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Links can be a tricky thing however SEOMOZ really has some cool tools to figure this out such as LinkScape and others to determine where your domain is currently compared to your competitors. However that being said, I would not just focus on the links.. There are so many other aspects to getting good traffic and rankings, such as good content and a good product or service. Without those it is hard to get good quality links that will mater. The number of links used to matter and still have their value however if you focus on your core business and develop a quality site that keeps visitors engaged you will succeed much more than just looking for links. Watch your bounce rates and your content find out what is working and what is not. Finding that perfect number will make you pull your hair out and will waste time when you could be doing better things for your site and company.. Wil Reynolds offered up some really good ideas as well down at the Affiliate Summit and its work taking the time to watch his seminar on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hSQ0DZdSDMI#t=368s I hope this helps.

I would not think so, but you may of been getting credit for linking to a reletive authoritive site. was the link to a an authoritive site? if so, no-folloing may have robed you of that credit

Page and site load speed/time is a factor as Matt has said in the past. It's beginning to take more effective value in the 'user experience' which Google is trumpeting in past months. I would surely aim to analyze and look over the data you need to see the value in taking the time to start correcting issues with regards to your site speed and load times. Yslow is a great tool for sure, but you can also download a chrome AP called 'SEO Site Tools', which has some great features to determine things like this. I would also look to incorporate Gzip into your site for compression. You might also want to look at the file size of the homepage. If it exceeds 30kb, it's probably too large, and taking more time than needed to call the HTTP requests for various CSS, JS scripts, images, etc.. Just some more things too look at Cheers.

SuperlativB is correct in his statement.  Use the tags to provide a description of the image and additional informative data.  Remember to use best practices with img alt tags as website readers for visually impaired rely on alt tags for proper website experience.

Increasing page shares with targeted keywords (1-2) have helped me get rankings. Along with reviews (social) and video.

Yes, there has been an algorithmic change to Google's PPC for QS. Your Quality Score is now being weighted to make landing page relevancy more important. IMHO this is great news for savvy marketers and end users. Here's a post from Google on the Ad quality improvement. Marin Software's findings suggest that this change has had a limited impact on under 11.25% accounts and affected by no more than 0.25 QS. I also believe that the rollout of shifting the weight towards LPs has been small, but I predict that more weight will be placed on LPs as paid search matures. I'd also speculate and add that Google Website Optimizer tool is probably being scrutinized and that the functionality of that tool will be upgraded soon inline with this change.

Fixed it now, it was to do with the url in the form.

I know this thread is very old, but still very relevant to me today. My OSE report is showing sites that do not have any link pointing back to my site. I checked both the page and the source code and cannot find any evidence of a link. Some of these are low quality sites, and I don't want Google to punish me for being linked from them. Should I be worried of a penalty if OSE is still indexing them? Appreciate any response.

It just seems so very unfair they are ranking number one like this, How do you know that is what is responsible for their rankings? ...one of our big competitors... That's what my money is on.

Hi Paul, In the UK people are pretty comfortable with either a .co.uk or a .com - and likewise I've not seen any evidence to suggest that the search engines favour .co.uk sites. As .com is stronger I'd be inclined to go with that Hope this helps, Hannah

I agree with Alan here. Paul, we use Joomla! CMS at our agency and we use a simple plugin (RSSeo) that automatically updates and is in XML format. Just like Alan's site shows the importance and frequency adjustments, I'm quite sure you can find a WP plugin...or you can write it all manually (just be ready for a few hours if you've got a large site)! Hope this helps!

No, I dont think you ned to worry I doubt it is somthing automatic, i think it would be a manual thing

Well yeah that wouldn't be too many at all, but then going back to what Marcus and EGOL said you're much better off using bold tags for readability reasons than simply using it on keywords really. It has little to no impact in terms of rankings (probably a tiny bit) but can have a much greater impact on keeping your visitors moving forward and converting if used to break the content up into more digestible chunks with a good scent of what's important to them and where their eyes should go next. I'd probably use bold a few more times in a 500 word piece but use it as what it is, an emphasis tag Not emphasising keywords for Google but whatever it is in the content that will encourage the user to feel they're in the right place... if that happens to combine with some keywords or keyword phrases then great, but don't see it as a game-changer for rankings

Hello:  I believe what you might want to do is set up canonical content.  This is where you have the same article with two different urls.  The canonical content code will give Google the original source and not count it twice.

Yahoo's Smushit.it is a tool that can do some lossless compression on your images and may be of use. If you use Wordpress, there's also a smushit plugin that will compress your images on upload. Page load speed does have an impact both for users and search engines. It's certainly something to consider.

Great insight Highland!!!

Can this work as a temporary thing? So if i put a canonical tag in then take it out, once taken out and the page is crawled Google will then value it as unique content? I just don't want to do anything which makes Google think its permanent.

Yes, the best way is to handle via webmaster tools, and not try to handle via code on the sites.  In your Google webmaster tools account, go to "Site Cinfiguration" and "URL Parameters".  It will show you a handful of dynamic urls it has detected, how it is handling them currently.  Then you can manually add a dynamic parameter that exists on your site and tell google how to handle it.  They have a bunch of new options/features with this tool that makes it really useful now.