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That makes sense Egol - one thing you might be able to give us a clue about without giving away any client info is - did the site you are working on increase/decrease ranking with a change in price and no other significant changes to there site such as gaining of authority links?
Hi Egol
This is very interesting and I would be interested to hear the communities thoughts on it. What made you suspect this in the first place?
Do you have any examples or situations that you have noticed which put this thought into your mind?
Hi Justin - the new keyword planner still allows you to do keyword research, entering lists and producing suggestions etc. The one thing that has changed is that you have to sign into your Google account now, but you don't have to be spending on Adwords to use the tool!
adwords.google.com/keywordplanner
Laura Philips over at Koozai has done a nice post on the Keyword Planner and how it has changed from the old keyword tool we all knew and loved. She also looks at alternatives, I would recommend taking a look:
Yeah I guess so - what's your opinion on "Or should I stick to one comprehensive link section? Or perhaps a small link section? Or none at all?"
Either way Christopher it has been good to share thoughts with you. Hopefully there will be many more times over the coming months and years in the community - that's what makes it so great to be a part of 
I appreciate what you are saying but the point I am getting at is that I wouldn't use it for pagerank sculpting (maybe my wording should have been clearer in first place) but if I was having numerous links to a site from several pages on mine I would consider adding the nofollow to all but one of these personally. In a more extreme situation this is sensible if you are linking regularly between two sites that you own (i.e sitewides). I guess it all depends on context and value..
Hi Christopher
I am aware of the post by Matt Cutts and still think it is foolish to cast off nofollow links in this situation personally.
And even that article notes the following:
"[*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results."
I remember when I read the article at the time there were a lot of interesting points in the comments on the post and some confusion.
Also have a look here: - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
"In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways."
I wouldn't just write of nofollow - Matt was basically saying don't do pagerank sculpting but he still noted the use and value of nofollows in situations where you are linking to sites. Nofollow links still aid search engines and how they run their index on the web..
As with a lot in our game things aren't always cut and dry or should that be "cutts" and dry - see 0:32 here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnVEERmbdpo
If this is the case I also may as well start getting as many paid links from high authority sites and have them all no followed as they will increase pass pagerank, increase my sites authority and in turn search engine rankings then but I won't be in danger of penalties from Google? Google recommends nofollow for a reason with link schemes such as paid advertorials don't you think? Nofollows on such links leave the value to the human but remove the value passed by search engines and in turn prevent you from falling foul of the webmaster guidelines and getting a penalty from Google..
The one thing I think is important and we both agree on is the quality of the sites you link to is important and it is natural to link out to some sites and will aid you.
Regards
Matt
I think it is a good thing for a website to have some external links that are pointing to relevant sites that will help your users. There is no hard and fast rule to this, but if you think that 4 links is too much then you may want to consider placing a nofollow on some of the links but I would definitely leave some followed and not worry too much about this.
On a side note if you wanted to link to one site on four parts of your site I would leave one natural and nofollow the other 3 personally.
I wouldn't have a section on my site that is basically a link page to other sites - it would be much more relevant and natural, in my opinion, to link to the relevant sites in context with certain areas of your site and this would provide much more value to the visitor as well..
Hi Bob
If you are trying to build up a social relationship and want to gain some proper interaction with these websites the more you interact the better in my opinion as long as it is a contribution of value and not just commenting for commenting's sake then I would definitely use this tactic.
If you found something helpful and of value then I would definitely shout about it and let the author know you found value in their work.
How are your rankings and more importantly traffic generated by these posts doing? You are right you need to be sure before taking this action and to be honest I think there is a good chance that the difference will be negligible even though I think we both agree that we would prefer the full post title URL. If we strip it back to a very base level then you are getting your most important keywords in the URL which is helping your page relevancy so why make this extra work for yourself.
Hi - I tend to always set the urls to be the full post title. You will also notice that the likes of Moz does this as well if you look at this post for instance. Your plugin is trying to be clever as there is thought that having too many hyphens and words in your url will dilute the effectiveness of your main keywords once you start going over 4 or 5 words, depending where the keywords occur in the title. I believe Matt Cutts addressed this in a webmaster video many moons ago and I think the main conclusion was that having too many hyphens in your URL may look a little spammy to searchers and put them off clicking on your result in the SERPs. However nowadays this is a common practice and I don''t think this has negative impact on click through rates from the SERPs. If I were you I would look at my URL matching my post title personally. Small words such as A and with help to add context to your page contents in my opinion.
I appreciate what you are saying - so my gut feeling would be if you looked at it from the point of someone that never read this sort of thing then you would post it and not worry about no follow but your link would most likely be www.yourdomain.com, so I think this would be ok as it is more natural - though at the end of the day this is just my opinion and your choice as no one truly knows the impact. I would still think about looking outside the box and seeing how you can push the exposure of this article to gain you more authority online.
"I see SO so many sites ranking with nothing but press releases and garbage article submissions... What does it all mean? I don't know. But I do know we are working on a press release to go out this week and I need to make a decision on this...hmmm"
Depends how safe you want to play it and how strong the content of your press release is! How many press releases have you done in the past with followed anchor text links? Do you have a strong well balanced link profile? I see sites that are still getting away with using this practice but they are in for pain when Google finalizes how it will deal with those abusing its latest guidelines - I don't think Matt Cutts and others at Google would empathize this if it wasn't worth taking note of! As with many manipulative practices those committing them don't suffer straight away but when they do get caught it is usually painful...
I would opt to play the long game and look at using your press releases as a way of attracting more attention that will lead to links and social shares rather than using them for direct followed links to increase authority..
I think that none keyword anchor text such as your websites URL is safer if you are going to have a followed link from a press release. Although I would be careful if you are creating a press release to gain authority from the link(s) in it with the recent changes by Google. Remember the main aim of your press release is to gain your brand exposure and even if the link from it are no followed if you do it well and what you have published is news worthy you are likely to pick up followed links and social shares from other sources indirectly anyway.
Always a good recap I think - http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339
Have you contacted them to ask them to remove your images - informing them that they don't have permission to use them?
Oh yes, varying your...oh wait sorry you didn't want that haha.
Erm this is an interesting idea - on first read my first thought was you're trying to game the system and that's never a good idea.
Then I thought a little more and I suppose it is very similar to dynamic content such as offers on your linking page, although it always points at one location.
I suppose it is only similar to changing your anchor text manually to see what works best, but I think that such frequent changes could end up getting noticed - a link anchor changing every time Google visits - surely Google is clever enough to notice this pattern and doesn't it smack of over-optimisation?
I bet others have already tried this - have you done any digging to see if you can find out what the impact was?
Firstly I would ask what the purpose of your link directories were in the first place? How do people submit to your directories and what value do they add to your site apart from possibly having too many links on some of your sites pages? Do you have a lot of spammy sites submitted? I personally would look at cutting this facility as Penguin has hit a lot of link directories and as you say there are a lot of irrelevant sites in your directory! Are your directory pages indexed on a "site:" search in Google?
Haha answer a couple of questions well then or write a post and you will pretty much be there 
Yeah I would say it appears that they are working on some changes in relation to video results in their SERPs unless it is just a bug but the strangest set of results I have ever seen! Yeah funny that they are all YouTube links - who owns them again? haha I'm sure its just a bug
Nice spot William I have never seen a first page like this one - something new being introduced I wonder - a Youtube takeover?!! I better get some more videos quickly lol
