Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I disagree on both fronts, Jesse.  What you said about the www is not true - I literally asked the exact same question by email to SEOMoz and the response they gave is what I provided above, of course without the editorial bit and mention of Majestic.

I would first say that you should consider other keywords including some "long-tail" keywords.  While these do not have quite as high of volume, they are generally not as competitive, and can tend to be highly profitable since the more established companies typically go after the largest volume keywords.

Through optimizing for the longer tail keywords, you will build more domain authority for your site, which I can tell is something you could benefit from doing.  At DA32, you have room to grow.  You're also not far off from your competitor, languageconnect.net, in that regard.

Type in the full URL including "www." in OSE.  For some reason the Moz toolbar and campaign dashboard don't link properly to OSE.  When you include the full URL you should see the links populate correctly.

OSE is probably the weakest link (no pun intended) in the SEOMoz suite.  Linkscape updates are only monthly (they've been working on this) and I've been told by an SEOMoz representative that OSE only indexes around 25% of the total links to your site.  That said, the application still has utility.

Most people like Majestic SEO's link analysis tool, which is more powerful than OSE.  Majestic has a free tool that will show you up to 10 links at once and has quite a few features that SEO doesn't have such as a "fresh" index to show links that are relatively new and therefore more valuable.  The UX isn't great, but once you get used to it, you will be happy to find more of your links being shown in that explorer.  Of course we want to see the progress of our efforts!

Holding events, writing blogs, publishing articles, etc. - basically putting useful information out there.  I've gotten most of my business from referral traffic, meaning traffic from people clicking the links I get on other websites.  So the links are the end to themselves, not just a means to getting promoted in the rankings.

I agree with what's been said.  I think you want to be very wary and careful of link opportunities.  There's a lot of danger in these tactics and for $5 I couldn't imagine that the ways of obtaining the links would be anything but spammy.

Contrary to what a lot of people say, I don't think it's all that difficult to get quality links these days.  If you're marketing your business in all the other legitimate ways, natural and high-quality links will follow (no pun intended).

I would agree with Tom.  I would imagine dashes would be better from an SEO side BECAUSE it is better from the user experience side, namely it is easier to read.  Think about what will read best when someone is looking at the search results.

Just a follow up to my previous post - I ended up submitting 4 of these to HARO.  Contrary to what I said previously, I submitted direct to other press sources, not through HARO, so I only ended up submitting 4 to HARO.  Anyway, I got 2 published.  It took a week or so before they went through, but I got my company and photo listed along with a link.

So I think it takes some work to come up with quality information and send it out, but at a 50% (with limited statistics) conversion rate, I'm definitely going to continue using it.

Good luck all!

The total number of links is almost always going to be higher than the RDs.  This is because the domain is counted once (hence "unique") whereas there are often many links coming from that domain.  Consider your own site - your own site will provide links (these are called internal links) and you will have hundreds or thousands of links from your own site.  If you have a homepage link on the menu bar, that is creating one link on each page of your site.

So the number of links is not very helpful to look at alone.  It may be useful to look at the ratio of total links to RDs, but that's a separate issue.  The more useful metric is RDs.  If I were you, I would pursue links from different sites so that you can build a portfolio of more RDs.

It's not unusual to have 10-15 RDs for a new domain.  After 1 month I would be surprised, but seeing that after a few months would be normal.

I signed up and have been submitting 2-3 daily for the past week.  I've yet to see a link let alone a response from a reporter.  It may be too soon to fairly dismiss the service but with the many people on SEOMoz that have cited it as a useful resource, I would be surprised if it doesn't work out.

The blog link you mentioned will provide diminishing returns as the initial link you get from a domain is the most helpful and each subsequent link from the same domain is worth less and less.

The forum does indeed sound sketchy if there are links to unrelated sites.  You are in a good position because your competitors link profile doesn't look great.

I also look at the proportion of DA and PA to number of RDs.  The lower the ratio (more RDs) the worse the link profile is.  For instance a site that has a DA of 30 with 15 unique domains has a great ratio.  A site with DA 30 and 500 RDs has a much worse link profile.

This particular site is not impressive.

Just seeing this post now.  Does anyone find it ironic that NYT drops a follow link to JCPenny in the article?

Hello everyone,

I've been building links for a while now and none of them show up in Explorer.  My domain authority hasn't changed for about a month or so.  When does Google do crawls and when does SEOMoz do crawls?

Thanks

Hey everyone, thanks for the responses.

I'm using my real name, not keyword anchor text.  Also, I am taking a lot of care to write a good response (a paragraph or two worth of thoughtful information).

Some of the blogs I am finding do have follow links and I'm wondering if those pass page rank.

Also, Brian, as for percentage of links that come from blog commenting, I am not really pursuing links anywhere else.  Is this a problem?

Dear Community,

I'm getting into blog commenting heavily now for the relationships I'm building with other bloggers.  I think the relationships I will build with these other influencers will be helpful.

But I'm concerned that Google may penalize my site if I have a lot of links coming from blog commenting.  If I sense that a blog is spammy, obviously I stay away.  I've also noticed that a number of CommentLuv sites include a link to my latest blog post, and that has helped me greatly in promoting my posts and building readership.  I am also interested in the follow links I get from it, but concerned in that regard that (1) Google won't count those follow links (won't pass page rank) and (2) Google will penalize me for some reason or in some way.

What does everyone think about this approach of blog commenting, and in particular, including posting some comments on CommentLuv blogs.

Thanks!

Mike