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Are there parameters being indexed? Is www and non-www getting indexed at the same time? Categories and tags being indexed? Any dev changes to the site that you know of?

I do see for the root domain that there are 8500 links, and only about 400 of them are external. Do you perhaps have absolute internal links using non-www, but your campaign is using www?

It's going to be a bit more difficult if they have no physical presence in those cities. Can you give us a little more information about the type of business?

I'm going to answer your question with another question. What kind of value does a referral for 'donate' give you? Is such a broad keyword one that is going to bring you in the right type of person, or are you better off building content regarding the terms that convert better or target more qualified searchers?

Also, Google doesn't show SEOs or web designers in the local results, and hasn't for several years.

http://searchengineland.com/google-hides-seos-web-designers-32671

People who come to Moz are in the same niche as the recommended companies. It'd be way different if I had the same link at the bottom of my site that's about model battleships.

I'd love to see a case study from a firm talking about the amount of traffic they get from these links, and if it turns into any leads or sales for them.

In that example, there is not a hyphen in the domain name, only in the page name. A hyphen in the domain name would look like:

buy-cheap-pills-now.net

CNN, Tribune, and other big companies often have both in-house people and agencies. I know people who are at (or were at) both CNN and the Tribune who are in-house SEOs who work with contracted agencies.

Modestos wrote a great guide at http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos that can help you with a few things to look for.

We don't have the same crawl capabilities as Google, so it could be we're just not crawling those pages with the links. What types of pages are you getting links?

EGOL does have a good point. You can learn a lot from our blogs, Q&A, and our Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

You may still need to hire a firm, but if you have started educating yourself, you will have a much better feel for if someone is giving you what they think you want to hear, or giving you something closer to the truth.

Moz has a list of recommended companies (based on our own personal experience) at http://moz.com/community/recommended.

If you search, you will find some companies (there is one prominent one in particular) that state they rate SEO firms. You may want to look on the Q&A forum for opinions of those companies, as they often require payment to even be considered in their listings.

Also, what works for one person, may not work for another. Do you have a 25 page site that serves a local area spanning two counties and sell nothing online? Or do you only sell your products online and never meet face-to-face, and need to be present in searches in Asia, Europe, and the Americas? Two very different firms would meet those needs.

Jen wrote a good post about that at http://moz.com/blog/social-engagement-metrics-that-matter that may help you get started.

Have you read this YouMoz about white-hat link building in the gambling industry?

http://moz.com/blog/case-study-whitehat-link-building-in-the-gambling-industry

Edit: Just realized the original question is from 2011, so I don't imagine the OP had a time machine to see that post.

Hi Chenzo,

We've actually just back a report as spam button in the PM system that you can use for this. This account also triggered some other systems we have, so I've already banned it. Thanks for letting us know! I've gone and removed some of the information, but will leave the question up so people know what to do if they do get spammed.

Keri

Also look at "what can I offer that the other phone review sites don't currently offer? What can be unique about my site so that people will come to my site instead of one of the others already set up talking about the same thing?"

401 is unauthorized. Do you mean a 301 redirect? If not, could you expand a little bit so we can better understand the situation? Thanks!

Did you get the incapsula error message when you tried to click Post Response in Q&A, or when doing something else?

The root of the dev subdomain. There's a blog post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/url-removal-explained-part-i-urls.html, and you'll want to look at the section for removing an entire site. The interface has likely changed since this post, but the concept is the same.