Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Patrick is on the money here, when you say you are getting links, did you go out and get them or are they natural. I don't think google is interested in 99% of any link you can go out and get yourself. And those that appear naturally are also 99% crap. You can get good sites to link to you but it is not easy, and you may get good sites to link to you naturally over time. IMO you are better off spending time in making sure your sites crawls perfectly, making sure you have good content, and describing your site to google using structured data. If your site is a good result for your keywords click data alone can do wonders for ranking

There is one more and very important point here. Can almost anyone get a link here? if so, then I would say no.

To the point Egol I am not sure how google see the relevance, but getting a link from a relevant business that is not in the business of giving out links is a good link.

Hi there Here is Google's resource on link schemes - I suggest you read it. I would also suggest (based on Google's resource here) that you make this link nofollow. Since this is a sponsorshipesque link and you're a local business (if you're not, don't do this), then make sure you take the proper steps. Where would this link live exactly? Content? Sidebar? Ad? Let me know - thanks so much!

I would say yes, worthwhile. This would also depend on the industry and purpose though. If your purpose is to get traffic then I think it can be very worthwhile depending on your content shared and the community you're sharing it with. If it's purely for organic ranking then I would say it's mediocre. Reddit being a "social" community will see right through links purely to build rank. Also, it's worth noting that this would also have diminishing value if you're trying to build rank through links on the same domain as a tactic. Here's a Reddit post with an answer to your question about follow vs nofollow links. Use Moz tool and you'll see that front page (popular) posts are follow whereas less popular posts are nofollow. I'm not too sure what the threshold is when nofollow links turn to follow, it might be worth testing though, especially if you have a fairly active/popular Reddit account you can use. Hope this helps.

If I make a blog about what Lawyers should know about say, new adwords changes or something like that, and then get links from PPC type blogs, would that help? Negative, your best bet is to no rely on building links but useful, authentic content. Mentioning portals with great value and like minded vertical. Then once posted - mention them socially and through time - they and or other like minded sites will begin to reference you. Now, this does leave you open to the issue of reciprocal links - but algorithmically speaking - we may stimulate the 3 pro-dominant social back links - facebook, twitter, and google + ( while it lasts ;o) What if I made a blog about top movies with lawyers in them or something like that, and just got links from non lawyer sites. Once again, don't put your efforts in just link building - if it makes sense and you have done your SEO keywords analysis correctly - cater it to fit that market. Most importantly - time is the most precious commodity in a URL's value. Is that worth while? I have many lead gen type sites and built them with knowledge of knowing they would take 8+ months to begin to gain traction and attention. Hope this helps Chenzo

Hi, Yes it works and it is legitimate. Brian Dean (SEO expert) also suggest to do that. Please read 4th point in below link. http://backlinko.com/17-untapped-backlink-sources Hope this helps. Thanks

At any given time Google has lots of different indexes.   They are always testing different algos and using different vintages of data.  All of this happens on thousands of severs at multiple data centers worldwide.   So, if your pages are relatively new then they might be in and out of the the search results that you see depending upon which of the many servers responds to your query.  The newer the pages, the more volatile they might be.  The weaker your website, the longer it will take them to stabilize in the search results. That is a partial answer to your question.   (Read the book "In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives" by Steven Levy.  Very interesting, helps you be a better SEO because you will understand how they think and work a little better.) I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages.  They probably weren't as unique as they should have been. If you did this Google will probably index them and start displaying all of them.  Then, if Google decides that some of these pages are not as unique as they would like, some of them will be filtered from the search results.  To find out of this is happening go to the very end of the search results and on the last page you might see something like..... "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." If your page can be found in the "repeat the search.... " then you will know that Google thinks that the page is too similar to other pages on the web (on your site or on other sites) and they have filtered your page from the search results. If you have lots of these pages then google might think that you have a low quality website and their Panda algo will get you.  That will demote the rankings of almost all of your pages for almost all of their relevant queries and your traffic will drop suddenly. If you really make them mad with this stuff they might consider your site to be even lower  than low quality - meaning spam - and deindex lots of your pages or your entire site. So, that is the stuff that can happen.  Don't publish a lot of cookie cutter pages or just change place names and insert synonyms.  Google has been slapping people for that stuff for at least ten years. Also see here and here for good responses to similar questions asked by you and answered by Patrick Delehanty.

Ok, so going forward if I let's say, profile a local lawyer on each local page, or a few local lawyers is that ok? Can I still title it Find a Lawyer Brampton, Find a Lawyer Mississauga, Find a Lawyer Stratford, if it is more unique from page to page?  Let me know, thanks. Rafe

Hi there These pages don't appear to be deindexed. Are you thinking this because you are not appearing in your searches? [1] [2] [3]

But if you are trying to get a lot of backlinks from unrelated site then you have to aware of the output. Relevancy among the sites are one factors for ranking in google. So if you are going for a long term ranking its better to have a solid foundation built for what you are targeting for.

Hi there This was actually discussed earlier in a previous Q+A thread. You can actually learn more as well from Dr Pete's answer to this thread as well. Hope this all helps - good luck!

In the real world most people use the least number of words when searching for something to get the most relevant results.  based on the data I see (and the examples you provided), it's fairly clear more people search without using "find" in their search query. While it is true that you can still optimize a site for "lawyers in ____" even if you include "find" in the page Title, the more precise the topical refined understanding a page has to a specific search query based on common intent, the more likely that page will be able to properly rank for that situation. So while you can include "find" in the page Title, I wouldn't recommend it in this case.

Thanks! Very helpful!

Hi, The example I quoted in my reply about Paul's pizza (it's not exactly the same - but quit close) For the newspaper: if it's just an ad random links (e.g. in the footer) it doesn't look really natural. If the newspaper is featuring an article about a legal issue and it's quoting your law firm in the article, than the link would be quite natural. For the retirement homes: Google is quite aware that if you're in a retirement home you have entered the last phase of your life; so it's not really unnatural for a retirement home to feature some articles on your final "bucket list" - which could include content on how to make a will. If on these articles they quote your law firm, or if the content is entirely written by your law firm, it would be quite logical to mention the original source (or even better - put a canonical url pointing to your site). Basically - natural links are quite easy to detect. Just ask yourself: if no link building for SEO purposes existed, would the publisher include this link? If he would, it's almost certain that it's a good link. If he wouldn't, it's not really a good one. rgds, Dirk