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Thanks for that - it helps a lot!

Do you have any opinions on articles or posting articles to directories?

Again, to me it would seem that a more relevant directory (i.e. a finance one for finance related stuff) is more appropriate is your site is in that niche. You would'nt post an article on dating in one of those niches I think!

Google presumably categorises all of this in a very clever way, I presume the lesson is to stay as 'natural' as possible? E.g. an article on a Kenyan site about a service only available for UK users will get picked up by their algo?

So, how does one control that up front? Is that even possible?

Hi there

Thanks for everyone here for their posts.

As a newbie (with dozens of SEO providers asking me to pay them!), I was wondering if there's a preferred / better backlink profile to target in light of Panda/Penguin.

I get a lot of companies offering 1000's of profile creations, which seems worthless to me! Surely certain types of links (local vs international), blogs, articles etc, have more value just through the fact that they offer something to the user who sees it (and hopefully that something is sticky, high quality content!)

I understand that there is no magic formula, but at least want to know whats not worth doing and working backwards from there.

Any opinions from users who have ranked well recently? I've got a mailbox full of sales pitches, so would be good to see this from an expert's eyes!

Thanks in advance

Regards