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In general, you should consider whether a link is valuable for the people visiting the other site. If so, then it is worth adding. If not, and it is simply a link exchange for the sole purpose of attempting to improve SEO, then you should not bother.

Hey everyone! We are investigating the possibility of a different color scheme or configurable themes. As for the ability to toggle which side the toolbar rests is also something we are looking into. Please let me know if you have any more feedback you'd like to provide and I'll pass it along to our product team!

OSE and the API are down right now, which is causing problems with the Moz Toolbar. If you keep an eye on our Twitter account, we'll keep you posted there with the status (I'm actually on vacation right now, and will not have good connectivity, so won't be able to update this thread myself).

If you have the opportunity to get those type of links without paying for them and you feel it would get your site on the radar of the audience they have then go for it. If your asking should you spend money to get those links from sites with low da that dont have an engaged following i would say no. hope that helps

Again, thank you very very much.

Cheers!

Ah I think this answers my question: ....John Mueller of Google did confirm  at Google Webmaster Forum that, if a page is made 404 or 410, links to such a page are not counted by Google.

If you follow someone on Google+, content they share will be biased higher in your search results, if you're logged in to Google yourself and don't have personal search results disabled. That's the only definite. Here's more: http://moz.com/blog/using-google-plus-to-appear-in-the-top-results-every-time-whiteboard-friday As for showing other social signals on OSS - they're a useful metric to know, and will probably become more of a ranking factor in future. Shares from established Facebook/Twitter accounts with lots of followers will probably carry more weight. See Moz's Ranking Factors survey for more info:  http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Our webmaster has at long last managed to trigger a general IIS-generated 404 template page -- but doesn't know how to turn that into a customised one . Help again!

Hi Jeepster, I saw this question wasn't answered yet, so here I come with one: What I would do in your case, is to check when the rankings or the traffic dropped. Since, like you said, you have a child to look after, it means that you might not have a ranking history... well, if you have Moz PRO, then you could go to: Campaigns -> Ranking tab -> Change the "full rankings report to PDF" into "Entire keyword ranking history to csv" export it, and then look after the Keyword, Date, Traffic and Google Ranking columns. If you are not a PRO member or you do not have a campaign set up for this particular website, you could analyze your traffic from Google Analytics and check aprox. on which date did your organic traffic drop. After you have this, you could check the Google Algorithm Change history of Moz.com. Compare the dates and try to figure out what update has taken you down. Regarding 17 Server Errors/575 soft 404s/17 Not Founds/Access Denied 1/Others 4: try to export the data of errors and check them manually (sorry, I can't give you tools for this, the best is, to look it up manually) yes, these errors could lead to problems in ranking (a while ago, a quite big website of a previous employer dropped in rankings. after resolving these issues, we got back) cleaning up your GWT in order to be clear it will help you I really hope it works out for you! Cheers, Istvan

He seems to have sorted it out now -- touch wood. Thank you for your replies.

We've decided to hand off the directory list to a few interested industry friends, who are planning something new for it. There should be a placeholder for the new site soon, but it will no longer be part of Moz.

Use those General Directories if they include your a section for your industry. Squidoo - turned to crap because of article marketers re-spinning content. Got HAMMERED by Google. I'm not putting my clients in Squidoo.

Yes, the owner can delete messages, but perhaps you might be able to find something in the indexation history graph or other place.

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.

Over-optimized internal links can only harm you, you are in direct control of those, external links you are not. So I would do everything you can on your site to show Google that you are not trying to game the system and that includes well but not over optimized internal linking. Paul answered your question well though.

Subscribe to Ward's linkmoses email newsletter, and purchase the archives.  The insights you will gain will be invaluable.  I'm not sure that a single link will "turbo boost" your sites rankings.  His email archive spans over 2 years and is about 300 pages - a much better investment in my opinion.

Go do a search for "property" and "properties" on Google. You will see that the results that are returned are different. This is because Google treats singulars and plurals as different keywords. Someone searching for "property" has a different search intent than someone searching for "properties". Think about the search intent of someone searching for property vs properties. Properties to me suggests someone looking for a list of a bunch of different properties on one page, whereas "property" seems more specific. If you think that your page is relevant to both queries, then include both keywords on the page and possibly in the title to increase your relevance for those terms. Get backlinks to that page using both keywords as anchor text. If you don't think your page can adequately serve people searching for both keywords, then it makes sense to create two separate pages targeted at each keyword. Yes, this can be done in a spammy way, but it can also be done in a way that adds value to the user and provides a better fit for what your user is searching for.