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If it's just paid editorial with no links (or links that are no-followed), that's straightforward advertising and you're on safe ground.

However, I'm guessing they want a followed link. Do so at your peril. And don't just take my word for it:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/why-did-my-pagerank-go-down/

Watch this Matt Cutts video here in which he says it's not an issue.

As it says on the tin:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-clarifies-url-shortenings-impact-on-seo/29312/

For what it's worth and to update my previous response, see this from Search Engine Land. I think the URL is self-explanatory:

http://searchengineland.com/links-from-press-releases-do-have-ranking-benefit-despite-what-google-says-145139

Dear SEOMoz

I don't know why/how this thread has been marked as "Question Answered" when it hasn't.

Bad, bad, bad. Not me, that Matt Cutts guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

I would start here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-beginners-guide-to-seo-version-two

I do a search and get absolutely nothing. Diddly squat. This may be one for your hosting company...

Can I toggle it from top to side to bottom like the old version (which had idiot-proof arrows for this purpose)? I ask because the default setting for the bar is now top-of-page – which completely stops some pages, eg Hotmail) displaying.

No need to apologise. I'm here for honest answers, not to be soft-soaped.

I agree with a lot (but not all) of that. A lot of the article directory/blog footer links were obtained 3/4+ years ago by a previous SEO firm. Like everyone else, we haven't done article marketing in 2/3 years. Funnily enough, ALL our articles on article directories were high-quality and informative (Yes I know, we should have found another home for them. But time was when even Bing advocated using article directories).

Re; the 3 links you refer to, it appears the company that built our (real estate) site lists all the real estate sites they have built and puts them on a template. Trust me, I didn't ask for it, didn't pay a cent for it.

Re: PR links -- I'm fully aware they don't pass link pop. They were a genuine attempt to drive clickthrough traffic (and we have received traffic from them). Why are they bad, per se?

We actually do have editorial citations/links from related sites, including the New York Times real estate section.

I'm not defending the parts of our link profile that aren't great, just trying to improve things the right way.  FWIW, our link efforts are now focused on content creation and social media.

All y'all SEO clever men be saying that paid directories (and fo' sho unpaid ones) ain't worth diddly.So how come when I open a can of Open Site Explorer on the a** of my (breathin'-down-my-neck) rivals, their (meant to be worthless) directories be passin' them lots and lots of link love? Riddle me that, people.

I don't know if I follow you right -- but simply put: if you remove 32 of the 40 outbound links currently on your homepage, the remaining 8 will each pass on more "link juice" to their destination pages.

Whether those destination pages as a result then go up in the SERPS would then obviously depend on a range of other factors (such as the innate strength of your homepage, your competitors, etc)

Hi bstone81.

Not sure I understand your question. Assuming you're asking why there's a disparity between the "link:" command and what you see in GWT's, here's Mr Cutts himself. From 2009 but I suspect it's still relevant:

http://tinyurl.com/amykbrx

http://www.google.com/search?q=bank&gl=**au**

http://www.google.com/search?q=bank&gl=**uk**

as explained here

works for me

This list here http://www.seomoz.org/directories/local contains some good free ones.
Otherwise, I'm with Brian: the number of free directories outside that list worth submitting to can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

I'm in real estate. I've seen sites get to No1 (and stay there) with some of the spammiest link profiles imaginable -- low-rent directories, blog comments, paid links from obvious link-brokers, you name it. It's frustrating, to say the least.

FWIW, I had a similar problem, in that one of my internal pages had 1,500 total links -- of which approx 1,425 were internal and had exactly the same three-word exact-match anchor text.

The page was ranking top 5 pre-Penguin for the keyword. Post Penguin, it sunk like a stone. A very heavy stone. As in, not in top #100. I've changed the links but still haven't recovered 10 months on.

Bizarrely, the page still ranks ok for other keywords, which makes me suspect some kind of manual keyword-specific penalty.

There are 455 directories (212 web, 188 social & 55 local) on the SEOMoz list.
Presumably they are there because SEOMoz recommends them.

Yet common wisdom seems to be that web directories have negligible SEO benefit - see this recent SEOMoz Q&A discussion.
Matt Cutts advises against paid directories in this video (which >99% of them are)
In a private Q&A last  month a member of the SEOMoz staff told me a link to my site from this directory, which appears on the list, was a "poor link".

I think some better clarity in SEOMoz's guidelines on directories would be appreciated -- and I'd appreciate SEOMoz staff weighing in as promised when Private Q&As were ended -- especially as many SEOMozzers take most of what we learn here as near-gospel.

Your response is, strictly speaking, the right one.

But I've seen people in my industry "black hat" their way to the top spots and stay there for years.

It's difficult telling people to play it by the book when lower rankings equal lower revenue equals people's livelihoods at stake. Just my two pennies' worth.

This may also shed some light:

Oct 9, 2012 Keri Morgret On-site Community Manager at SEOmoz:

Another reason is that we just don't have the same size server farm that Google and Bing have. We could crawl all of Twitter and get nothing else crawled, or we could crawl some of Twitter, and some of the rest of the web. We aren't able to crawl all of the web, and we release a new index about once a month, so that's why you don't see all of your links or see them right away.

However, what we do offer that is different from Google and Bing is that we show you links for sites that are not your own, we add metrics about the trust and authority of the page, etc.