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That PointBlankSeo article still recommends press releases & article marketing.

However, Matt Cutts on press releases & article marketing as quoted by SearchEngineLand:

http://tinyurl.com/63pabf6

Matt clarified that the links in the press releases themselves don’t count for PageRank value, but if a journalist reads the release and then writes about the site, any links in that news article will then count.

How Valuable is Article Marketing?

Not very.  Both Duane and Matt said that articles syndicated hundreds of times across the web just don’t provide valuable links and in any case, they aren’t editorially given. Duane made things simple: “don’t do the article marketing stuff.”

He suggested contacting an authority site in your space to see if they would publish a guest article that you write particularly for them. If the authority site finds your content valuable enough to publish, that’s a completely different situation from article hubs that allow anyone to publish anything.

For god sakes, if the only page a website can build links to is the home page, then none of the other pages deserve to rank.

I couldn't agree more. Yet I've seen internal pages on high-authority sites rank #1 for very competitive keywords -- despite having no external inbound links and just a handful (4-5) of internal IBLs.

There's this Firefox Google Semantics tool add-on -- http://tinyurl.com/buybxq8

as well as this Google Synonym search tool -- http://www.synonymlab.com/index.php

http://ahrefs.com

Good, at-a-glance graphical depiction of metrics such as anchor text and the speed at which links are being acquired

I've run it through Open Site Explorer and the link profile is pretty good.

The tip about GWT's a good one - I'll ask if the seller's open to that. Is it possible for site owners to delete unsavoury messages in GWT?

I'm weighing up buying a niche-related 13-year-old domain that hasn't expired but hasn't been used in some time.

I've read the very informative thread here: www.seomoz.org/q/buying-domains-with-prior-age-and-or-pr

The backlink profile is clean, with only on-topic links.

However, it doesn't rank in the top 50 positions for its own (hyphenated & fairly competitive) domain name. Does this indicate a Google penalty of some kind? What's the surefire way of checking?

What I'm seeing is the overwhelming primacy of relevance. I've seen sites with links from a mere 10-12 websites get top 4/5 positions (beating sites with 50 times as many links) -- because those few links are deemed highly relevant.

A key metric appears (from what I've seen) the referring sites/pages having part or all of the referring keyword (or a variation of it) in their url.

Just wondering how google would know the difference.

I honestly don't know. Many sites already sell editorial space with links. Not all get caught. But some clearly do: http://tinyurl.com/csxu84l

Behemoth sites like Forbes can recover from getting whacked. I've seen smaller sites that never did. Like I said, you go down this road at your peril.

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/

I've heard great things about Eric Ward's URLWire. Especially if you've got content that lends itself to social shares. At $495 it ain't cheap, though...

How To Get Your Company Listed On Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/cy4vocj

How To Develop A Wikipedia Page That Sails Thru Approval:** http://tinyurl.com/cfxoobh**

CBS News: How To Game Wikipedia:**** http://tinyurl.com/c3z6rfm****

These may prove instructive.

Re: Naina's comment "...if it becomes notable in any case, you will automatically find a page for it on Wikipedia" -- if you run a small/medium-sized enterprise, I don't think you should be waiting for someone else to magically do your marketing/PR for you.

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.

Hi

Over the past 10 months, my internal page rankings (previously excellent) have plummeted. I'm now trying to recover them.

I haven't received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Also, I used to have hundreds of internal links to each of these 21 pages using the same exact-match anchor text eg, Tuscany real estate, Umbria real estate, etc. I changed this about 6 months ago.

So why am I still ranking poorly for these (only moderately competitive keywords) behind sites with poorer metrics?

1) Keyword: lake como real estate

My page here – **http://tinyurl.com/d34k8m ** -- used to rank No1 or No2 neck-and-neck with this page www.immobiliarevacanzelago.com/. He's still No1 but I’m down to about No13. Yet when I look in Open Site Explorer virtually all my metrics beat his.

Bottom line...They probably don't care as much weight but that must certainly carry some.

To echo TextMarketing, my hunch is that no-follow editorial links from high-authority sites such as Wikipedia are a sign of trustworthiness.

I'm no SEO guru, but when I started out I found keyword difficulty tools quite useful.

I think if you're a newish/low-authority site, it's pointless and a waste of resources trying immediately to compete for, say "real estate" because bigger, better sites are way ahead of you.

I got around the problem by targeting long-tail keywords "eg, real estate in Chatanooga". Less competition, easier to rank for and, because it's a more focused keyword than merely "real estate", greater clickthrough and ROI.

To whit:

In working out whether I've too many over-optimised links pointing to my homepage, do I look at just external links -- or also the links from my internal pages to my homepage?

In other words, can a natural link profile from internal pages help dilute overoptimisation from external links?

I'm after a turbo boost (direct and indirect) to my site's SERPs.

How beneficial is URLwire.com? Anyone here used it? Worth $495?

Given that Matt Cutts has said links from PR sites don't pass link pop, would URLwire fall into this category? (I'm aware the idea is also to generate backlinks from other referring sites).

Thanks

Hi Jason

I'm in a similar-ish position to Carol in that I've seen my rankings drop (from #1 to between #6 and #25 for various keywords).

This may be because for about 9 months, for family reasons, I ignored the site, so a lack of link-building/social engagement in that time could be to blame.

Question: If I've no notification of errors/messages in GWT, does this mean I can definitely rule out a Penguin/Panda hit?