Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Guest blogging. It's nothing new, it's nothing that requires a lot of talent, but my god! It does the trick for most clients I manage. Helps me acquires custom anchor text dofollow links from themed sites and the long term relationship with these blog owners are worth their "weight" in gold!  You get a great link, you get some referral traffic, and you expand your network. Triple win!

I would consider other routes than using article directories for a long term strategy. I'd suggest placing one quality article on each site (totally unique, not spun.) Then try to build relationships with bloggers in your niche and try out guest blogging. You'll get the benefit of the link, the anchor text, and also a dedicated audience base somehow related to your niche.  In short, the benefits are much greater.

If you must go the article route, definitely get links from a variety of sites. Make sure they aren't all ran by the same people. There's a lot of article "networks" which are typically easy to spot. It's beneficial to check the WHOIS data for the domains and the IP address/name servers being used by the domains to make sure you aren't willingly placing your articles on a "link network."

I've been a member for awhile, a PRO member for almost a year.  I haven't experienced any problems like that, and I have come across issues in the past. I typically email or tweet at them and get a solid response within 24 hours tops.

What specifically are you having problems with?

I'm most familiar with myblogguest.com but I wouldn't discredit any of those sites. Take some time to look around all the sites to see if you can find people looking for content that is somehow related to your niche.

I typically take a look at whatever site I have plans to guest blog onto, and see what their topics are like. Then I'll look for any "information gaps" on their site that would fill a need (for them), as well as be a relevant topic to the site you're going to be linking to.

This way you're getting a nice relevant link, but more importantly, you're producing something that the blog actually needs and will** benefit** from.  That might get the guest post more exposure as well as strengthen your relationship with the owner of the blog.

I wouldn't go out of my way to build a bunch of profile backlinks, but I would definitely get profiles made up on sites that make sense to use for your industry.

On a side note though, services like KnowEm can be useful for reputation management. Even if those profiles don't rank or pass any value along to your actual site, you can (and should) prevent someone from using your brand name.

Any link that points to another page could be considered a "backlink" - these doesn't mean every link will show up in "back link reports" from various places.  Every data set is different.

For example: In Google Webmaster Tools, it shows me a handful of links for my site. Bing Webmaster Tools happens to show the same links, plus some that Google didn't. The same can be said about all link tools (Open Site Explorer, Majestic, Ahref's, etc)

You can acquire links through an uncountable number of ways. The type you are currently chasing though may not be the best route for long term strategy or success.  I'd suggest checking out link building related posts here on SEOMoz and then elsewhere.

If you just want to jump into action without really getting a better idea, this site has an awesome list of link building ideas. However, keep in mind there is a certain skill level involved with how you go about building links, something you can't fake easily.

Nope, either should be fine. The biggest thing to remember is if you change any URL structure, setup 301 redirects to go from the page's old URL to the new URL.

Your friend is right. If there are 10 links on a page, and 9 are marked nofollow, that 1 followed link is getting less juice than a page that has only 1 link on it.  The division happens regardless to whether it is nofollow or followed.  I believe I remember reading this on SearchEngineLand, or it may have actually been a Matt Cutts video.  If I can find a reference to cite, I'll edit my post/add another comment.

There is no real right answer for the specific situation.  Whenever I'm linking to content, especially my own (or clients), I try to include the main focus keyword in the anchor text but also include other words that make sense.

For Example:

If you are targeting the keyword "landscapers upstate NY" it might look weird if you link to the article using that same anchor text, it doesn't really make sense. In this scenario, you'd be better off linking to that content with something like "Landscape companies located in upstate NY"

I know the example is pretty rough but I think it displays the idea pretty well.  The end result might be less anchor text love, but it'll make more sense from a user perspective and search engines can look at that and still get a good feel for what that page is really about based on the anchor text you used along with the content found on the particular page.

If you are on an Apache server and have FTP access, you can setup 301 redirects using .htaccess

The proper format for this is as followed:

redirect 301 /oldurl.html http://domain.com/the-full-url

This reminds me of a lot of websites that got railed by Panda updates this year.

