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That's quite a tough question to answer as it depends on a huge variety of factors. Some of the new websites sit on aged domains and are more powerful than brand new domains subsequently they rank quicker. Some of the new websites are blogs and are updated with fresh content rather than static 'brochure' websites (which struggle to rank for anything).

You are correct. The more links you get from a website, the less important future links become. However, at least the first 3, or 4 links from that site will be worth a lot of links juice. If I were you, I would try to write up to 5 unique articles per site, all with unique anchor text (watch this weeks white board friday video) Point most of the links to your home page, and a couple of them toward important internal pages. I would say that mixing up the landing pages will help a little, but make sure your links go to related and relevant pages. Remember, inbound marketing is all about getting high quality traffic., If your articles are accomplishing that goal, go for it, even if the link value isn't high.

Will a home page link from a PR8 chinese site help me? Will my site be penalized? Maybe yes, maybe no. If the link isn't devalued by search engines, then yes it will provide some help. What kind of devaluation can happen? 1. The link could be completely devalued if Google suspects the site involved is receiving or making a payment for the link 2. The link can be partially devalued if it is a footer link or otherwise not used in content (i.e. a list of links) No one except a current Google or Bing employee who decides to break the company's NDA (non-disclosure agreement) can properly answer your question. In other words, we are guessing. What we do know is Google is a very intelligent entity with some of the best minds on our little planet working to ensure their results are not manipulated. What makes sense is Google locates sites which sell links and then adds that site to a penalty list and devalues all of their links. This could have already happened for the Chinese website you are considering. None of the SEO tools you depend on such as Open Site Explorer have any idea if a link has been devalued, so you simply see a high DA/PA site. My recommendation is instead of trying to manipulate the system with such an effort, why not put that same money towards legitimate efforts? Even if your link does work for now, it can be devalued tomorrow or a year later. When it happens you will wind up back on these forums asking "why did my site drop in rankings all of the sudden?" We see it all the time. If you have money to burn and desire improvement, some suggestions are: if you really want links, focus on the few accepted directories who offer links with value: BOTW, Yahoo, BBB, Dmoz. Also consider any niche directories for your industry. spend the money on trust symbols which add value to sites such as Verisign, TRUSTe, organizations like GBB.org, etc. Also consider any niche symbols related to your site. hire an SEO for a site analysis. Most sites have opportunities on page. Improve your site so it naturally ranks better. On page SEO is half the battle. hire a quality content writer. Most SEOs agree "content is king". Even for those who disagree, they understand content has a big impact on your rankings. Look for "best of the web" content, not just average internet content invest in graphics. Improve the look and feel of your site. Make it an award winning site to where it is discussed by graphic designers and other sites about how amazing your site appears. Create an infographic for your niche which others will naturally link to create a useful widget which your site's visitors can use and will offer a backlink hire an expert to write or officially review an article. Articles written by doctors, attorneys and other experts add credibility to your site. hold a content and give away a prize. If the contest is performed correctly, you can gain a lot of social media and other attention. create videos for your site. Quality, original media can make a big impact. This works for images as well. You can pay a SEO to perform quality link building as well. Rather then hiring a permanent SEO, you may wish to hire a dedicated, intelligent college student who is capable of learning SEO basics and your niche. Let's say your site is a health food store. This link builder can then read the overwhelming number of health blogs and forums daily, offering comments and feedback as appropriate and occasionally linking back to your site with helpful information. The list goes on but the point remains the same. There is a huge number of quality, white hat methods to grow your site in a sustainable way which provides real value and will last for years? It doesn't make sense to pay for links which may offer no value at all to visitors and may offer no value to you either.

thanks sha!

Thanks Ryan, I can play with the widget code for the Facebook. Yes, I am doing an entire site redesign but I wanted to run a few things over here at SEOMoz as well. It is pretty comprehensive based on all the topics and content and so it is taking a while. My designer so rocks--and has some great ideas.

