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In recent months google has taken a dim view of paid links in blogs etc. They prefer them to be nofollowed and show that its an advertorial. That being said lets assume your keeping this under the radar and are not going to have any issues with negative SEO. In my opinion it's hard to put a price on it there's diminishing returns as the volume increases however the exact numbers etc i'm not aware of. I would think if you have a link from them every few months it would show they like you but if you have too many to quick and the content is not relevant I would think the benefits would be less. From a PR and Traffic point of view its good publicity so i would price it based on the potential customer impact and slightly ignore the SEO side of things after the first half dozen or so.

Don't forget oDesk.com.

I'd say use both links for information that is relevant to the post and serves to enhance the post, and if those two links aren't enough, write such an awesome post that you'll be given an exception because the post just wouldn't work without those resources. I manage YouMoz, where people can guest post for Moz. We don't have a number limit on links, it's just what makes sense. I'll have a post submitted with no links that I return because it needs links, I'll have a post with links that need to be removed, and I'll have posts that have a valid reason for each of the 25 links they include in the post. http://moz.com/blog/dusting-the-website-for-spring-optimization-seo-cleaning is one post that would not have been published if there had been no links, or we limited the author to just two links.

I have been using GSERP.com for several months now, and it seems to be reliable and accurate. It is free, in beta-test, with no pricing plans yet announced. The rankings correlate well with actual Google search query results, and are updated on a daily basis. It has a few quirks, such as the graphing feature usability (not being able to deselect all and then select specific keywords, you have to deselect keywords one-by-one, as far as I can tell.) Also, be sure to set your default country correctly. The GSERP results are downloadable, which makes it handy to keep track week-to-week and month-to-month and compare results with the average SERP rankings you see in Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools. There are several other good rank tracking tools, but most cost $50 per month, more or less.

I'm probably biased, but I find it hard to beat Domain Authority in the long run. Julie Joyce at Search Engine Land recently did a writeup of the various competing domain metrics, including Domain Authority: http://searchengineland.com/down-with-toolbar-pagerank-and-up-with-what-175886 A couple of things I should note: It's common for DA to fluctuate normally with each index The recent government shutdown included 1000s of subdomains across the Web, which had a ripple effect across many Moz metrics, including MozTrust, which feeds into Domain Authority DA is a relative metric, so when you see your DA rise or fall, you'll often see similar results in your competition. This makes DA ideal for a competitive metric. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Wow - I have received an email like that recently, and was surprised that the person emailing me would want to take his link down - but now it all makes sense.  It was a competitor all along! Talk about Negative/black-hat tactics!

Actually the current blended local algo - where the 7 pack shows up is primarily weighted toward regular organic ranking factors. Some still think it's based on citations and reviews but that's the old algo not this one. I have a big post coming out tomorrow (partly due to discussions with Miriam on her newest 2 blog posts) that explains the local algo and proves that at least the top 3 in the pack are controlled by the organic algo. Then of course the "Venice" local results are based on the traditional organic algo. So links 'can' play a part, however in local it's often not even needed because it's often not super competitive. If you do the Place page right and know how to do good "LOCAL" on-site SEO (which is slightly different than regular SEO) then it can make all the difference. I used to take clients on average from #16 to #2 just doing on-site SEO and local hooks. Never did citations or backlinks and many clients rank #1 even though they had no reviews and are furthest from city center. So I say good on-site and Places optimization are most important. BUT if in uber competitive market like Atlanta Personal Injury Attorney, then you'll need links too.

I can also approach this a different way: Would you ever link to your competitors? Would a good piece of content for your blog or site be worth giving them a link?

I have clients that ask me this question (eg "how can I add quantity links to the quality stuff you're working on?") and I tell them to go ahead and do it if they're determined to do it, but the ROI of time spent is minimal in most cases. Some go ahead and do it anyways, which is fine in most cases as long as they're avoiding spammy practices and using branded anchor text. Blog commenting, forum posting, and spending time answering Q&A sites can be effective and produce a good return - but the value is in the click-through, not the nofollowed links. They're rarely effective tasks to hire out to a VA unless that person has an understanding of your product and native English skills. You need to be able to provide value above and beyond the generic comments with an obvious link or cry for attention that most people use. Here's one decent way to interact in forums, provide value, and see a decent ROI: http://pointblankseo.com/ecommerce-forum-link-building. Emphasis is on "interact" and "provide value" - without those two things you're just another spammer. The same concepts can be applied to blog comments and Q&A sites.

No, it didn't change how the metrics were calculated, but as the index size and contents varies each time, the data that is put into the metrics changes each time. What you're doing is what we recommend -- pay more attention to how you compare to your competitors each time rather than how you compare from crawl to crawl.

Interlinking between articles is the best way. Additionally I think bread crumbs may solve your problem(list of links traveled to get to that page). They are semi-navigational so they will assist visitors finding more info, and Google is pretty good at distinguishing navigation links from contextual links.

I would like to know what the effects are in regards to the SEO benefit.  Like what does the title need to include?  Is it good to make your website url, Current Date / Year be in the title of a press release ?

The hours it takes them is really not relevant since the contract will be "x" number of links per month for "$y". Focus your correspondence on the quality and relevancy of the links they are providing.  Hopefully the adding of links will take a natural progression and not all at once each month.

Well, we tried both, and ultimately liked BuzzStream better for what we needed, but both exceed in different areas.  It seems best at it's smooth organization of all of the relationships and integration with gmail.  The discovery tools do work, but if you're serious about your link building, it should be just one tool of many in your link prospecting arsenal. I have to say that there isn't a tool to pull in a competitors' OSE backlinks and create a series of BuzzStream tasks (that I know of), but that does sound like it would be really useful.

Pbhatt Think about crawl budget allocation that google gave to your website. by blocking search pages from your robots.txt, your saving alot of budget to crawl and recrawl your important pages. and on the other hand, some instances where search pages might provide indexable URLs with Thin content and your site might be a Panda candidate. So there is no potential you did a good job.

_should I still avoid an anchor text link from the first paragraph of this page: http://www.tutorialchip.com/inspiration/20-most-famous-round-corner-business-cards-designs/_ For this page, specifically yes - The page is almost a year old, so adding an anchor text link to this specific page, without a major content revision would provide almost nothing in my opinion (from SEO perspective) If you are paying to have your product on there like the others, then this would need to be No-followed per Webmaster guidelines (if no indexed no SEO benefit would really be seen if left indexed  you run the "risk" of violating Google Guidelines Would a few links from blog networks be harmful if we had a lot more "white hat" links to offset them? Depends completely on you link portfolio, as even "white hat" these days is sometimes "Grey Hat" so one more link could be all it takes to push you over the edge, of course I am only playing devils advocate, but when giving advice I try not to give risky advice.

Is there any way you can get my competitors to use these guys? Let's see...they write 7 articles that promote my keywords and distribute those to 150 different directories.  Another thing they do is build 250 blog comments and 4000 articles!!!! When I see those numbers what I'm thinking is that this will either ruin a domain or create a $xxxx to $xxxxx job for an SEO who does penalty removal. RUN AWAY FAST!

As long as you have the canonical in place you should be fine on the duplicate content aspect. In terms of the "spider trap" I dont really agree with their logic but the idea holds true. These pages would not be a spider trap as the spiders would be able to continue to navigate through your site as there are links on these pages. You should however only include the pages you want indexed in your xml sitemap. Also, you could try and 301 redirect these pages to the canonical version.