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Bob, there's nothing 100% safe for the future, Google is a private entity and they make the rules of their own game. However you can 99% sure that links will always be in their algo, just because is the inner nature of the www to have sites interlinked. I imagine that they'll become every day smarter in detecting patterns and automated links or human trying to manipulate the algo, but what they won't never control is human manual editing. It has no (huge) patterns and it's natural which is what they really want.

About your alumnis I don't have the compelte view of your market and situation but if I understand yyour position: they know that they're helping you but you're not giving nothing back to them. I think that since they've studied in your center they've been selected as top alumnis and been given a badge to demonstrate that. If I were them I would like to show it, so ask them to write a post, I think that the value for them here is intangible, jsut ego-boosting you need to play in that ground, I don't know how renowned you are in your market but someone is always happy to be endorsed by a structure (maybe you can offer special linkedin endorsemnent for a really short group with good websites )

Hi Bob, take into account one thing. Google wants links to be manually edited. Editorial link is good when you hide a link in a widget/badge to receive a link which is not editorially made you're "gaming" the algo. That link is not natural under google eyes. (further listening here).

The idea is good, the implementation not so much. Why not get in touch with your top 50 alumni, ask them to put the badge without any link inside and then ask them to write a post about their happiness of being considered a top alumni or their experience in your school? There they can link back to you (or not!) but it would be definitely higher quality, relevant and moreover editorially made!!!

Also I won't be making heavy linking tests while the next, huge Penguin is in the air

Completely agree with Tom, save your findings in an excel file, which may help you in the near future. Just because if those lnks may be hurting you you'll receive an unnatural link warning or a descrease in traffic. The disavow tool is helpful on removing links in a great scale, not for removing jsut a couple of links each week. Is good to prevent but as Tom said, better to not raise google eyes on your site, a manual review can only spot bad things; I've never seen a manual promotion after a review

Hi Vac, send me a private message and in m y free time I'll be glad to help you, if I can condense the redirects in just one or two rules I'll definitely do that. However I think you don't have to redirect all your 404s. (further reading here)

It's natural for a site to have 404s you need to redirect only pages which are actually going elsewhere (as the redirect term indicates), for expired content or not available pages, you'll better create a customized 404 page to help UX on your site.

That's true gold Ryan. I'm trying to add more value to this even if it's difficult.

Probably you're making some confusion among the EMD algo, which reduces the value of exactly matching domains, and penguin which affects our linkbuilding strategy.

Waht you should try to focus is to create linkable assets and then spreading the word in the channels where you can achieve links.

If you're trying to achieve links in a product page (I prefer to point at product categories since product may expire or get out of stock) you may want to propose special offers or if it's difficult to find opinions on it, create an extensive review with a video maybe so users may find it useful and why not, maybe they'll link or share it!

Quoting Ryan with the best ending: "Stop building links, start earning them".

Hi Vacbag, just one question, why do you have so many

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /
[.................]</ifmodule>

First if you have the rewriteengine On (and you should, because if not your redirect won't work at all) at the top of your htaccess, you don't need it in every ifmodule.

If you use the rewritebase rule, use it on top so ti applies to all the rules, without repeating over and over. Maybe I'm seeing jsut a bunch of your code, but I don't see the added value of having so many ifmodules...

as far as -i know a click on a video ad doesn't always resolve to a visit to your website. The first click will get the user to see the video and you're paying for it.

If you want to be sure that you're tracking all the visit have a look at your log files or put a 1x1 pixel which activates when you page is loaded. Then you can check how many times that pixel has been loaded and how many visits you've received.

Maybe SEOMoz crawl has encountered a problem with your self-canonical tags. As Oleg told you, you don't have any issue with your canonical tags, it's just a matter of personal opinion to use self canonicals or not.

If you're afraid of possible scraper re-publishing your content and if you use url-based user sessions it may be worthwhile to have. But it doesn't hurt in any way.

They should not pass any ranking value, definitely not any anchor text value at all but it may depend. IMO if a link is passing human traffic to your site, this link may be related to your website and give to google some useful information.

remember that google actually sees that link the nofollow just tells him to not pass juice. If your choice is to not have any link at all got the nofolowed one, but always be selective on the sites pointing to you. You don't want any bad neighbour not even nofollowed

First of all, I'll better forget about tons of links. Sometimes is better to have few but good quality links than a massive amount of crap pointing to one or more pages.

Normally the highest value is hidden where no one can go. If you manage getting in touch on a 1 by 1 basis with good quality sites you may achieve few links but with an high value. To achieve this you'll need really good content. Not only original but with data, research and which may be considered useful to someone (because they'll need to link to it).

This is not scalable in the short end but as time pass by you'll be expanding your list of contacts and achieve a group of quality sites which already knows you and who are happy to share your content.

For this purpose, if they don't want to link to your content, try to ask them to share it on their social profile, there may be someone who likes it and link or retweet it!

About searching for blogs, I use the google tab but you can also consider on find 5 hi valuable sites and then use the related command in g search

I don't know how much control do you have on your url structure but you can always create:

-domain.com/toibiza/ --> tips on how to travel to ibiza

-domain.com/toibiza/ferry/ --> create a content focused on advantages on going by ferry to ibiza (and link to book now if you have)

-domain.com/toibiza/boat --> create content focused on advantages on going by boat (and link to book now if you have)

You can link to both boat and ferry from ibiza page, an to each other using them as alternatives.

Creating 3 different text of 200 words won't be high cost with a freelancer, though you can always try to mash up some content elsewhere.

Hi Scott, when did you set up your 301? If you look at the supplementary index, you'll find both your pages the one ending with the / and the legacy one.

I'm seeing that google still have the cache of you non-trailing slash page in their index since the last time they cached that page was on March 2nd. I saw that you set up correctly the 301, so it probably will be just a matter of time that google will drop the old page and leave only the new "slashed" one..

Hi Bob, I think that badges are really helpful to build a brand and get renowned in your niche, as more alumni use them the more exposure you'll achieve, however I discourage the usage of this kind of backlinks in your seo linkbuilding strategy since they're not editorially made, and since the link is embedded, it doesn't reflect an user real willing to link to a website. In this video from Matt cutts you can see what I am speaking about. IMO it's still fine to use this kind of links but only if you do the following:

1. put a nofollow in it
2. don't use rich anchor texts but only your brand name

In this way you'll be sure that no penalty may affect you in the future. Just a general guideline always try to achieve editorially made links. Hope this helps!