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Thank you for your help. I have changed the links to nofollow.Best, Marko

All the points made are great and I'd just add one more thing...look at the average length of the blog/website that the post is going on. Like EGOL said, on Moz, most posts are around 1000 words so that's what you should aim for but for another blog, they may want something longer or shorter. Match the content and length to the blog it is going on, that way you are adding value to the blog and not just blogging for links.

I don't think you'll see any quick or significant impact linking from your long-tail ranking pages to your individual product (the beauty of the long tail is that you don't need to be so competitive in order to rank) so there's not so much That's not to say that you shouldn't do it but think about what's best for the visitor. Consider where the visitor is in the buying cycle and provide content that supports them at the stage/awareness they're at. Do they know what the solution to their problem or need is? Do they understand the benefits of your offerings. Why should they buy from you. Make sure each of your pages offer an obvious next step. This can be finding out more about your products or is can be a link to buy a particular recommended product. Don't forget your category pages either. Make sure they have some great unique content too - as well as making it easy for people to find what they're looking for. Retargeting is a great idea from Christopher, but I'd also say remember the other downloadable assets like buyers guides case-studies, product data sheets (not just the manufacturers produced stuff) - make sure that any such assets are clearly branded, have your website address and active links back to your site. Again, a lot depends on the kind of products you're selling.

It was a mix of both. There were some embedded keywords with nofollow links (which I thought were ok given that they were nofollowed). The keywords weren't forced in, just naturally present and then linked, doing so to have a nice balance between follow and nofollow links to the site.

Completely agree with you, Oleg. I've got two wikipedia links back to my website and I get a fairly regular stream of traffic from them as referring sources, and those visitors are the most engaged, too, averaging at least 5 to 10 minutes per visit!

Cheers Chaps !

Awesome Dr. Meyers. You nailed my question. Thanks everyone for your discussion. I get the impression that an article with a bunch of outgoing link is preferred to just a list, but either way it sounds like it won't hurt my site. Thanks again everyone.

If all other things are equal AND you all have some crawlability issues, yes it could be a major factor. For example, if you have deep pages that are not indexed well then linking to them outside of the sitemap could help. Just because a page is in the sitemap doesn't mean Google wants to index it. If it has zero other links (either internally or externally) and the content is a little "thin" they may choose not to include it. Adding a decent internal link could make the difference there. If all other things are equal AND those pages are indexed and linked to from your crawlable navigation, yes it could be a moderate factor if your competitors are interlinking from body copy and the only place you link from is the navigation - as these types of links are not treated exactly the same. That's the short answer. The long answer is - it's complicated. Feel free to stop reading here if you really don't care about possible complications. Some sites go too far on their interlinking strategy and end up with a penalty. I've seen this happen on a few Wordpress sites that use a plugin to automatically link every single instance of a phrase to a specific landing page. That just doesn't look natural, and you could end up getting filtered or penalized at the level of the page or, more likely, for that specific anchor text. Another thing to look out for is future scaleability. For example, I don't often like to hard code links to specific products within the body copy of an eCommerce site because products tend to come and go. What you'd end up with a few years later is an avalanche of 404 errors that you'll have to manually go in and fix. I tend to leave product interlinking automated (e.g. Related products widget) and save the hard-coded links for linking to category pages, which tend to stick around longer.

Thanks Oleg. Much appreciated. Will take a deeper look into the anchor profile.

Hi moregood, If I were you I would do it the other way around: I would go over all the existing links asking the following question: Is this an "editorial" link? And I would cut out all the rest. I think It's easier to find out the good ones. There are a lot of reasons for which links could be bad for you, you might not even be aware why they are bad. But the good ones are pretty obvious and way fewer :). I think it's easier to recover from a penalty this way, and the chance to cut something good is pretty low. If you go the way you mentioned and avoid cutting the ones that are in a gray area, you might resubmit the website over and over. It will take a lot of time. Meanwhile you could stick with the good links and invest the rest of time to get more of these

Another thing: When I click to read the message in webmaster's tools, I get a message saying that I used link spam and I get this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UFHCw4Q_FQ As an illustration of my situation. Now when I go to the search traffic tab and click on manual action, it tells me that some of my links are suspicious and that they may have been made by someone else than me. Because of that the manual action will be to stop taking those links into account. The video I get as an illustration is that one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y74Op_k6UY Which is a lot less alarming. Also it says: Impact on the whole site: none Impact on a part of the website: yes. And then they give me reasons for it. So my question is: should I expect to lose rankings because it's the first video that applies to my case, or should I expect some links to not being taken into account anymore because it's the second video that applies to me? Thanks.

Both suggestions from Ron and ReferralCandy are good ones. Have a dedicated landing page, promote on all of your owned channels like newsletters and social media profiles, and do your best to promote through your writing onsite and offsite. Beyond that I recommend that you look into paid social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. You can get reasonable CPCs and highly targeted audience demo/psychographics like job title, region, etc. Very handy if you only want to target CMOs or CIOs, for example.

I know quite a few SEOs who would use 410s rather than 404s when cutting and running from bad links pointing at internal pages...

I'm using this toolhttp://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/pagerank.html

Many thanks Lynn, that all makes sense to me. We will suggest moving forward with NEW logo's set as BRAND and no-follow only. We will leave the home page alone Regards Tris

Just took a look at that site, and it offers unlimited monthly submissions to post guest blogs.  I can't help but thing this is akin to a public blog network which with the posting limits will be full of spammy posts. I keep an eye out on http://bloggerlinkup.com for relevant posting opportunities on guest blogs myself.  Sure, you won't get many opportunities that are in your niche, but you can find some real sites to post on.  I prefer quality over quantity.

No, I am not really sure that schema can even be used to mark up a link. Or are you talking about using schema on those linking pages? A well marked up review, address etc on an external site is not going to be a bad thing but if this is just an attempt to game the system then... it will likely offer little benefit.

Look in OSE: Showing only _rel=nofollow _links from external pages to pages on this root domain: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.sylvaniachurch.com&sort=page_authority&filter=nofollow&source=external&target=domain&group=0 It shows only 17 no-follow external links to pages on your site.

And keep an eye out for sweeping generalities--there's not much in SEO that is 100% black or white.

to create a link network I should have said!