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Could you give me an example. I really like your strategy Dan. It doesn't have to be a real example.

Hi Bob, I have done some soliciting myself for a free finance resource website, which went quite successful. Basically, the main aspect you should focus on is explaining to them the value that your website can bring to theirs. Go into specific details on why exactly your website should belong on theirs. For example, do you have fantastic content that they and their visitors should know about? If you can, let them know if you had any success cooperating with a major site, as it helps enlarging your credibility. Also, at the start of the email, just let them know that you enjoy visiting their website (whether it's the look or the information given), they always seem to appreciate that. Good luck!

Hi Bob, Many people are also using Blogger Link Up http://www.bloggerlinkup.com/ and Help a Reporter Out (HARO) http://www.helpareporter.com/ Hope that helps!

Thanks Cyrus. That's close to what my intuition told me. I'll try to keep the niche directories in the 4:1 or 3:1 ballpark.

I use UBL for creating citations. It submits your Local Listing information to over 200 Buisness Listing sites like Yelp, and others. I don't use it primarily for link building purposes, as I don't know much about how quality the sites are or if they're even followed/no-followed links, some may not even have links, etc. They're primarily for the Citations to improve Local. So I pretty much forget about links when I do that. And based on what I'm hearing from the Google Penguin update, Directories may not be that great of a place to build links currently either. Or at least there is a little more of a vetting process that link builders need to go through right now before selecting a directory to submit to.

500 words seems pretty short, are you sure these are high quality articles? What are you doing to promoted these articles?  Are you sending out e-mails to other people in your niche that would be interested in your articles?  Contacting them on Twitter and other social media?  Posting your article to social bookmarking sites?  Submitting your articles to news sites for your niche? Like Donnie said, you can just build it and expect people to find it.  Make great stuff and do some outreach.  If that doesn't get you any traction, maybe your content isn't being received by your audience as well as you thought it would be.

This is interesting: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger

My current bet is linking domains, if we're only limited to those 2. Sitewide links seem to be harmful as of late, proving that total links is less valuable.

One idea off the top of my head is to look for mentions of your brand or URL where there are not links, and ask them to link. I'd also read through the link building posts from SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4 and get some ideas from there.

Thanks for adding your comment on this SirMax. Very creative and not something I'd thought of!

There is a sandbox, and there will be chances to get hit by you, if you are competing for extreme competitive keywords. Then Google will put you under sandbox. As far as i heard on other forums, they got recovered from sandbox from 3-6 months.

Hi Bob, We're all always learning! A blended result is one that combines information from both the website and 3rd party sources (so, let's say it links to the website from the title but is accompanied by a link to the place/+ page). A purely organic results has no third party data. This would be your typical old-style result of the title and meta linking to the website. Most local results are blended these days, but the first page of results typically included both the blended results and some organic results. Do a search for 'pizza san francisco' in Google. If your results are relatively similar to mine, you will see the page start with a purely organic result from Yelp and another from SeriousEats. This is followed by a set of 7 blended results in which the title element is linking to the websites of various business and is embellished with reviews from Google and Zagat, contact info and links to Google Maps which lead to the Google+ Local pages. Then, below this, we return to pure organic results (2 for businesses and 1 for Gayot). I hope that makes what you are seeing in the SERPs really clear to you.

yeah i prob should have read the title.........................  Can I ask what industry cause in the lawyer sector There is 100+ article/blog sites 100+  LOCAL directory sites 100+ Other Related Sites a good place to get some backlinks is patch they use sub domains for each town so every area you market to you get a listing (and i think there blogs have follow links)

Miriam, This is making more sense. But how do we show 2 NAPs on one website. Do we have a page on our site for the 2nd location and list a separate NAP there than on our general contact us? Also, if there is only one office (like my friends who own a center that trains in california and utah both and don't have an office in california anymore), then how does the NAPs work there? I assume all of this effects the non-local SERP listings as well as the Google Places listings, and that's why we haven't been able to move up in two locations in the non-Places results. Thanks again!

Absolutely an internal blog on your website if it is related directly to the subject of the website is a great asset. I'll admit originally with one of my websites I produce a blog solely to get better search engine rankings and some of my articles were indexed quite high on the search results which produced traffic to the website all interested in its content. I now produced  blogs on my websites and find it more fulfilling because I enjoy spending my precious time working on it and know that it will hopefully be of interest and also it scratches my back in return by getting the articles indexed and also to some degree producing brownie points for my website rankings. If you produce an external blog obviously there's a very definite chance that Google will not associate your work to your website, and not improve your search engine ranking.

Hi Nakul, We're trying to determine if this is a huge undertaking or a possibility to compete. We don't want to waist our time. Do you need any more information? Thank you.

Here's a great SEOMoz post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building And if you're using a Wordpress CMS: http://www.devonwebdesigners.com/3278/relauthor-step-by-step-for-wordpress/ Best of luck, I'm in the process of implementing this myself.  And as others have noted, you can test if it's working through GWT.

I don't think it will "weaken" the domain but if it might provide a better experience for users if instead of clicking a link and being 301d they could click a link straight through to the target page. You can 301 the duplicate pages as well if you like.

You have some valid points to consider... things seem to be improving and the articles that you might cut do pull in some traffic. I can't tell you how to make your decision but here is how I made mine.. I had hundreds of republished articles but a lot more that I had written myself.  Deleting lots of republished articles would cut my traffic and cut my income.  Noindexing them would cut my traffic and cut my income.  However, although those were serious losses they were small in comparison to other content on my site.  So, knowing that google does not like duplicate content I got rid of them.  There is still lots of great content on my site, visitors still find stuff to read, I know which of the things that I cut I should author a customized version for my own site. The upside....  My site is more compact but still has thousands of content pages and the content that remains should be a lot stronger.  After making the cuts my rankings, income and traffic increased.  Not quite to previous levels but back to nice numbers. I have reduced risk and am pleased with that.  Everything that I cut was redirected to similar content.  The most valuable of what was cut will be replaced with custom content with 301 redirects from the old content. ============================ How likely is this list of 60 articles out of 200 pages causing or will cause a major problem with past or future panda updates? 17 of 60 are by us, a few are written for us, and several more show up as only us when you type in the title into google surrounded by quotes. What from this is unique?  Definitely keep that.  Keep what is not struggling in Google. Keep what is essential to your site but replace with better that you create yourself. Do you see further risk in future panda updates? Yep... that's why I cut off my foot. My thoughts are to rel=author each of our own articles, YES... In the past I wanted all of my content to be anonymously written.  I have changed my mind on that and used rel=author on the best stuff. no-index the duplicates between our 3 sites (We have 3 sites that share a few articles) and no-index the remaining articles. heh....   Here I would be chopping off two of those sites and merging them into one.  I would have done that years ago before panda was ever heard of. I think that the drop in traffic will be outweighed by the lack of risk of current or future ranking drops. I agree.

Very Greatful for SEOMoz. Thanks.