, month 2 - content, month 3 - more content, month 4 - more content, a few links maybe... with that kind of timescale both you and your clients are likely to get discouraged long before real results start appearing! That being said I would definitely look at making sure the content is decent (and optimised) before actively looking for linking opportunities. This will usually involve content creation in addition to on page optimisation (so another 8 hours...or more!). Be realistic about the keywords you are trying to target and go after longer tail and/or local combinations. Only then would I really start looking at links, but be careful! Deep links to these kind of small scale sites to me usually means seo directories and pr releases and they are not going to do you much good. Concentrate on easy wins in term of local business directories, potential links from cooperating businesses and the like. Hope it helps!

There is a lot that goes into dealing with this issue. You will need some good tools that can be found here http://www.reconsiderationrequests.net/tools/ You need to focus on dofollow links and this may come as a surprise but also links that appear missing. Download the latest links from WMT, Ahrefs & majestic. Combine them and use excel or "ScrapeBox DupeRemove" available from the link above to remove and duplicates. Use "Blackhatlinks.com Free Dofollow / Nofollow Link Checker" to see if the link is dofollow / nofollow or notfound for the webmaster tools links. Once done you can start to look at what is good and bad. Under a manual penalty you are under review by a real person and they are meticulous, they will make you remove links you never even created and all sorts of crazy stuff. Almost all links are bad in Googles eyes, this includes urls, brand mentions and non optimized anchor text like click here. You need to attack it hard and remove as much as possible, because a penguin refresh only comes around every 6 months, the next will probably be in Feb or April. Remove anything that has optimized anchor text no matter what or try to get the text changed if its an incredible link. The most creditable links are ones where multiple sites are mentioned that include your competitors in some form of comparison on a forum, article blog etc... Almost all others are trash. Also some directories are ok, like dmoz, yahoo dir etc... OK I Mentioned before about missing links, you will find links in WMT where the link does not appear anymore, BUT in the case of a directory it may have moved down to page 3 or 4 when it was on page 1 or 2 when first crawled. The link is still on the site and if you see the site itself is trash, add it to the disavow. Dont bother adding links to the disavow file, add domains. example: domain:xyz.com domain:abc.com This will ensure you capture all links on those domains regardless if the move around. If you do not want to do this all yourself there are many tools out there, like Link Detox and rmoov. Feel free to ask me any questions or send me some examples if you are not sure. Its a horrible process I have had to do it myself and helped many others,all with success!

Also ask the sales guys WHO are they selling to. As in, the persons they interact with and what they are like. Who makes the decisions, who looks for the different options, and so on.

You can use Twitter + FollowerWonk or Google (the search engine) + custom queries. You can type things like these on Google to find potential guest posting opportunities: "keyword" + "guest post" "keyword" + "write for us" "keyword" + "submit your post" etc. You might be interested: http://findmyblogway.com/finding-guest-post-opportunities/ (discusses about some unique ways)

I agree with Gary, you should definitely go through all your links and be really ruthless in terms of which are the poor quality links. Anything that is on an article or directory website you can probably get rid of (apart from directories like Yahoo, DMOZ etc) and submit your disavow file to Google. If it is only your target keywords that have dropped then you have been lucky to escape a site-wide penalty but there is a good chance that this will be on its way so if you can clean up your profile sooner rather than later, it should help.

Howdy, Great question. A couple of metrics that I like to focus on are "# of unique linking root domains" to a site, and also overall Domain Authority and Moz Trust. It's not really about the pure number of links. Even a spam blog can generate millions of backlinks without moving the rankings. Instead, it's more about the breadth, quality, trust and topical relevance of the sites linking to you. If there's one metric that most agencies use for benchmarking, it's Domain Authority, but I'd be careful with this as it can fluctuate from month-to-month and should be thought of in broad terms instead of as a precise number that you track from week to week. I think this blog post by Dr. Pete perfectly answers your question better than I could myself. It's well worth a read. http://moz.com/blog/whats-better-on-page-seo-or-link-building Let us know if you have any questions. Best of luck with your SEO!

The site no longer exists? Then the link no longer exists, and there shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate your responses.

I have a few clients with 90+ DA scores and suggest the following stay on your radar: 1. (At lest in our case) these clients have large dev teams which can lead to unintended SEO issues when changes or roll outs are not properly coordinated. Basically don't let the client break their own site or rankings. This is not meant to be cynical, its just a reality when you work with a larger team. 2. Typical link building is not a main priority, these sites often build links on their own. Focus on high quality links, and ensuring that the anchor text used is properly balanced. 3. Researching conversions and keywords for new opportunities is important. 4. Improving conversion rates of the pages can often increase value quickly on these high traffic sites. 5. Look for keywords where the client has some ranking traction due to the authority but where they are not on the first page. These can often be easy and highly valuable traffic wins.

Definitely third-ing what everyone else has said.  Disavow that sucker! Keep your link network clean!

