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If you can find these lists, and if you can find a tool doing this -- Google can easily do the same. Do you want your first links to your brand new site in a competitive field to be ones that the search engines recognize as easy to get and where there are literally 500 other people writing comments on the same site with links back to their blog?

I'd suggest looking through the SEOmoz blog in the link building category for ideas about building valuable links instead. Takes more time, but is much better for your site.

It really depends on the quality and the relevance of the site. If you sell politically-themed merchandise and have a chance to guest blog as often as you want on the Huffington Post, go and take it. If you sell bathing suits and get a chance to blog on a site about raising pet turtles, your efforts would be better spent elsewhere.

Just a quick note -- I've seen Google index PDFs that were scanned images of a cut-and-paste newsletter from the 1980s with a variety of different fonts. This is not a guaranteed way to keep Google out, and images will also make your files much bigger than just text.

Hi Peter,

SEOmoz and Google use different crawlers. We're not quite the size of Google, and the server farm we have doesn't quite match theirs either. Simply put, we don't crawl as many URLs as Google, so we won't show as many links.

We DO try to crawl the higher-value links, and we show links for more than just the sites you have verified in Google Webmaster Tools. We also have some nifty metrics along with our links that you won't find at Google.

Things won't ever match up, but looking at the variety of sources for link data will help you get a better idea of the big picture.

There's an excellent blog post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance too.

My guess is the reason people do it is because it's easy and they think it will do them some good.

I understand wanting to get links. But you also don't want to wish you could remove those links two months down the road. For example, you'll see sites and gigs that advertise getting a bunch of .edu links, which may initially sound wonderful, but may actually end up looking like https://drupalsites.purchase.edu/journalism/index.php?q=node/52\. No human is going to read that and buy from you, and a search engine isn't going to give your site any positive value form that type of link.

Here are a bunch of posts in the Link Building section of the SEOmoz blog about how some of the experts go about getting links. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/link-building

You can also check out the Beginner's Guide to SEO section on links at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

I've heard of this before with Wordpress being hacked. I'm having one of our associates who is an expert at WP come over and comment and help walk you through a fix.

Here's an explanation from an SEOmoz staff member about what that notice means and when you might want to do something and when to not worry:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Warrior Forum has some interesting discussions, and you'll certainly get a different point of view than you will at SEOmoz. Many of the tactics and offers you see there are frowned on in these forums. As with all advice, use your own common sense and do a little research on your own.

Thanks for pointing this out! A lot of unhappy people on the thread, but among SEOs that have retweeted the announcement on Twitter, there seems to be a positive reaction that this will help reduce the incentive to create low-quality content.

Have you seen this post by Rand about things you can do when the "wrong" page is ranking?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

Hello everyone,

Just a quick reminder that today is the last day to ask a private question before we shut down private Q&A (see the full announcement at http://www.seomoz.org/q/private-question-shutdown).

We encourage you to submit your private question before 12:00 Pacific Daylight Time today (so in the next two hours). After that, you will no longer be able to ask new private questions, but any questions that have been asked will be answered over the next few days.

ONLY private Q&A is shutting down. Public Q&A is here to stay! You'll be seeing more activity in public Q&A from associates as they answer questions and endorse answers, and more feature development in public QA during the year.

Hi Kristy,

I'd look at a couple of things. First, have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools? If not, do so now. If you have, log into your account and see if you have any messages saying an action was taken with regards to your site.

Second, you haven't made major changes, but even a minor change in the right part of the code could have caused your analytics to stop working.

Before we get into full-fledged panic mode, let's do a little diagnosis. Take a deep breath, and go back to your analytics and get a little more information.

• Is it just that one page that suddenly has no entrances?
• Is your site traffic as a whole down?
• For that one page, what was the source of those entrances? Was it a link on another site, and that link has been removed?
• If the source was organic search, has you traffic declined over all search engines, or just one search engine?

If we figure out more exactly what the problem is, we can help you get things fixed back up.

That could actually exclude a number of good blogs. YouMoz from SEOmoz doesn't meet a couple of your criteria -- we require a free account, and we've been around for several years now.

I'm not seeing anything in here about the quality of the blog, if the guest posts are all related to the theme of the blog or if anything on any subject is accepted, if it's related to your industry, what type of content you have to offer, and so on.

Also, if you use the CSV of your errors, SEOmoz will tell you where those 404s came from too.

Gina, thank YOU for letting us know, and a big thanks to everyone in the community as well. Posts like this are great to see, especially on a Monday morning. I'm glad that Q&A has made such a difference for your company.

Google looks at URLs, and not pages. It's the same content, but on different URLs.

If Google delivered mail, it would think the following were all different houses:

123 Main Street, Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main St., Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210-1234

If you're able to use a canonical tag in your custom CMS, you can effectively tell Google that one specific URL is the "right" one, and that all of the others should be treated as if they were the "right" one.

What I'm trying to say is that your criteria may exclude blogs in your industry that are high quality with requirements about not needing to register. Everything on YouMoz is about online marketing, so it wouldn't be a place to post about furnace filters.

I think you're missing requirements about the topic of the blog, making sure that the post is a good fit for the blog, making sure existing posts on the blog are high quality, and making sure that the guest post content that you provide is high quality with proper grammar, spelling, references, fact-checking, and formatting.

If they have a little bit more to spend, I'd recommend EGOL's suggestion above, and then to look at something like page.ly for hosting. The basic WP hosting there is about $25 a month, and they take care of all of the upgrades for you. I worked with it once a couple of years ago, and it was the easiest WP install I've ever done.

What do people calling the business ask for? The way potential customers describe things can help you figure out keywords, too.