I seem to remember seeing a website which had several pages with similar content, it was like "How to make a fax from the Canada to Mexico", "How to make a fax from United States to Canada",  "How to make a fax from Mexico to Canada" and so on (probably at least 50 of these pages.) Pre-Panda, they were dominating SERPs and rolling in the money, and now I believe they are no where to be found / may have restructured their content so it's less spammy, more of a resource, and overall a better user experience.

Having a lot of low quality pages like this on your website may hurt your overall rankings from what I've read, seen, and have tested.

Matt Williamson has some really good points in his comment.  I'm going to focus more on those potentially spammy link tactics.

I would only suggest using blog comments and profiles on forums that meet the following criteria:

1. The site is somehow related to your niche, product, service, etc.
2. You are there to add value to an already created discussion.
3. You are there for the long haul.
4. The site you're participating on isn't anything shady or illegal.

The biggest thing to remember is, wherever you spend time building links, you better be building value too. Any link that was created 'for the link" and not because you are genuinely adding meaningful content/conversation will be looked upon as low quality, even spammy in some cases.

You don't want to create a negative image of your brand to the eyes of users, likewise for search engines.

SharedCount is a great site for this (also 100% free)  - http://sharedcount.com/

Using the multi-view dashboard, you can add multiple URLs and bookmark it so you can easily revisit the same URLs without having to add them in every single time.

I would focus more on Guest blog posts for multiple reasons.

1. You get a contextual, relevant link, if the blog is within your niche.

2. The referral traffic from the blog can be more powerful than the link equity you receive from the post

3. The relationship you build with the guest blogging approach is priceless and can only lead to bigger and better things.

Squidoo can be extremely effective in certain niches for driving real traffic.  For my niche, it took me a 2-3 hours to prep a nice Squidoo lens which does shockingly well at driving traffic to my site. The Page Authority (Moz) also shot up to 62PA relatively quick, so that's an extra perk. The real value on Squidoo is creating content that delivers people to your site, not so much for getting a boost from the Domain's authority.

As John Pring put it, OSE doesn't update instantly or "often" - you might want to try out Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Bing's inbound link tool is remarkable. It's showing links to my site that I've never seen before (and I've tried OSE, Google's, and a few other "back link reporting" tools)

You should ask yourself 3 questions about the content you plan on publishing.

1. Is it a "resource" to someone, if optimized to specific keywords, does the content match the intent of the search query?

2. Is the content to similar to other content on your current domain?

3. Is the content shallow - how many words, did you enhance it with "extras" like pictures/media, how in depth does the content dive into the subject?

If you are finding that you're publishing more than you feel comfortable doing on a single site, I don't see the harm in offering some of those articles to other blogs or websites. Just make sure you ask the 3 questions above before trying to place your content on other people's websites because you want to  make sure any relationships you build through this method are solid.

A common practice to get a link picked up faster is to "Ping it" but as others have already said, if you are getting a good link, it should get picked up on it's own quick enough.

Regardless to the links you get, quality or not, pinging them is a good way to try and get a search engine's attention. You can also visit a site that one of your links is on, and check Google's cache to see if Google has updated the cache since your link has been placed. This will help identify if the link has even been crawled.  If you notice Google has been on the page after your link was placed, check Webmaster Tools to see if it's showed up in there at all.

As Ben Fox stated, you can use the report to find the linking errors.

I'd also run a scan of your site using Xenu Link Sleuth (it's 100% free) if you're a PC user. Some people prefer Screaming Frog (both work well, Screaming Frog has a free and paid version to my knowledge)

I use Xenu personally, been using it for years with much success. You'd be surprised what kind of stuff it digs up.

Most RSS feeds exist because a site has some type of content generating script/software tied to it (IE a blog.) If your site doesn't have something like that already, you can create an RSS feed using a site like this: http://page2rss.com/

If you are unsure if your site has a feed, in Chrome, you can use this extension to find out - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pnjaodmkngahhkoihejjehlcdlnohgmp