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Yup my images send me traffic from Google images on most of my sites and attractive images attract hotlinks as well. At the moment people are hosting their images on a different domain (cdn) and are still being credited with the images but I haven't tried to do that myself ie I don't know if they've set some "ownership" somewhere and somehow.

found it. it deals with the sitemap. It's auto generated. I also think it deals with search result and a high CTR. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

i would not look at DA, i would look at relevance and local. Matt cutts has said that they should be local or relevant and that they should not accept just anyone. If they should have a high standard of review and suit some purpose rather then just a site full of links. A site that lists businesses in texas or lists businesses in the auto industry would be a a good place to get a link if you have a auto business in texas.

1. I would stick with links with anchor text. This way, the anchor text acts as a rank factor for your keywords. 2. Depends on what you want. If your keyword/anchor text is general, I prefer linking to the Home. If you keywords/anchor text is specific about a page, I prefer linking to the specific page (landing page). I don't know what kind of conversion you are doing. Experienced guys, correct me please.

The Google link; command is notoriously inaccurate, to the point of being worthless. Rand wrote a piece on it a couple years back. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-link-command-busting-the-myths Unfortunately, as for manually checking for backlinks, your options are limited. The good news is that OSE is getting much quicker at indexing new links. Other good ways of discovering links include checking your referring sites in Google Analytics. I could be wrong, but I believe this is the principal behind Linkstat.com Moz is releasing a new update to Blogscape soon that should solve some of these problems. Majestic SEO sometimes has good backlink information.

I would take the Pope's irrelevant link as well, if the domain authority was higher than the PR7 site. What I'm saying is that it seems there more credibility to pages with higher domain authority than Page Rank. From what I'm reading it seems like Page Rank is dead. or at least counts for only 5% of ranking algorithm today. reference page site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday So what I'm getting at is DA>relevance when it comes to ranking. Although I believe it's nice to have  High Domain Authority / Relevance sites, it's hard to get on them when you're back linking to niche keywords in a world of big brand competitors or your competition is just spam linking(which is a factor why they are number #1). They are  linked to over 2k domains while we are close to 600. I figure the more domains you are linked to the better. The better domain authority, (regardless of relevance or Page Rank) will boost your rank. I believe that Domain authority plays a bigger part in ranking than relevance. However, I do believe that Relevance will play just as equal part as domain authority in future google updates. I am also open to constructive criticism.

You'll have to test it and see.   Don't remove all the keywords, just don't have the BMW keyword in there over and over. It looks spammy.