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Someone else may be able to give you an 'absolute stopping point', but I really play it by ear if there's something that looks relevant and good, then I'll try and get a link.

I obviously wouldn't put as much effort into getting a link with a lower PA/DA as a high one. If I was to put a lower limit, I'd always use domain authority rather than page authority as this to me is a much better indicator, especially if you're looking for a link on the site in general, not just specifically on the same page as your competitor's link.

If I was to use a lower limit, I'd probably stick around the 40 mark for domain authority to be worth putting time and effort into getting a link, but I would still consider a lower DA if the link was relevant and fairly easy to get.

A link can still be good regardless of page authority, simply because there are many other ranking factors involved to determine the quality of a site which simply aren't available to OSE. You could easily get a spammy directory much higher in the OSE listings than a good quality content rich site that's lacking links further down.

I would use a combination of page authority and gut instinct. 40 is probably a good level to use as a marker, however there may be some newish or good content sites further down that you can make a judgement on; it's just that they may be fewer and farther in-between

If I were you, I would try a different strategy to article marketing. Google are well aware of how easy it is to submit an article to Ezine and the likes and have therefore weighted any links from those places accordingly. Guest blogging on relevant sites is probably a better strategy.

If you do however wish to persue article marketing then I wouldn't go overboard, maybe a few a month on high quality and relevant article sites. Regarding keywords, generally they are given more weight, the higher they are in the article, however you're probably better off keeping to your quality, well written structure - it's probably better in the long run to go for quality rather than intentionally putting keywords in the best places.

Not unless the google-bot creates an account for itself and then proceeds to login

Paul,

OSE is no-where near as complex as Google's algorithms and can only rank links in a relatively simplistic manner. Although it's a very good tool for getting an idea of what's going on, there are so many other contributing factors that Google will use that just can't be included in OSE.

For example, the directory links may be ranked highly in OSE because it's algorithm looks at all the links going into the directory and determines that it's probably quite a good source. Google however may have penalised the same directory (something OSE can't determine) and so any links from that directory may in-fact be worthless.

When using OSE, I tend to use my gut instinct as well as the stats to tell whether a link is worth anything or not. If a link looks particularly spammy then it probably looks the same in Google's eyes.

Also - it's worth remembering that OSE's index is much smaller than Google's, therefore although most of the decent links will be in there you may not be able to see some awesome links that your competitor has, simply because they're not in the OSE index yet.

Ross - Great answer with some good ideas that I should be able to put into practice. Thanks for taking the time to write it!

Hi Will,

You're doing the right thing my getting guest posts on blogs that are relevant to your topic. Regarding your last question, it would make sense to diversify across soccer blogs and other areas that you can contribute good and relevant posts. It's probably quite easy to relate fashion to a wide range of different areas and as long as you're creating content that seems relevant to your topic and the blog you're posting on, then go for it!

Regarding putting the blogs' link on your site.. You may want to do this occassionally if you find something really good and relevant to you that you want to link to, but I wouldn't do it very much; every external link you add on your site is reducing the amount of link juice that flows internally around your site. Also if you do it to blogs here and there, google might see this as some sort of link exchange scheme, which is not something you want.

Fraser, how old is the site and has it undergone any change recently?

There are many reasons a site fluctuates in google. Sometimes is just because it's new and takes a while to settle in the rankings or sometimes there's another reason.

Do you mind sharing the site URL?

I've seen some other South African sites like this that have ranked really well. In fact our brand name is a big term is South Africa, hence the reason I noticed the odd .za site appearing in the rankings. I'm not sure if the algorithm is different for the area and that's why it works??

To be completely honest with you, what you competitor has done may not be sustainable in the long term, but you can see he's got some easy links from 'high ranking pages'. I won't endorse it and sooner or later he may get a penalty, but he does seem to have found some easy wins for the moment at least!!

