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Hi Adam,

They are correct that quality over quantity however I would be cautious over signing contracts for 6 months, I don't meant to toot my own horn but we don't lock you into contracts at Pixel by Pixel because they can be unfair.

It's pretty easy to look at links and call wolf on them even if they may not be "toxic" Unfortunately research is part and parcel of SEO however it shouldn't really take a month. I'd more look at it in terms of hours. Whilst they might be in terms of months how many hours are they going to be working on your site as it may be a month but if they are only putting in an hour a month is it worth it ?Ask to look at some of their previous work see if they can back up their claims

I would also expect good communication its very common that SEO firms get you to sign a contract then vanish with the odd print out report with no real human interaction as to whats going on.

Whilst it takes them a month to look at your SEO back links don't skimp out researching them.Don't forget you can shop around too!

Good luck

I'll refer to a question we had no very long ago on the same subject - http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-tell-the-date-a-link-was-created

Quick note even though you didn't start using them the bot still would have crawled the site etc. you just wouldn't of been able to access the data.

One thing it is helpful for is getting things indexed a bit quicker, don't expect it to help you rank though unless you are lucky enough to have a good social gathering and are getting good click through rates etc. Generally any kind of comment link isn't really good.

As mentioned each software has pros & cons though you only get a limited amount of links to view in the free versions, You can also use OSE as a free option but don't forget all the other goodies you would be missing that Moz offers that Majestic and Ahrefs do not have (perks, products etc.).

Each of them uses a different robot to crawl the internet and some are faster than others which is why they bring up more (they also have more resources) Ahref's is a bit more expensive for what you get compared to its competitors but it come down to preference etc. I'd recommend using the best from each if you can.

in short - like Ahref OSE also has a free option but OSE for the money gives you a lot more options (Moz analytics) Ahrefs just has more power and faster bots but this doesn't make it better just different. Check out Leonie Kramer's link for a great comparison.

Hope it helps.

All of the above !

A lot of people are using DA as a main factor though.

Really vary from person to person, many find a combo that works for them and use that.

Well there is the old "three click rule" which is meant to mean a user can get what they want in three clicks or less, but its not always that easier. What makes it easier from a user point of view because that's what you want to achieve can a user find what they want to get easy? No point in having one category if it has one hundred options on a page and is a bit confusing etc.

So it really depends on preference and how much data/products your planning on having on your site etc.

As well as LindaLV's advice (excellent) you can also set up your preferred domain in webmaster tools, you will need to add both www. and none to do this. Wordpress normally auto redirects the www.& none, a quick test of this would be to simply go to both www. and none www. see if it redirects.

If you've set up word press on e.g htttp:// you can go to settings>general and select the www. version but as i mentioned it should auto 301 in WP if not its easy to fix!

The thing I always think of in the back of my head is even if the tools don't see it I bet Google does and that is the main thing so as long as you know about the links you can make a note internally and work out and benefit from there.

Firstly you would never be penalized for using rel=canonical. If its the same content yes I recommend using the tag pointing towards the one you want indexed.  It seems like a messy layout though have you looked into making it neat and maybe a bit more friendly for users, could you not have a lot of that information on one page ?

In short - Yes use canonical to avoid duplicate issues.

Hi there,

As the bulk of your content is unique I wouldn't foresee it causing a massive problem for you.  If you are concerned  you can always do things like run it in an iframe or just link to it on a dedicate page etc. which can help avoid the issue altogether, but a very small amount of words are nothing that will do you any major harm.

Hello,

1. DONT PANIC!

2. Why not all of the above?

As you've mentioned no-follow means no worries but if you are worried and want to sleep better you can add them to the disavow tool. You can also work on getting the links removed from the website so it won't show up in tools like open site explorer etc. as for other action you could try to work out WHY but good luck with that.

Over time it happens to sites so don't sweat it too much it won't hurt any rankings most search engines respect no-follow so deal with it in a way that will make you feel better.

Hope that helps and good luck

Webmaster guide lines

"Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites."

Basically most people are wary on press releases as Google isn't keen on them. If the link is no follow you're fine though. So just make sure you know what you're getting into. It's also one reason why the terms for guest posting and pr and not about as much on here.

Have you looked into your robots or made sure its not no indexed as fetch as Google should work it it cant access the page then it may be a deeper issue. It's not behind any thing that may prevent robots crawling it.  You can also try screaming frog to see if a crawler can in fact crawl the page.

Once you know that bots can crawl the page then you can work out why from there.

Take a look over here - http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and we can't forget the Moz version - http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

Alternatively you can just add meta noindex on the pages with with the added bonus of letting link juice flow better as well as being a bit more stern to robots ( recommend the noindex tag!)

Some great suggestions here - http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

Google changed its webmaster guide lines a while ago making guest posting and press releases a bit more grey hat i.e they recommend against it (with the exception of no follow links).

Basically you can still do it, however you're doing it for the user not the search engine.

Thus as it's against the webmaster guide lines most people are looking for alternatives and thus it's not used as much.

thamls

A long time ago the TLD .gov and .edu etc. used to be worth more but because of abuse they are not, they are worth the same as .com etc. It can still be a good link if its relevant to your niche though so don't think they are utterly useless and they can normally have good DA with them which can also be helpful.

Might want to double check  -

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en#6

"Avoid errors: use absolute paths rather than relative paths with the rel="canonical" link element.

Use this structure:  http://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendresss.html
Not this structure: /dresses/green/greendress.html)."

Also have you given enough time for Moz to recrawl your site and pick up the changes?

Google is pretty cleaver at finding new website and knowing what they are about. If you do not build backlinks to you will get indexed but without backlinks you may struggle to rank.

If we break it down more as advanced as Google is it still requires backlinks to work out how popular or authoritative a site is.

Look at it like a playground, you might be the new guy on the playground and people know you are there but because everyone is talking about (backlinks) that other "kid" (website) its the most popular and so it is the cool kid (number one pos.).

In my metaphor how do you get people talking about you? Well you can write some great content but you need to tell people about it so they can start knowing you are there.

In Short:

Yes Google can find you if you don't build links and just work on content but don't expect your site to get to number one spot. Great content is fantastic but you need to tell people its there to help get your site out there. You can do this via getting in touch with people in twitter or Google hangouts etc.  so you can still rank a website without direct back link building.

Hope that helps.

Have you looked in webmaster tools as it may tell you in there under crawl errors ?