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Is this still the case? because in the Moz 'learn' it talks about connecting with you customers who have blogs and get them to put links on the sites. http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links *Manual "Outreach" Link Building *Get your customers to link to you.

Yes, you are essentially talking about Brand Building. The kind of efforts and initiatives you are talking about will bring different kinds of links, mentions, citations from all over the web including but not limited to Press Releases, Links to Press Releases, Blog Mentions, Blog Comments, "maybe" a Wikipedia page etc etc. It's very difficult to put a dollar value next to all this work, but if that's not the concerns, by all means go and do it. It does help in Brand Awareness/SEO which are technically directly related in my eyes. Don't try to target too much of "Anchor Text", that's the only caution I would like to recommend. All in all, you are on the right track. Do stuff that makes people/websites talk about you and link to you.

I think you are all going off topic, if someone wants to keep going down the same path then let them. Anyways to answer your questions I've been looking at Link Authority and LinkVana. I won't vouch for them as all these networks could be targeted next, but if you have seo clients who don't pay you top dollar then I would use these link building sites. At the end of the day you and they pay for what they get. But yes I also agree with everyone else here about using these services, eventually they will be found and you will be caught out. I've been google slapped and panda slapped, its not pretty. So short term go with these sites until you find a better way.

It wasn't really all or nothing.  Most of these were near the top of the second page or somewhere near the middle of the second page.  They all sort of entered the first page one after the other.  I'm not really sure if anything was done off page to cause this sort of penalty.  We do try to build links but I don't know if some of these were looked at as bad links or if some lost a lot of value.  I know that at the time the drop took place we did have some technical problems with our site that took a while to fix.  I can't say for sure if those problems cause the penalty either. Aside from doing a lot of SEO in-house we also have a low cost provider and they assured us that all of their activities were legit. I know we have some bad links that were mostly due to scrapers who stole some of our content, re-wrote it and left a portion of our URL on a page.  I think this sort of thing happens to all sites.  The vast majority of our links should be good though.  WMT tools shows that we have a little over 220,000 links to our pages.

Both Casey and Ryan have good points here. A slight clarification that Google doesn't like buying links for the purpose of passing page rank (which is the main reason it's done).

sescout.com seems like a great deal but unfortunately they are closed to new clients.