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I can see both sides of this argument, however, I'd love to hear a solid answer. I have heard plenty of white-hat SEOs recommend asking family and friends to link to your site when working on building backlinks. As an online marketing and SEO guy for a company, from my perspective, I want backlinks to my site. I'm not going to do anything black-hat to get them, I want them as natural as possible. But reverse engineering this, looking at potential links you could acquire from people you know, then figuring out how to make it as natural as possible. For example, if I wrote a brand new, original and highly relevant guest blog post for a friend that includes a link that is passing juice to my site. If he sends me a guest blog post with a link to his site and we both post them, I am assuming this is a reciprocal link. However, it passes Google's "is it relevant, valuable, natural" test. This act of swapping exclusive, original, high-quality, and highly-relevant guest blog posts - is it considered white-hat or black-hat? Am I going to be penalized? Am I going to gain the benefit of this backlink pointing to my site? I would love to hear an accurate answer. Assume we are not using nofollow tags. Also, let me know what the case is if you do this once, 50 times, or 1000 times, what the difference would be. Thanks!

Well I am hoping if I got there once - I can get there again! Can you explain what white links are? I am only familiar with the term follow links.

Most likely OSE has not pick up on the links yet (give it a few weeks), or the links are too deep to moz bot pickup on them  (in that case they mostly don't have much authority to pass anyway)

Hi, There are a few ways to go about this, but for the best results you have to use all the tricks in tandem. 1. Firstly the copy has to be really interesting, funny and/or look amazing. Your standard boring 300 word articles do not cut it. There has to be something unique and offer extra value to other info on the web. 2. Promotion - There is no point in creating great content if it's not going to be found I have found 2 effective ways of doing this. Getting you post featured on famous blogs. Having great contacts in the blog world always helps, but is difficult to build up a quick relationships especially if blogging isn't your business. So I recommend finding someone with experience promoting content. I would to pay between £200-£400 for a good job. (I charge £400 but I'm sure there are plenty of people that will do it for less, just make sure to have proof that they can do it Examples: http://www.rollaramp.co.uk/news/infuriating-wheelchair-ramps/ http://www.airconco.com/news/how-not-to-install-an-air-conditioning-unit-1190.html If you are not looking to promote the content then it's important to write about something that people will search for. I wrote an article a few years back about the hottest cities in the world. It got no attention when it was initially published but now it ranks top on google for many search terms and always brings in at least 100 hits a day. Best tip is to use Google Keyword tool to find long-tail questions that people ask, then write about them. http://www.airconco.com/news/the-worlds-10-hottest-major-cities-839.html The two options above are scattergun approaches that bring in traffic to your site but do not guarantee top quality links, however, they significantly improve your chances. For good quality links you need to hustle by going out to respected websites and ask them to publish your blog post. It's hard work but high value. For example find a college website that is teaching people about a specific subject that you can offer extra value on and ask them to put a link to your page. Finally, if you become an renowend blogger in your field you get asked to write things for newpapers etc. The New York Times found our blog (ranks first for air conditioning blog on google) and asked us to write a piece for them. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/21/should-air-conditioning-go-global-or-be-rationed-away/air-conditioning-made-this-debate-possible Hope this helps a bit.

I had to think about it for a minute but what I would do is < meta name="canonical" content="http://www.descriptionpage.com" /> on your eCommerce pages and then put all the content onto one description pages and use rel="nofollow" in the links. Then all your content is available and if you test this on a few pages you might be surprised to find that one page with more unique content will probably outrank the two anyways.

I would place the widget on my site and and anyone who finds it useful can like it, tweet it, link to it. Make these widgets awesome and make your website the "go to place" for these calculations.