Both are quite different, so it really depends on what you are after.  I'm actually a big fan of majestiseo (just to confuse things further).  OSE is good for understanding the big picture. However I find that its crawl isn't anywhere deep enough for the stuff I work on - particularly in terms of deep pages on large authority sites.  Example:  links from the bbc are almost the holy grail for some of the projects that I work on, but OSE often misses them. Ahrefs is better, and majestic goes deeper still. The down-side of that is that you get a lot more low quality stuff to sort through. In terms of majestic v ahrefs, ahrefs definitely wins in terms of interface / tools.  I'm an excel guy though, so it is all about the data for me - hence majestic being my "weapon of choice".

Your DA fluctuates over time and you may have gotten hit by Google's "Hummingbird" search engine update. For links, I'd recommend 1. Posting on forums with your website in the signature line and legitimately respond to questions with good answers, as opposed to spam responses 2. Post new website content to social media with links 3. Take a look at where your competitors are getting links and trying getting a link from the same source 4. Write content for other websites via being a guest host and put a link to your website on the article

I find Domain Authority to typically be a much stronger candidate for results.  Installing the "mozbar" to your browser and using it (make sure you are logged into Moz) will really help show you what I am speaking of.  Many times, websites like Yelp will list on the first page for a business with a page that has a Page Authority of 1, but the DA of the site is so strong that it outranks other pages with a much higher PA. The way I see it, PA will help get a certain page to rank, but DA will get all your pages to rank (which will help diversify your SEO thus bringing way more traffic to your site for different sets of keywords.)  Remember, each page should be for a different topic, so if your front page is for your main target keyword strand, and you have a high PA but a low DA, your site is likely to rank for that one term, but all the interior pages wont.  Whereas, if you have a higher DA, you can rank higher for every page on your site with different keywords.  The best way to do this is to link multiple pages from your site.  For instance if you are guest blogging, don't just include a link to your front page.  Try to include a few links to interior pages as well for relative topics.  Also, I have actually seen Google Adwords give stronger DA.  I know many will argue this, but when campaigning on adwords, you can send different keywords to different pages.  Users entering your site through interior pages is a good thing, as Google seeing everyone come to your site from the front page can sometimes lower your DA. Hope this helped!

Digging a little and it looks like a totally fake site by some hack SEO. Any time you see a link in a suspicious site's footer that says "SEO xxxxxx xxxx" (in this case "SEO Company Perth" that's a massive red flag. To the left of that link is a link "LEF" - that points to a Link Exchange site. How obvious is it then that this is a bogus site? Other clues: No other navigation links of any value that communicate "this is a legitimate web site". The "Remarkable US Presidents main navigation link has links in it that just point to another hack site "MTI-USA.com" and THAT site, even though it's got "USA" in the domain, links to a Perth "digital agency"... Bottom line, it's a mess. And the lesson here is don't get caught up examining competitor links assuming you see something that could be helping them unless you know what you are doing. All it will result in is your site being slapped with penalties.

Hi Seth, How exactly are you determining your backlinks are decreasing? If you are using crawl reports from Moz, Google or other sources, understand most crawlers dump their data and perform fresh crawls of the web periodically. Often adjustments are made to the crawling algorithms, or other links on the internet change, which may impact the visibility of some backlinks. You can use various tools such as Raven's Link Manager to track links. Simply add your current backlinks to the tool and you will receive an update if any link is removed. Have you actually checked the links which have been removed? Or are you simply viewing reports and seeing numbers decrease? The only way to really know what is happening is to track each link. You can then understand if the link was really removed, or if it is an issue with the crawl report.

Your question was: "Any idea how my site can rank on google?" The short answer is: Write unique content, especially on product and category pages, and get quality links. The longer answer is: Write unique, useful content for every product page on your site. Yes, you can outsource this but go for the highest quality offered, not the cheap stuff. Try odesk, text brokers, elance, helium, writer access, etc... and go with whichever one you like best. Start EARNING (as opposed to "building") backlinks by providing a great user experience with good, useful content. This is hard to do if you "don't want to write any article". Something as simple as outlining the reasons why it isn't a good idea to use an iPhone 4 case for your iPhone 5 might be a good place to start for the example above. Then you can interlink to your store's category pages too. The promotions you're doing are a great link-earning opportunity. Be sure to let bloggers (those in the money-saving / deal niche especially) know about it in a helpful, non-intrusive way.

Thanks for helping me out. I'm referring to this sort of urls that I can find in code after commenting

Hi Keri, here I given moz.com just for an example. I just meant any trusted website

Thank you both for your responses. It was one of those impulse questions since I'd just received an email "solicitation" from them, so I didn't think right away to check for previous posts. I'll go through the QA archives, and I do agree with you Robert. I thought I'd ask/investigate nonetheless.

Hi no this isn't what I meant, I have authorship sorted. i think I read on Copyblogger that it was a good tactic to re post your blogs on google plus without google penalising you for duplicate copy, in order to engage your google plus following rather than just drop a link ? ash