You want to have less than 100 links on a page, that includes internal and external links. using a tool like seoquake or even an seomoz tool may exist to check this kind of on page info. generally you want to have a constant link building profile, do you think facebook and twitter getting incredible volumes of links would get penalized?! no of course not. natural just means regular and normal looking. if you can build 100 links in a day and then spend 10 days not building links you are much better off building 10 links a day for the 10 days. really you shouldn't be in charge of your incoming links, your quality and value bring in links by having people like your content and share it. hope this helps

Hey Sha, Sorry for the slow reply. Yes, I checked the URLs that were listed and I didn't actually receive a 403 error. I guess I figured there would be some room for lag time but these errors are over a month old so I thought that was strange.

I have heard that Google does indeed use characters after the 65 character display limit in its ranking algorithms. Is this true and does it therefore make sense to have title tags longer than 65 characters, so long as the first 65 characters (or 60 in many cases) are a complete thought on their own? Here is a page describing this strategy: http://www.seologic.com/faq/title-tags.php#limits

Perm 301 re-direct all sub-brand sites to www.tire-sensors.com. Keep the old domains as you will still get referals from them for sometime to come. Or you could 301 redirect each branded URL to the new location of that particular brand of sensor on the new site. Then to target those indiviual keyword terms, when you catagorize the products in order of brand, simply set the url up as www.tire-sensors.com/suzuki-tire-sensors/product-name Title tage could be in the form of "product name | suzuki tire sensors | your brand

Hi Phil From an SEO standpoint and in an ideal world, dealing with localisation issues, it would be preferred to have each country specific site hosted within that particular country. But this throws up additional hosting cost as well as individual link building efforts to each of those domains. The best way would be to redirect any country specific versions of the domain to the relevant root folder. For example, if we were to launch hurco in Italy, the preference would be to place the Italian content within a subfolder (i.e. http://www.hurco.com/it/) but also purchase http://www.hurco.it and use a 301 redirect the site to the Italian subfolder. This is done both to preserve your brand assets in other countries and markets, but also to avoid any confusion should a user mistakenly remember your brand but not your site. The subfolders or portions of the website can be targeted to the local market by way of designation within Google Webmaster Tools.

I've seen it done before for the first time about two weeks ago. I checked up on the rankings of the website, which was in a local (read: no competition) web development niche. The website was not ranking for anything. Take that as you will, it's certainly not a case study. Personally I wouldn't do it. What value does it bring your visitors? Any at all? If not, it's probably not a good idea, as per the advice Matt Cutts and the Google quality guidelines state: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Take a step back and think about it. Doesn't that seem excessively spammy?

If you're talking about the column in the report "301 (permanent redirect)", its telling you whether the page returns a 301 status or not. It is not giving you a recommendation about whether or not to 301 the page.

Will do. I might do an hour of link building on the weekend just to get Google to it a bit quicker. I do rank for another EMD, which is at position 4, I built it in couple hours and did 1 hour link building, O and it has 8 affiliate links point out as well. Its been stable for months now at that position, which says to me if its an EMD and its a .co.uk, GAME ON!

The best way to go is to continue building quality links. These links you've 'kindly' acquired from a competitor have clearly made your link profile look worse than it should be. The fact you've got nearly 450k links coming from less than 100 domains will look a tad suspicious to G. If you continue to build quality links, google will see that you're not getting your links from spammy sources and the other links you've been given could easily turn from having a negative effect to having a positive effect. As it's a new site, this is the time when your link profile is watched carefully, so although it's unfortunate to have got these links, it's not the end of the world by any means. Try and get some links from sites with a high MozRank using white hat tactics.

Ooo, Panda, that's caused a fair bit of trouble hasn't it!? We did the following; Re-formatted and re-wrote a lot of old or 'rubbish' content. Including it's layout and the navigation process Culled any links which looked a bit spammy and tried to obtain links from site with higher MozRank and more credible links itself Updated all our business listings on the major listing sites such as Yell, Google Local, etc. And made sure our domain and addresses on the website corresponded with the business listings. With a view to increase the overall trust of the site. Hope that helps!

Does anyone have any further feedback on this?  We are at a complete lost as to why the penalty may have occured.