Hello, As i may understand, you want to get a list of websites linking to internal pages of your client's website (which are now borken 404). So, you can benefit from that link juice by doing some internal 301 redirects. Welll i have gone through such issues times before, and here are more tahn 1 way to get those links: 1. Google Webmaster Tools: This is the easiest one i think. Go to Google WMT ---> Traffic ---> links to your site ---> You will find a list of top linked pages at top left. (screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/fFoLEJC.png). Click on "More" (i have it in french here: "plus"). You will geta  list of the most popular pages in your site. Click on those pages 1 by 1, and u will get the external inbound links to that page. 2. Open site explorer from Moz.com here: Go fetch the inbound links to that domain, then click on the "top pages" tab. You will have a list with internal pages who received links and social share. Export this to a csv file. Then, take those urls 1 by 1 and fetch their inbound linsk using opensiteexplorer again. You will get a list of ddomains/pages linking to those internal pages 1 by 1 . 3. Use cognietive seo tools. They have a filter by url, so u can exclude hpage and llok for inbound links to remaing pages. But their index is limited (my own opinion) 4. Majestic seo tools: great index, easy-to-use filters so u may exclude hpage and lookup the rest. Hope it helped. regards

In a word: No. By doing that you a) get closer to being over optimized and b) your current URL has a PR of 4 and decent page authority. You'd be giving up both if you change the URL.By all means change the Title tags and meta description, but changing url WILL hurt you more that it will benefit you.

Is it different in Google's eyes? No. Is a single link going to get you caught and penalized? Probably not. Don't rely on buying links, as it will distract you from doing real marketing, and make sure you don't leave obvious footprints.

In addition to Lynns point it would be worth discounting these URL parameters in Google webmaster tools and bing in order to avoid any possible duplicate content issues, rather than leaving it to them to work out which will also avoid the case Lynn mentions for organic search (A case we also expoerienced with a client!)

I don't know if removing bad links will work for me or not as I've only just completed the process. I now plan on using the disavow tool to remove the links I didn't get removed by my own efforts. The removeem.com tool did help me identify potentially harmful links. It's a tedious task so using a tool like Removeem over Site Explorer and manual removal requests was the way I chose to go.

My pleasure to help you. If they have removed, then you don't need to panic. Google will automatically update. You have to only work on those directories which have no contact forms or not entertained your request.

Not doing that, thanks though.

Unfortunately, it can be murky and very situational. Optimistically, I tend to agree with @Paddy - this should be a good thing, and you're not doing anything wrong. I'd hate to see you shoot yourself in the foot by cutting these links or harming your core business. Practically, though, I have seen situations where the duplicates started to cause problems or the scrapers or partner began to outrank the source (you, in this case). There's no easy answer, I'm afraid, other than diversification. If you can build a solid link profile beyond these links, have solid social signals, and generally appear to be a brand in and of yourself, then duplicates and other issues will have less impact. If you base everything on these links, you could start to run into trouble. I'd be hesitant to tell you to cut valuable ties and relationships. For the most part, these links are positive. I'd just make sure that you've got eggs in other baskets.

Hey Edward, The second link is indeed in Google. You can see it cached at this link. It also has links in OpenSiteExplorer. The first one however is not. I've checked several different link indices and it would appear that the page does not have any links to it. I've also crawled the site and the page never appeared. So basically this is an orphaned page meaning there is no crawl path to it and no crawler will ever see it. Hope that helps. -Mike

Hey everyone, Thank you for your answers. They've been really helpful. Best regards, Tiberiu

Thanks. I edited my initial post to properly format the links and canonical. // Ooo suntem romani

The best I have ever used is http://www.localsitesubmit.com they hand submit to hundreds of directories. watch?v=PPfTaDkV6Eo

thank you for this. I was looking at sites such as citylocal.co.uk and thebest.co.uk who do this for each city. They are a totally different type of website to our health site but they have a subdomain for each city, so i thought this maybe a way to go but obviously with what you have said, it is not the best approach to take. many thanks

Hi Wayne, Google released an official post regarding this topic located here which may help to explain your question. As stated previously, by Google and in the post, Google does take measures to ensure submission to low quality links will not necessarily result in a penalty, but will likely not help your site a significant degree. This also means a significant ranking drop for specific keywords is likely not the result of low quality directory submissions.