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Thank you for the in depth response.  I agree with you and EGOL that it depends on the type of client and size. You have definitely given me a lot to consider.  I'm starting to think I need to audit my own role and come up with a more strategic approach to how I handle each client.  And your advice on how to "outsource" or manage parts that I am not personally executing on is helpful.

Thanks Keri...

Hey There, Not sure what Moosa meant by "re installing GWT" but I wouldn't go that route.  I do agree with checking OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs and other sources to form a total link profile as no one crawler will give you that.  And Google's will always be limited (at least for now). If it hasn't been too long since you picked up the links or set up GWT then I'd give this some time.  GWT is notoriously slow and incomplete as Google doesn't necessarily give you all the data. But if it's been a while I'd start to check things like "301ing your www. version of the domain to the non-www", double check your robots.txt file to make sure Google can crawl everywhere the links are pointing.  Make sure the links you think you have aren't nofollowed or the pages they are on noindexed.  But frankly the above isn't very likely. I'd need to know more to make a full diagnosis but hopefully that gets you started.  If nothing else go with Moosa's suggestion and compile 2-3 other link profiles.  Dont rely on GWT for that complete data anyway. Jacob

After a quick look at that directory's back links, I'd recommend simply disavowing the domain.  Here's what Matt Cutts has to say on that type of thing: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-common-disavow-link-tool-mistakes-162804

Hi Devanur,Thanks for your response. It turned out to be an eye opener for me . I would surely follow what you suggested. Thanks once again. Regards Sawan

Cool post Phil. Also, you look like a bad-ass musketeer.

DA/PA are Moz metrics, not used by any of the big search engines. Although there is a correlation between DA/PA and "good" links, it is not enough of a metric to go by. There are plenty of high DA/PA sites whose backlink would be considered "bad" because of the content (e.g. its a blog network, lots of spam, malware, etc). I would try to get any link from any "real" website, no matter the DA/PA. There are plenty of good new sites who haven't had the time to build up a strong DA/PA but a backlink from them would still be beneficial to have. So if you are unsure about a site, visit it to see how legitimate it is.

Thanks Chris and Alex for your response. I think I should focus on building links to category pages and high traffic potential posts and let the page rank flow to other pages with less traffic potential.

Thanks Noah. Any more feedback on this?

Generally a week at a time is a good interval, this is also the rate at which Moz sends out crawl reports or rankings. Hope this helps!

There's a little effect on ranking in terms of the anchor text of your links helping with relevance.  And there's link juice that flows internally to the target page.  But it's not anywhere near as strong as a link from an external website. Do make sure, however, that all of your major category pages are linked to from your main navigation, so that ALL pages on your site have a link to those pages.  Make sure as well that these are plain HTML links, not Javascript, etc.

Hi Dennis, What was your cost per link acquisition when you used them? Did the links generate any traffic? Cheers,

So glad to hear about the recovery. Thanks for sharing!

So do you think this had any impact as of sep 2013? Im curious to know if this method works at all or removal or modification of other links will still beat it. thanks

I like Raven's tools for link building. I have never tried buzz stream, but I am going to give it a try. I can't afford to have both Moz and Raven's. The content manager in raven is VERY buggy. And axribe is very stripped down. I love scribe, but with ravens its limited. Bugs with ravens content are as follows: Meta description does not pass from raven to WordPress seo (you have to go into wp to re enter) when you do it created a duplicate post in WP which is a second bug. I mentioned this to raven and they said it was a bug with WordPress.

Great answer. I've seen some old PDFs on some .gov and .edu domains, but unfortunately, there were no URL links.

Press releases CAN rarely be useful if you have actual newsworthy affairs... say an event sponsorship that is for a good or community cause that can make it to your local paper or news sites actually. stay AWAY from CHEAP providers such as lightening press releases (pure spam artists) or others as they all will involve a high degree of utter rubbish spam networks of scrapers and syndication sites that will constantly generate links for you for months on end, that COULD POTENTIALLY BITE you at some point even if Google currently does not care about them. PRweb does nicely and is about the only one I would personally trust to be least spammy in the network of their 30000 bloggers. but there will be spam unless you are taking the highway and having a professional PR firm or person take care of affairs with more personal relations in the media crowd than one of these web services. costly, but can get you HOURS OF LIVE COVERAGE on tv (say if you are a restaurant and your fox666 local channel has nothing better to do for 8-11 am slot) which in turn not only can bring more traffic and actual market exposure, but will more than likely have some people check u out and give you links/reviews/etc.

Thanks for your suggestion Oleg. I'll try your G+ idea and see how it works out. Cheers.

This does help. Thank you for taking the time to answer!

Hi, thanks for the hint, we added bot the canonical url and the category page. cheers