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Turns out i was wrong.  Take a look at this.

Some sort of russian spam has created 1000s of backlinks for this site to the non-www pages.  The weirdest part is when you visit those pages, they are forums, full of literally thousands of seo type spam posts full of links.  And it gets even weirder.  If you google translate those pages, the links to this site are using anchor text that is seemingly irrelevent.  Like "buy barbie dolls online" or "best chicken noodle soup".  WTF?!

Why would anyone linkbuild like that? is there actually a benefit to having obscure anchor text pointing at your root domain?

This is beyond bizarre.

What is the deal with this:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.selfstoragestartup.com

Based on the links it is showing, there is no way in hell that it should have a domain authority that high.  What am i missing here? There is practically nothing on this site, and hardly any backlinks, yet OSE thinks it has a huge PA and DA!?

http://www.pegasusdirectory.com/directorysubmission.php

Has anybody tried these guys before or anything similar?

Hmm, i was hoping that there was a tool i could enter a url into and it would do a realtime search.  I'm guessing OSE only updates their facebook backlinks once a month or so.

google directories don't exist anymore. this question was asked before google killed their directory.

Hmmm I see your point but it seems naive to assume that google can't see how many times a link has been shared on facebook.  It seems like  a pretty simple bit of code to hook into their API and return the total number of shares.  Who's to say they wouldn't use this data?

Let's assume for a moment that there are T number of total shares, and X visible shares, while I invisible shares for a given link.  We could say that T = X + I.

Further more if we assume that each share on facebook has an associated Page authority, lets call it Pa.  And let's also assume that each page that is invisible to google has an unknown page authority Po. Then it would follow that the total link juice passed by a facebook share would be something like:

Link Juice = SUM-of-Pa-from-0-to-X + SUM-of-Po-from-X-to-T

If we were to assume that on average Po was equal to the average page authority of the visible share pages, then we could conclude that

Po = (Sum-of-Pa-from-0-to-X) / X = PAverage

So you'de get: Link Juice = SUM-of-Pa-from-0-to-X + PAverage*(T-X)

Since they are capable of caluculating both of these quantities (all known variables) then i think it follows they they would be able to calculate the rough value of a link shared via facebook.

If i can do this pseudo math on the back of a napkin, who's to say that Google's engineers couldn't figure this one out?

So can we still safely assume that google treats facebook shares the same way they treat other links?  I highly doubt it.  Espcially because of the fact that most of them, like you say, are nofollow, yet despite their nofollow and invisibility, they still effect rankings (at least they do in my experience).

I want a tool that i can enter a domain into and get all the social backlinks available.  Preferably the tool that keeps the most recent database of this information.  I'm willing to pay for the tool, it does not need to be free.

Not sure if i'm using the right terminology here, by "social backlinks" i mean Facebook Shares, Twitter RT's, Google +'s, etc.

If i have a page on my domain say PAGE-A and let's say it's located at:

http://www.mydomain.com/something/page-a and this page has quite a lot of page authority from many many inbound links.  It is my understanding that if i "sculpt" the internal links on PAGE-A to point at only my primary targets, let's call the PAGE-B, PAGE-C, and PAGE-D; then those pages would gain some benefit from this link juice flowing through.

Consider a similar situation where i have a page, say PAGE-F located at: http://www.mydomain.com/anotherpage/page-F

and page-F gets 150 facebook shares.  would the links on page-F pass this benefit on in any way?  Or is only the direct target of the facebook share gaining benefit from this facebook sharing?

Furthermore, lets consider a scenario where there are 30 or 40 similar pages like PAGE-F all with links out to my primary targets.  Would these primary targets gain anything as these 30 or 40 pages gained facebook shares?

Repeat above question, replace 'facebook' with 'twitter'. repeat again for 'google+' ?

Is this also why people build backlinks to their BBB profiles, Yellowpages Profiles, etc. i.e. why do people build backlinks to other pages that link to them?  Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just build that backlink directly to your target?

What i mean by this is if we were to obtain 10-20 facebook shares for 10 different deep links like these:

http://domain.com/deep-page/page-one
http://domain.com/deep-page/page-two
http://domain.com/deep-page/page-three
http://domain.com/deep-page/page-four
...

Would that help any of these rank better:
http://domain.com
http://domain.com/product1
http://domain.com/product2
etc...

Extrapolating, does the same count for Twitter, Google+, etc?

Thank you for the advice.  We do have many other campaigns that are currently running and very successful at link building.  In this particular case we are looking to contact other local businesses in our area and offer them a link exchange.  They are not websites that blog, nor do we regularly blog, it just doesn't suit a small business profile.

So suffice to say, the only way i have ever been successful getting other local businesses to link to us is with the classic "link exchange" format.  Although it seems outdated, it still does work for this particular situation.

Hey Mozzers,

I've been working on a bunch of different templates lately to approach various companies in our industry for link exchanges.  But I'm somewhat stumped on what the best approach would be.  I want to convey the message that a link exchange would be beneficial to their ranking in search engines, but I don't want to come off sounding overly spammy.

Do you have a template that you have found worked well for you? Share it with us!

exactly, so in this case you are completely safe.

whoa, your title is so long it broke the layout. lol.

Thanks for the tip!

Hmmmm interesting.  Is there any way to confirm that a specific blog is actually considered by google to be in a certain city?  Like if there was some sort of tool that you could plug the address into and it would spit out the google city???!