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If you have a legitimate reason for linking you should be fine, too many sites do it (big news networks too)... however after looking at your sites I am not sure if this is what Google wants. My gut feeling tells me that they would prefer to see this as one site. I understand why you split them up into different domains.

To be safe I would use branded links rather than using search terms in anchor text. For example: http://www.tummytuckguide.com/ could be Tummy Tuck Guide not Tummy Tuck although it's hard to say if Google treats any of them as "brands".

Yup. This is pretty much default view for all my searches now. The who and authoriship seem very important to Google right now. So if you're nobody you won't do well. Issue for start-ups?

That sounds like something Google will hate by default. Your problem there is page quantity to quality and uniqueness ratio.

While we had it there it got very little action. We removed it in order to fix the styling, will be back up next week - hopefully with renewed enthusiasm after Google+

I like that! Thanks Rand.

OBL (from page) is not going to be a problem. OBL (from domain) could be - depending how large the site is. However to check each of 20,000 links we have in Google to see if it ranks would require some insane scraping power - not so keen on that one. Perhaps we can do it manually as we go or prioritise by most commonly used links. Ideal situation we have one unified metric which gives link builders what "PageRank" was meant to be years ago.

You do have an option of reporting them to Google (with detailed explanation of what they did). I have to admit in all my years of SEO I have never actually done it. Firstly not all spam submissions get looked at and actioned and many are used to simply improve the algorithm on a global scale, secondly there are much better things to do.

I would suggest that you continue marketing, branding, networking and building compelling content for your site and products. Create as much buzz about your business as possible and get people talking about it.

On a technical side of things there are probably links that you SHOULD have and didn't think of it.

Here's a few tips:

• If your web design company linking to you via their portfolio page?
• Have you given testimonials to service providers you used?
• Are you involved in the local chamber of commerce?
• Where you rent your office space, do they have a website with a tenant directory?
• Do you allow user generate content on your site?
• What happens when people buy on your website? Thank you page can be a great time to get people tweeting and sharing what they just bought. Use the momentum of after purchase to get links for free

Are they your (or your clients) direct competitor?

We're currently observing a crumbling empire of websites with auto-generated content. Google is somehow able to understand how substantial your content is and devalue the page and even the whole site if it does not meet their criteria. This is especially damaging for sites who have say 10% of great unique content and 90% of their pages are generated via tagging, browsable search and variable driven paragraphs of text.

Having citations is perfectly normal but I would include reference section just in case.

OK, let's keep the various colored hats out of this for a sec. What they did is simply against Google's Quality Guidelines - and that's it. The level of severity is not as high as if they hacked somebody's website - nevertheless still in breach and it could bite them back if Google should ever audit their link profile.

Yes. The address is one of the signals, this has been confirmed by Google. The address on your website doesn't need to match WHOIS though.

Here is an interesting article which takes the trust explanation further:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

In a natural link profile there will be both followed and nofollowed links, if you only ever get dofollow links and your link profile is big - it will certainly look unnatural. I like nofollow links which come from great places, especially if they mention my brand (citation) or bring traffic and recognition.

Thanks for the update Rand. The reason we did the test is because we have a very large, searchable link database which our 20 link builders regularly update and add to. Sorting by PageRank was not so great and lot of great links were missed so we decided to go with Moz metrics - primarily PA/DA.

What other signals can you recommend?

• Alexa (or some other traffic metric)
• IBL (to domain)
• IBL (to page)
• OBL (from page)
• Page topic (keywords?)

I was always curious about this so we did a test and the results are as follows:

Over a sample of 1000 domains:

• PageRank average = 2.71
• MozRank average = 2.34

Quite close.

Does this render MozRank near-useless, especially since recent downplay of PageRank by Google? What is your favorite metric at SEOMoz? Mine is PA/DA combo.

The best kind of competition is when it gets personal. Not necessarily about prize but more about status, ego, achievement and daring.

Apart from competitions you can try viral content. Here are a few examples of viral content I created:

• http://www.giantstars.de/ (Flash & Video)
• http://analogik.com/acid_trip/ (Flash)

Hope this helps.

Is the page lacking content so that's the only thing Google can scrape?

Try running a competition. We've had good success with it.

One pattern I've noticed is that if you have a site with a large number of useless or thin content pages your good content will lose rankings as a result. basically one drags the other down. Could this be the case with you?

Sounds like your pagination is being used by Google.

Really good point. I find that most of my content ends up behind a login (therefore hidden from search engines). Do you know a way of going around this? Uni blogs are good for example.