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They both have massive numbers of backlinks and domains linking in. What do you think? Looking at the NY site, it has a total of 2300 links from 46 domains. That is not a lot at all. One site wide footer link can offer 10k+ links from a single site. The focus should be on the number of linking domains which is 46 in this case. When I review the links for this site in OSE, they seem quite natural. There are a couple legal directories but nothing unexpected. The anchor text varies nicely and the link profile is what I would expect to find. For OSE I usually apply the following filters: followed+301, only external, on this root domain, group by domain. Take a look for yourself and I think you will agree there doesn't seem to be anything unusual. This NY site is not setting up "mirror" sites, but landing pages. Mirror sites are basically identical sites set up under different domains. Landing pages are pages within a site designed to welcome visitors who locate your site through specific search terms or marketing ads. If this was my SEO client, I would advise them to increase the amount of unique content on their landing pages. I am not comfortable at all with these pages in their current form. With that said, Google apparently is comfortable with them and is indexing these pages. The site's DA is 31, and PA around 30 for these pages. These sites are very easily beatable with proper SEO work. If I were in your position I would be very pleased to compete with these sites. No matter what site you build, you are going to have competition in SERPs. What results are you concerned about? I presume you are searching for the exact phrases in their domain name? These types of sites usually do well in domain name match searches, but otherwise they don't fare well. If you offer a basic site with good content and solid SEO, you will solidly beat these types of sites every day.

Spend your time and money focused on generated incredible CONTENT not buying links. You or someone who works for the site can be reaching out to become a solid member of the housing community. Newspapers, government agencies, builders and others all write about housing. Find out what the current hot topics are and write about them. Don't write the standard "I need a 500 word SEO article" type of internet junk. Forget about your company. Write the best, most sincerely helpful article you can think of regarding a housing topic. "The Importance of Researching Local Schools Before Buying a Home", "Building a Truly Green Home", "Home Improvements that Add Value", etc. Write an article that talks about something people will WANT to link to. Talk about something YOU would link to if you even found it on a competitor's site. The value of your competitors links were not that strong. I don't recall any links from DA 7x sites. You can earn those kind of links with a high quality article.

This was a good answer and deserves to be labeled as such. I decided not to pursue this since I have been lucky to take the top spot for important key phrases. Thank you for such a well crafted answer.

If I had a client who built hand-made kites and he enjoyed sharing information about them.  I would encourage him to start his own blog rather than tell him to go out commenting on blogs owned by other people. The last thing that I would do is to go out myself commenting about kites and trying to get links for him.  I don't know a damn thing about kites and my comments would make him look like an idiot.

exactly, so in this case you are completely safe.

Thanks Daniel. The link/ranking competition for these individual category product pages is very low, so it might be very beneficial to have a handful of links pointing to each product specifically. I know that if you have 2 or more links pointing to the same page, Google only counts the first link. I wasn't sure how Google responded when you had multiple links to multiple pages.

No, from my understanding, Google continually indexes your pages. Rand updates his Search Engine Ranking Factors and he puts the new information at the same URL: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Thanks tomypro.

Thank you for your cooperation . http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelguides/travel-blogs-forums-websites-about-traveling-in-sri-lanka/ anchor text is = Sri Lanka Tour Packages

Hey James, don't forget the Wild, Wild, West is not a static lab environment. How old is your site? What has changed with your competitors - look specifically at any new entries into the top ten and try and determine why they might have moved up to replace you. Any server/page load speed issues? It is supposed to be an algorithm, but I doubt there is a single person (probably by design) that has any clue what it really is doing and barely what is supposed to be doing It could be a million different things - is your dev sub-directory blocked from crawling, did some high quality comment links get archived, did some of your quality links go away, did someone you are linking to get whacked or go away, etc, etc Are the pages that dropped still ranking for other terms - i.e. was it a "surgical drop" that I have experienced on another site of mine that I'm still trying to figure out. Just do an audit of everything and keep doing quality things... and theoretically, as we tell ourselves, your rankings should come back. Finally, were your ranking drops in the 10-50, 200+, or 950 range?  The smaller ones are supposedly algorithmic and "easier" to correct while the higher ones are manually and "time out" once the offense has been corrected - all kind of witch craft Good luck.

If what you say is true they have made some horrible SEO since Google will index their product pages and search pages there are some serious duplicate content issues to worry about. you should always tell Google not to index the search result page to avoid this problem. you don't want your search results indexed, you do however want your product category pages indexed.

And it's not allowed by Mechanical Turk, either. https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies <a name="#violation_examples">What are some specific examples of HITs that violate Amazon Mechanical Turk policies? [excerpted]</a> HITs that directly or indirectly promote a site, service, or opinion HITs that violate the terms and conditions of an activity or website (for instance asking Workers to vote for something) HITs that generate "referred" site visits or click-through traffic HITs that ask Workers to take action to manipulate a website's behavior or results

In some cases my list will be upto 100 locations - to the user this looks really: a/. Spammy b/. Ugly c/. Unreadable It's an irritating situation - If I am going for option 2, what I am in reality doing is pandering to search engines over users - exactly the opposite of what you should do, and SE's are very clear on this as well. You would have thought SE's would have figured a solution to this out by now as it must be so common - and as a user when I see lists like this which are clearly for SE's not users, then I get annoyed with the site. I'd be interested to know if there has been: A/. Any test done on such list types to see if SE's can actually recognise that although the anchor just says the Location, if the link title has the perfect anchor, do they take this into account. B/. If there are any other methods that could be used to try and tell the search engines the full meaning of the links - eg something like a tag on the container holding the list.