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Hey Purple Indigo, Sounds to me like you are one of the few thought leaders in your niche which is why you're struggling to find others, and perhaps "others" are "competitors", where your not going to get a mention/link from in a million years. If you're still struggling with this, my suggestion would be slightly different and approach thought leaders of CLOSELY RELATED niches, and introduce yourself as the thought leader in your niche. You'll need to put a spin on the introduction and how phone unlocking is linked to their niche. Think niches like... gadgets/tech mobile/app developers PC repairs/over-clockers etc Money saving tips I'm sure you could find some middle ground with thought leaders in these niches? You just need to get creative and be prepared to share their content first. Hope this helps Woody

Hi Kelly, I agree with Thomas that Local SEO, Content Development and Social Media activity, surrounding your local geography, are the best tools to consider for achieving your goals of increasing your visibility for local long tail traffic. Thomas has made some good suggestions here, and I will add something more specific. I have seen a few sites, some of them not very beautifully designed, that offer 'what's it like to live here' user generated content. I've had to look at this when writing about areas in which I don't live. You have an advantage here in writing about your own home town, it would seem. What if you wrote a good article about each of the neighborhoods in your local city/cities and then invited users to expand on the article with their take on what it's like to live there? There could be subtopics, too, like what are the schools like here, what are the restaurants like here, what are the shops like here, what's the government like here, parks, doctors, etc. Here's an example: http://www.city-data.com/forum/san-bernardino-riverside-counties/839376-whats-like-live-palm-springs.html That is more in the form of a forum, which you might consider, or you might do yours more like blog posts and then treat the user entries somewhat like reviews, marking them up with Schema. Don't know if this is the perfect fit for the things you want to rank for, but it is a UGC feature I've noticed that I think is really cool. If your site could become THE powerhouse site offering this type of content in your city, that could be pretty powerful. Hope this helps!

Hi Laura, I like scoop.it ... you can send from your blog to WHERE EVER..... I find its best to send content where it will get attention ..... Send it to FB, LinkedIn, etc....... This is already a target audience you have dialed in on.... We use scoop.it for several SEO Blogs

Perhaps a focus on online PR, with the clients doing some of the legwork to drive ideas and initiatives? (PR Power by Amanda Barry-Hirst is a great book for small businesses).

I realise this is an old thread but can I ask : can you list to your website from yiur ebay listings?  It was my understanding EBAY disapproved of outbound links.  Is there a way to go about it thats in line with policies.  ?My own store is wordpress/woocommerce. Thanks Steve

you have a private message waiting just so you know

Something it's easy to miss... Spend time to understand who your target audience is, what they're interested in, what motivates them and what do they care about...  Don't fall into the trap of defining your target audience with generic terms like "30 something professional" or "stay at home mum" - that doesn't do anyone any favours. The more you really know about the people you're trying to talk to - the easier it'll be to do the stuff on your list and if you understand them properly you'll know how to do it in an authentic, engaging way that's relevant to them. Don't lose site of the fact that a link isn't just a link, but should/could also get your referral traffic too (if it's relevant, in the right place and gives people a real reason to follow it. And really, it's all about the traffic isn't it?

I think you are missing my point.  The Nail Stickers page does not need to be a list of links to products like your other page as that is not the product you are providing. Make it a page that talks about the differences.  You can make it unique.  Start a campaign about "Friends Don't Let Friends Wear Nail Stickers".  Make it funny even.  Why not show pictures of bad "Nail Stickers" and have users submit.  Think about it and you will be able to setup a separate but complementary page that is different.  Beat your competitors at their own game.

Hi there, It is hard to tell without more information about the links themselves, but I'd suggest that you try to track these links down and work out whether they seem good quality or not. To be honest, it doesn't sound like they are because there are so many only going to a few pages! If they are nofollowed, then they shouldn't really be hurting you, if they are followed, then you may need to decide if you want to try and get them removed - if you feel they are hurting your rankings and have caused the traffic drop you mention. If they are the cause of a traffic drop, chances are that you'll have received a link warning on Google Webmaster Tools or have a manual action which you can see. Here are a couple of other articles on link analysis and finding / identifying low quality links which may help you: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/ http://moz.com/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings I hope that helps! Paddy

One other thing... I'm assuming (hoping) that the content you will be providing the news site will be original and not reprinted on your site.  If you do reprint on your site, you should use a canonical tag to establish the originator of the content, which the news site will probably want to be them. Also, if you have setup a Google+ authorship account, you can claim authorship of the articles that are being published on the news site as well as content on your own site.  That can help with your search rankings as well.  Right now, Google says authorship doesn't affect rankings (which i think is debatable), but I know for a fact that it does affect personalized results.

