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thank you, I always forget about Majestic. I am currently checking the directories manually. and at present I do not have access to webmaster tools. I will give Majestic a go thanks

Yep, diversify you anchor and pray for the best.

sad sad situation for the article directories! sounds like their time has come and past.

Great thread! I just submitted one with Marketwire, it was much cheaper and I know they have strong contacts. i will likely use PR web next time and I'll let you know which I found better. I think it also depends on your industry and what you are looking to get out of the press release. Marketwire is great for Canadian offline media distribution if that's what you're looking for.

Is there a reason to not post on your own site and build up the authority of your site, rather than put the content on a new external site?

You would think... Hey there Chris, thanks for contributing. I agree with everything you said, but something seems to be amiss with what's going on. There's the "should be", if we go by Google, and there's the "what is", when we look at how things really play out in the real world of ranking. I don't want to beat a dead horse, the subject has been brought up many times before on how so many websites  seem to get away with what appears to be blunt infractions of Google's rules, but in all honesty, I never before had to consider hallmarks as a competing factor, I don't even know how they're perceived by search engines. How would a website designer who builds high quality sites but in small numbers compete with a designer who spits out low quality sites in high numbers? Should hallmarks be a contributing factor? Do they have a rightful place in influencing rank?

Thanks. Yes - I've had a look at OSE and I do agree it's useful. I also look at the inbound anchor text - I've seen some shocking examples!!! Appreciate the reply! Anyone else?

Ive heard all squidoo links are no follow now

Thanks for all the comments. Its made it a lot clearer.  Strategic seems to be the best fit. I have been letting one or two random posts on my site. This will now stop.

Oh, and I do appreciate it!  I know that it will definitely help someone out there anyway!  I had a higher bounce rate and found out that speed was killing me so, once that was tweaked, our bounce rate continues to drop little by little! Thanks again for your answer!

And that brings us back full circle. "Creating links in well-ranked directories using his specific category is still a SEO strategy even after all those penguins and pandas." No, it's not.

I started a website only two months ago in a medium competitive niche.  I run affiliate websites, I should state that up front. I started on page 40, and now I rank page 1 between 2-4 depending on fluctuation of the serps. This is true for several products, single word, two word, and three word + terms. I do the regular things I think most folks do, but I will list them; Well researched, grammatically correct, and properly formatted articles Articles are no less than 1k words each - if its not at least 1k words then it can be combined with another shorter topic. Broad scope of information on the site, allowing the opportunities to interlink pages to my money pages. Another thing I do that allows me to rank fast and high is the structure I use for my site.  It's rather unique and allows controlled distribution of pagerank. So my advice would be more content.  A lot of the time I see a website ranking purely because their website is larger than mine.  The content stinks, but they have more PR flowing.  Add more content!

that's the one and is what I figured. so I'm outta luck unless we upgrade.

Just a follow up to my previous post - I ended up submitting 4 of these to HARO.  Contrary to what I said previously, I submitted direct to other press sources, not through HARO, so I only ended up submitting 4 to HARO.  Anyway, I got 2 published.  It took a week or so before they went through, but I got my company and photo listed along with a link. So I think it takes some work to come up with quality information and send it out, but at a 50% (with limited statistics) conversion rate, I'm definitely going to continue using it. Good luck all!

My gut reaction is the same as Marie's - it doesn't sound like a typical negative SEO approach. It seems more likely that a past SEO attempt by a 3rd party went farther then you thought or got spread/duplicated somehow. Unfortunately, there's virtually no way to tell who created a link (let alone why). If many of these are coming from just a few domains, I'd also recommend using the disavow tool. I do agree with James that these links could potentially harm you, even no-followed. I'd look for any common clues as to who might be leaving these comments, though. I'd just want to make absolutely sure it's not someone operating on your behalf. I've seen that way too many times in the past.

Hi Denny, Where do you currently rank for the product, brands and manufacturer page?  Will the link be followed? If the product has some decent search volume then I would ask for that link to the product directly to help further improve the ranking. A

Thank you for the explanation. very clear and that is what i want know. Knowing my history, what we are and we do, you guys think that this 3 Keywords are the best to target?, or do you have any suggestion. thanks a lot.

What I'm trying to say is that your criteria may exclude blogs in your industry that are high quality with requirements about not needing to register. Everything on YouMoz is about online marketing, so it wouldn't be a place to post about furnace filters. I think you're missing requirements about the topic of the blog, making sure that the post is a good fit for the blog, making sure existing posts on the blog are high quality, and making sure that the guest post content that you provide is high quality with proper grammar, spelling, references, fact-checking, and formatting.

Glad I could help and give you something to think about - I would definitely think about 301 redirecting one site to the other site and push forward with building one great information resource for customers new and old..

AdTaxi's SEO solutions adhere to Google’s best practices for building links.  Currently, the Google algorithm is based on Onsite SEO as well as Offsite Link Building metrics related to sites.  AdTaxi adheres to building links from a white hat perspective and focus on traditional (directory & 411 style links) and social signal (social media style links) to aid our customers with their SEO campaigns. The key to link building in our opinion is to ensure our clients have the most diversified set of links pointing to their site with a multitude of anchor texts pointing to different pages of our clients sites. Good content helps but it can only drive so many visitors to ones site when comparing it to a strategy that encompasses both onsite (site architecture and content) and offsite (link building) SEO tactics.