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.

Hi Arti,

Generally, you want to link to your root domain. Many common website templates link to home as /index.html, but that really hasn't been necessary for years.

The easiest way to fix this would be to add a canonical tag in your homepage, which is the /index.html file. It would go in the section and look like this:

After you add this, when you look at your source code for your homepage, you should see this tag in there from whatever address you reached the page from.

There's a lot of information on duplicate content out there, and a lot of different ways to fix the same problem. Here's a good overview of the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Best of luck with your SEO.

Sounds dangerous!

Usually, these types of links may be found on high authority pages, but the placement is spammy, such as deep in the footer with 100 other links, or an out-of-context sidebar link.

Do the pages have PageRank? I only ask because a page may display both PA and DA, but if it's been de-indexed by Google then it most likely will be stripped of PageRank.

The other problem is relevance. The links may be of little value to you if they don't come from on-topic pages.

In short, I would advise you stay away from this.

But, to answer your question, you would need a ton of links to move your Domain Authority from 62 to 78. That's because both PA and DA are scaled algorithmically, meaning a ten point jump could be 100 times more difficult to achieve. At the upper ranges, the difference between scores becomes much more pronounced, so that it's much more difficult to rise from a 60 to 70, than it is to go from a 10 to a 20.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Anton,

Great question! Folks get really caught up in the proper way to use H1 tags and there's a lot of misinformation and rumors out there.

In the old days SEOs discovered that there was a correlation between words in the H1 tag and rankings, and so it became best practice to load all of your keywords there.

As time drew on and Google became more sophisticated, new research by SEOmoz and others discovered that there really wasn't a statistical significance to adding keywords specifically to the H1 tag - in fact the simple use of keywords in a large font towards the beginning of the document worked just as well.

So the best thing you can do for an H1 is the way it was intended - use it as the unique title of the document.

I don't see a problem if this means it's placed after the h2, but I would be wary of placing your most important content further down the page. Google seems to discourage important content pushed too far down the page, but sometimes there's legitimate reasons to place your CTA in a prominent place.

Just make sure your readers can easily find your important content - especially true if you're placing a CTA on every page!

Short answer: no (or at least, very unlikely)

Google publicly states they don't pull data form inside GA, and realistically they don't need to. They are only concerned about the performance of their search results, and how that traffic responds to individual results. They also have no reason to lie about not using GA data, as there are so many other sources of information that are better.

"And finally... when is google going to shut these open back doors in Analytics so that Vitaly and his ilk are shut down forever?"

Great question! Hopefully soon.

Sounds like you're trying to outsmart Google.

Here's my advice: If you have a legitimate reason for creating independent blogs, then by all means do so, but do it out in the open where everyone, including Google can see it, because Google will see it anyway. They have tools of detecting "administratively related" sites that we can't even comprehend. It goes way beyond ip addresses, class c subnets, Google analytics profiles or whois registration data. if you have a relationship with a group of sites, chances are they will figure it out algorithmically.

As an example, the Theme Forrest folks do a great job of this with their collection of websites (try the drop-down navigation in the header to see the relationships) But aside from navigation, there is not a lot of inter-linking between these sites to my knowledge.

It's actually pretty common to run a number of sites under the same company. Danny Sullivan runs Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, and has a number of other sites. These all link to each other naturally.

But be careful. If you're doing this solely for SEO benefits, the temptation to optimize your links and overdo it may be too great, and you may end up in a place you didn't intend. If, on the other hand, the different sites can all stand alone on their own merit, this may be a great idea.

Best of luck!

Hmmm... This is a hard one. (Oh man, did not mean to make the intentional sex referrence)

Yes, Google has made changes in it's algorithm in the past year that makes porn harder to search for on the Internet. These changes don't filter the porn per se - except when "Safe search" is set to on - but it does mean that you must be much more specific in your search queries to find what you are looking for. For example, the query "boobs" generally returns almost no porn in Google, but the query "boobs porn" will.

If I were building an algorythm to separate porn sites from non, a large amount of XXX in the incoming anchor text, or in the URL, would probably trigger it.

Oh the other hand, I'm inclined to agree with George - seems like there's something more going on here. The backlink profile isn't terrible.... but there's definitely a footprint of comment spam in there. I won't link directly, but some of the suspect, off-topic links I found include:

http://www.takarat.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=750&page=3
http://www.omyogapages.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43&page=7
http://www.atthepicketfence.com/2011/09/behind-blog-with-savvy-southern-style.html
http://www.marypoppins-homesweethome.com/2011/07/what-is-it-with-us-girls-and-ikea.html

These are pretty terrible   It's possible that there's 100's or 1000's more we're not seeing, and these are causing either a manual or algorithmic penalty.

My advice:

1. Check with Google Webmaster Tools for any messages - especially unnatural link warnings.

2. File a reconsideration request, even if you don't have any messages in GWT. Explain your concerns. Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team, helped write the original adult filter algorithms. He might take a special interest if you can get it to his attention.

   But mostly, what you're looking for is verification, or not, of a penalty.

3. You may need to clean up the links. Do your best to remove any suspect links. Use the disavow tool as a last resort.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.