Socialdude, that may well be the case. It also looks more natural if you have keyword links going to internal pages. Typically you'd expect keywords for a home page to be the company's name or their main niche with more specific keyword links targetting internal pages.

It sounds like your keywords are working for your homepage at the moment, so you may want to continue with that. But I would add more diversity with internal pages at the same time.

I don't see why you would want to do that; I would assume you would want the link juice on your site to spread freely through all the links so that each page is benefiting. If you nofollow the links then any links you follow will still be devalued by the nofollow links and the nofollow links themselves will not provide any juice to the rest of your site.

I would say that nofollowing your navigation links is therefore a bad idea

Your site is relatively new and so a spammy looking link profile is something that will not work in your favour. Take a look at this video by rand from a few years ago; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/belated-whiteboard-friday-can-bad-links-hurt-me

You definately need to work on some high quality content and then try and create good links to the high quality content you are creating. Google will then recognise your content and see that it's being linked to externally which is a positive sign.

The best way to go is to continue building quality links. These links you've 'kindly' acquired from a competitor have clearly made your link profile look worse than it should be. The fact you've got nearly 450k links coming from less than 100 domains will look a tad suspicious to G.

If you continue to build quality links, google will see that you're not getting your links from spammy sources and the other links you've been given could easily turn from having a negative effect to having a positive effect.

As it's a new site, this is the time when your link profile is watched carefully, so although it's unfortunate to have got these links, it's not the end of the world by any means. Try and get some links from sites with a high MozRank using white hat tactics.

Ooo, Panda, that's caused a fair bit of trouble hasn't it!?

We did the following;

1. Re-formatted and re-wrote a lot of old or 'rubbish' content. Including it's layout and the navigation process

2. Culled any links which looked a bit spammy and tried to obtain links from site with higher MozRank and more credible links itself

3. Updated all our business listings on the major listing sites such as Yell, Google Local, etc. And made sure our domain and addresses on the website corresponded with the business listings. With a view to increase the overall trust of the site.

Hope that helps!

Does your blog actually contain duplicate content from your website or are you saying that the Moz Crawl is identifying some of your blog pages as being duplicates of other pages inside the blog?

It happens to one of our sites due to how the tagging works, but I've never really thought anything of it.

Is this the seo tool you're talking about? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/canonical/

Also have you read this article http://www.seoresearcher.com/how-to-make-your-wordpress-blog-duplicate-content-safe.htm

Ah, ok, sorry - I misread your question Don.

I think I had the same problem with a campaign for a while, luckily it wasn't urgent so I left it, but it took a while to sort itself out

As I understand it, it takes a week for a complete crawl to be carried out on any new campaigns, but you now get a starter crawl when setting up a campaign - the starter crawl isn't as comprehensive and may explain why your sites haven't been crawled properly yet.

It may be worth directing a request to the SEOMoz team via the help function

Unfortunately getting links from quality sites, isn't generally an easy process.

If you want an easy process then you could always buy links from some sites with a high mozrank, but I wouldn't generally recommend this as it's a path that may lead to being penalised.

Try using open site explorer to check the bank links of your biggest competitors, you can then check the mozrank of the sites that are linking and make a 'gut' feel on sites where you can submit links with relative ease - e.g. by guest blogging or contacting the site owner and promoting your content.

For some niche keywords, link directories can work and have a positive effect, but you'd be best to avoid anything that seems spammy or thrown together.

The examples you've given are all suffering from the problem of having an excessive number of external links from a small number of domains. For example one has 30k links from just 22 domains. That suggests something fishy to me and probably would to Google.

You can use the seomoz toolbar to get some useful metrics on directories before you submit your site. As Wayne has said, also try and make sure the directories are relevant.

Another useful check is to check the pagerank for the directory. If it's a lot lower than the MozRank (as in seomoz toolbar) then you may deduce that the directory has suffered a penalty and you may be wise not to put your link there.

There's a similar thread in the QA Forum here, where someone else has a similar problem

http://www.seomoz.org/q/rankings-failure