Rand, Do you still stick by this, or have you noticed a shift in the metrics given the update from Matt Cutts on this very subject. Should I structure my site using subdomains or subdirectories? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk

If you get a hit from Penguin then you should take this seriously and see if there are bad links pointing back to the website you should try and remove them as much as you can! OSE take a month to update the data (my guess) so maybe you see the updates in the coming month but in order to be on the safe side just add the link in the link disavow file and submit it to Google. Hope this helps!

Loss of backlinks seen at ahrefs:  I've seen this on a number of different websites, and am not convinced that it's all that accurate.  In none of the cases have I seen a real loss of backlinks--what may be happening is that the links are on weak pages that finally get so weak, ahrefs' crawler doesn't even visit them. Anchor text: I would aim for a pretty high percentage of your anchor text being your brand/domain name.  From this article, it would appear that brand/domain anchor text at or below 35% of your links is a recipe for a penalty.  I'd aim for a number greater than 50% if it were me. I'm not sure what you're talking about in your 2nd question about anchor text. For detecting backlinks that are a real problem, I'm a big fan of the Link Detox report from Link Research Tools.  In my opinion it's well worth the money.  For removing problem backlinks, contacting webmasters, etc. I'm a proponent of rmoov.

I agree with Miriam.  I have had success with landing pages for different cities / countries with a few different clients. Perhaps also try some inbound links from .ca for your canadian pages and .co.uk for your London city landing page. I've used journalism.co.uk for this and it has worked quite well.

Hello there, These are forum links, 99,9% sure from article spinning as I am on a soft penalty case for a new client as we speak and came up with the exact same links. The first one in an online gaming community for world of warcraft, totally irrelevant with your product and I highly doubt organic as you mention. Same goes for the 3rd one. In regards to the yahoo forum, even if it was placed there organically, it is a nofollow link (<a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">="</a>http://www.visualwatermark.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.visualwatermark.com/ ) so whether they remove it or not it doesnt really matter as it passes 0 link juice. Hope this helps! edit: I do not want to panic you by saying I am on a "soft penalty" case. The reason for the penalty was site wide links and in particular one domain pointing to one single page 250,000 times and not the links mentioned above. I see only good in removing these links.

Yes, These sort of links may hurt your website, you need to remove or let it place nofollow under the link tag. My bet is to remove only. It's not going to help, single link is enough from 15 links .

Hiya Patrick, Whilst it might seem tempting to create 10,000 back links a day ( more back links means better SERPS right ? - Nope ) this will not help you rank up in fact it will do the opposite and is more likely to have you removed from Google's results all together. A long time ago you could get away with loads and loads of links however times have changed a lot  so maybe you saw that it was a good idea - it is no longer so.  The best way to get on-top of search results is to create good content and good content means good links. All though this take more time it will give you far better results. You can find many good tips & tricks around here as to how to create good content that may get you good links. Please don't use an automated submitter (as seen by the horror above!) Good luck!

I tried searching on http://www.google.com for comments placed on the disqus tool and they don't show up. Just a piece of javascript.

You may not like this answer as I'm not going to recommend some service which makes it easy to find quality blogs that will accept your content. Because that service does not exist. There are plenty of sites offering such services, but the quality of sites that partake are typically pretty sketchy. A few years ago this may have been an option, but now that guest posting has blown up, those sites are ineffective in my opinion. If you want real results, you'll have to do some outreach to secure posts on awesome sites that aren't simply a free-for-all accepting posts from anyone. Of course, this means the content you put forward has to be equally, if not more awesome.

Yes, but he also said that people are not usually named "Buy cosmetic online". That's just plain spammy.