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RE: "** I'd like to remove most of the blog articles as I want the new site to be very high quality, but isn't it dangerous to do a 301 redirect to the same page for all these articles..."** While others have commented on that, what we've done before on this is to create (note a WP site) new Categories and then 301 all to the master Category post page.... This is or rather has been solid SEO in that it is okay to group like posts....gathered all together on this master Category page and save the linkjuice that way...

I totally apologize.  I only said that because I've only seen women doing video gigs.  Most feminists consider me one, although I don't.  I believe in total equality, I"m very feminine myself, and HATE how women have and still are being abused all over the world. Where I disagree with a lot of feminists is the language police political correctness stuff. Also you can see the videos beforehand, and sellers can have addons.  I've seen one fivverr gig to get mentioned on a national radio program....but you could pay him up to $550 and get like a 10 minute commercial. The women on fiverr (in the demos at least) look professional, and not picking them because of their attractiveness, but because of their ability to read something and make it seem natural. But yea sorry for the comment.  I was tired lastnight and normally wouldn't use the word "chick".  It's a thing in southern california, but at the same time I wish people wouldn't make such a big deal about words.  That's what gives them so much power.

What is a good amount of pages to have? Your long-term goal can be to have pages for all of the important keywords of your niche.  I have a site that I have worked on every day for years with employees and there is still an ocean of content that we can produce.  Endless job. I have another site in a much smaller niche that we are producing content to the point of keyword cannibalization.  The goal is to absolutely saturate the keyword range of the niche.

Cameron, If you can obtain those links and have it appear natural on quality relevant sites, it is as good as a guest post. Just be careful and choose wisely. It works, no matter what anyone tells you. Let's be honest here.

Thanks!  I'll try and have them changed / removed. I'm thinking thats why Google is ranking me much worse all of a sudden.  My site is 14 months old, and the directories do make up the bulk of my backlinks.  Do you know if this is a huge problem?

At SMX West last month, Duane Forrester from Bing was talking about social signals and Bing, and saying that they look at who you follow as a signal, just like they look at who you link to. You don't want to link to a bunch of spammy sites, and you don't want to follow a bunch of spammy profiles. I realize that you asked about people following you. Some of the twitter services (though it doesn't look like this is the model of Twiends) for gaining followers follow a bunch of people in hopes of getting people to follow back, then unfollow those who do not follow back. I'm pointing this out here for people in the future reading this and considering other ways to get followers. Followers don't necessarily read your tweets, much less go to your site. I occasionally tweet from the SEOmoz Twitter account when Jen is unavailable, and there were a couple of times I inserted a bad link into the tweet about that day's blog post. I was amazed at the number of people that I got that immediately retweeted the SEOmoz tweet -- they obviously were not going to the site, but just trying to look like a "real" account by retweeting things from a known and trusted account.

Cameron, I link to my press releases from other navigation than the home page mainly because I believe the content on the home page is to get the visitor interested to go deeper into the site. I don't think it's bad to link to them from the home page but I think you will see the value of the link isn't that much greater than linking to it from a subsequent page.

A couple of clarifications here. Links from .edu (as well as .gov and .mil) are often thought to have more value because not everyone can register those domains, though there is debate as to whether they do have more value or not. Anyone can obtain a .org domain, no matter what its purpose. Here's a good post from Cyrus on the SEOmoz blog about building links with directories: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

This post from Dr. Pete also explains the 100 link guideline, its origin, and how to think about it. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hi Martin, Have you sent us a note at help@seomoz.org so we can look into it? That'd be the best bet. Thanks! Keri

Thanks so much for your response! Very helpful. So I've since removed the outgoing links to sites that don't make sense, and hoping they will notice and remove me from their sites.  I will from now on not try and cheat my way into getting links. Is it likely that Google will punish me for having my site on a a few hundred directories? I manually submitted and paid to get my way in.  Do I need to take the time to ask to be removed from all these directory sites? 90% are related to the topic of my site, but most are free directory sites, and I'm sure some of them are on the verge of being spammy. Thanks again.