Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Done, thank you!

I am happy I could be of help. Sincerely, Thomas

A very strong home page will help out wack landing pages. If you have the time to breeze through chapter 7, it may help to grow the popularity: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo. There are way too many factors in trying to find out why one page ranks over another. And let me tell you one thing.... always remember this.... OSE is not that accurate, but it's the next best thing to have since you can't get your competitors username/pass to GWT. Compare your GWT inbound links to OSE's inbound links to see if there is a difference. My recommendation is work on your pages. Jesus Christ! If you were Google, would you rank a page with only 3 sentences? http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain  Those pages are probably bringing down the rest of your site. Sorry to sound so blunt, but that's my answer.

HI csblev, Forum links / blog links are very important. For 2 reasons. A. They typically are text anchor links like... you should try "Open Site Explorer". This gives Search Engines text to relate to the page based on what other people think is important about your page. Compared to a link directory which usually is just your company name or url linked to your home page.. little value for any specific keywords except your company name which you probably have locked up anyway. B. Secondly on forums / blogs that relate to your industry is where you want to be for direct customer purposes. I've given this advice before, but I'll do it again. Personally, if you have the time I would invest it in your business appropriate forums  and blogs. Find where your potential customers interact with each other, go to their forum and "engage" the community. Offer them free advice, answer questions and in general share your knowledge. By proving yourself helpful and when it is appropriate you can drop a link to a product page or an article on your site. The biggest caveat I can say is don't run around hitting up forums and spamming them, every forum that you want to be on has some sort of moderator that will remove your post. And personally if I'm on a community site and I see a blatant spam post, not only will I not click it, I will make a mental note to never go there. I don't know what industry you're in, but if your site is much better and a leading authority then these types of forums should be picking up on you on their own. And your users / customers should already be generating some of these links for you, if not.. you need to ask yourself why not?. Sometimes forums need a push so it certainly doesn't' hurt to follow my advice above, but you may need to focus some attention on what you can do to make people want to link to you, rather then going out and doing it yourself.

If Google came out today and said "site traffic, time on site and bounce rate are all going to be factors of our algorithm" then ethically-challenged individuals and companies may considering banks of users based in places with low labour costs to try to manipulate the algorithm. It is almost certain that Google has considered this in the past but is worried that people may try and game the system. As such I would expect any ranking element related to the quality of a site to be more complex. There are suggestions that Google is trying to get algorithms to be able to judge the aesthetic quality of a site and that this could be a factor in the future

Thanks!