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Thank you!

Irving but what if it was the New York Times and it was in articles. Would you still argue that it is a bad link- Would you actually disavow all those links from New York Times (Hypothetically speaking)

So what about links that show a high number of links (hundreds or thousands) but are quality websites. Do I disavow all those links just because they have a lot of links pointing to my site?

Software is quite sophisticated these days, there's no such thing as incompatible directories, as long as the submission involves any type of web form. Rejecting the use of submission software has become an unreasonable reflex with some seo experts I don't see why someone would not use a tool that helps saving time,  as long as you are in full control of what gets sent where.

Hi Daan, SEER Interactive has recently gone rather global when they hired Aleyda Solis. Please see the link below: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/an-international-seo-division-is-born Admittedly this is not just for link-building but it might be a start? Andat SearchLove 2012 I saw a presentation by Lisa Myers from Verve Search on International SEO so I guess there is quite some know-how there too... Hope the above helps? Cheers Greg

It depends what you mean by backlink checker tool. If you're talking about competitive & research analysis then OSE, MajesticSEO and ahrefs are fantastic tools. If you're requiring backlink monitoring tools for your own projects I would recommend these three great tools: Raven, Buzzstream, CognitiveSEO. hth, Phil

There is no way you should use no follow tag for your internal links... as Branagan said no follow tag should only be used when you are linking to the site you don’t trust. Obviously you trust your own website and this is the major reason why you should do follow all link that are pointing back to your own website (to some other pages). Hope this helps!

There's a definitely value. If that mention was  "we used TVFoodMaps.com for our trip", that's better and if it's a link, it's even better. All that combines, makes up for a Natural Link Profile :). I hope this helps.

My guess is that Google is recognizing a branded entity in these types of searches but I'd also guess that mentions play into it.

The industry i work in is a bit old fashioned and i find it hard to get links from quality well ranked and relevant sites as there is not many around. For a Small business with a growing site £500 per link is just insane! I understand the value of quality links but finding a relevant site above PR3 (I realize PR is not the be all and end all these days) is very uncommon in our industry. Our competitors have massively more links than us but in my opinion there links are a tad spammy. If my link profile looked like my biggest competitors i would be disavowing them asap. I feel a quality link is, From a site that relevant to the topic of your site/page. From a high ranking site. In a prominent position as near the top of the page as possible. Surrounded by quality content about the page you are linking to. Preferably as close to the index page as possible, not 8 clicks down. The anchor text should vary from your other existing links. The page should not have a high number of external links on it. the page title should be relevant to your page and not be a links, forum or directory page. Preferably not on the same C block as other links to your site. The link should be likely to drive direct traffic as well as produce an SEO gain. I'm sure i missed some things as I'm a site owner not an SEO specialist. I was not judging "Good link builders" more the companies who claim to get you to the top of google in a month guys. Unfortunately I'm yet to find a good link builder. I keep finding the conmen and black hat guys. I think the good guys must cost too much for most small to medium businesses. As a retailer with an ecommerce site the current google methods seem to be geared to kick small businesses to the kerb. Ebay and amazon and now google shopping are wiping out businesses that are already hurting due to the economy. I agree with goggles lust for quality sites i just feel it is sending big multinational sites so far ahead that it is almost impossible to get any momentum if you are a smaller business. The thing i don't understand is why google seems to want so much content on ecommerce sites. Surely if real world shops are anything to go by shop layout, cleanliness, good displays, stock volume, price and service are what matter not how many leaflets and books you have on the products. in googles eyes you don't need to have the product and you can be double the price so long as you have a lot of info on the product none of that matters  it just seems odd to me as a retailer that they don't differentiate sites by type so each can be optimized for the particular purpose. That being said its just the way of the world. Rant over!

Hi there John, Thanks for reaching out!  While I am not exactly sure why you are seeing that, it seems like the reason that you are only seeing 80 on the dashboard is because OSE itself displays page specific metrics, if you are logged into your PRO account and in OSE, you should be able to scroll down and see "Subdomain Specific" metrics.  From there the numbers should line up and everyone is happy!! Thanks again for the question, please let us know if there's any additional questions! Best, Peter SEOmoz Help Team.

More than likely this site isn't going to be very valuable to you. Google is placing less value on those sites where links that are easy to get, are filled with spammy articles, and have no relevance. Basically, your article and link will be judged based on the site that contains it. But, I don't think one single site is going to hurt you. Test it out and see what happens. You will absolutely get better value and results by focusing your efforts on relevant sites and those that require a little more effort, like on Bluff magazines website.

Check out this recent video, it is full of great ideas and can be applied to most any industry with a bit of brainstorming and creativity: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/link-smarter-not-harder

There is no benefit or negative aspect to either - pick one and stick with for your own internal linking structure, external linking structure, Google Webmaster Tools setup and outreach. I also suggest doing a redirect from the one that you do not choose to the one that you choose. For instance if you want to go with www.domain.com, make sure you 301 redirect any traffic from domain.com.

So, if I'm correct this means that if you have a your logo in say the header of every page. Then, it is internally linking back to the home page. Would that be right?

I'd think about the visitor experience. Are they finding what they're looking for via your existing search results for step by step recipes or would they be better served landing on a category page. Do you get a lot of search referrals using that keyword? If you do decide to create a category page, add some unique content at the category level and build some links to it. I guess my only reservation with that method would be that you say the enitre site is about step by step recipes. In that case, shouldn't you be targeting the homepage for that keyword?

I've used this for a number of clients. It is useful in generating a list of potentially harmful links and classifying them. However, you still need to manually review the results as sometimes there are false negatives.

The blog network (link juice farming) is against Google's Editorial Guidelines. You never know if you'll get caught, but many people have. Link juice farming on product/client specific blogs, or focus on content for each course niche on main site, that is the question?! Focus on content for each course niche on the main site. Blogs tend to have higher bounce rates, but if that is a concern you can filter out (EXCLUDE) your blog to see what you real conversion rate is in Google Analytics. As far as conversions, it will depend on the purpose of the blog: sales, leads, newsletter signups. I would only have one blog because you can build a lot more authority with one blog than splitting up the blog five ways.

Sitemaps from xml-sitemaps are completely reliable. Google does not index all pages of your site and it also doesn't show the exact amount of indexed pages, that way the prevent users from using shady tactics to fool the system. In my case, with about 4K pages submitted to Google via sitemap, about 3.5K are indexed (that's what it says in WT) but when performing a site:example.com search it shows about 5k results. So as you can see, those numbers that Google show are not exact, those are just estimates. If you submit 200 pages via the sitemap and google indexes only 10, then there's a problem. As per your traffic change, you should look on another possible reasons, ans it could also take some time to reindex all your pages.

Thanks for all the responses! Very helpful.