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They have no shame when it comes to link spam LOL. You should know this by now. This person seems no different then the people that email blast cialis discounts.

I was doing a search for a similar topic for a site we manage that has gained 50k links in the past 4 months, and I came across this article. I was a bit shocked at the answers I saw, and some of the ones that were voted as good. It's an old article, but I felt compelled to answer since this is still a relevant topic.

The link structure you showed is completely normal, and I would highly doubt you would see any negative impact from a strategy such as this. New sites and updated sites over time always receive new links. It's not about "how many" but more about "from where". I will address them one by one:

100 directory submissions
Great, as long as you have tested the directories that you are being submitted to. If they have high spam scores and low domain authority, could be a risk. You should ask what directories you were submitted to and research them to see if they have a blacklist history or are penalized. If not, I see no issue here at all. When we launch a site, we submit it to up to 450+ trusted directories, depending on the SEO plan level selected. All directories have been tested via Moz tools and other providers, to ensure the link health.

80 bookmarks
Not sure when you mean by this, but as long as the places you are being added are trustworthy and somewhat related to what you provide, I wouldn't worry. Even non-related links can be beneficial, coming from the right source. Granted, everyone wants the perfect anchor text link such as "awesome product in CITY", but a "visit website" followed anchor link will not do you any harm coming from the right source.

16 search engine submissions
If this is a page or URL submission through Bing or Google webmaster tools, it's a total non-issue. People submit hundreds of URLs per day, or even thousands for larger sites.

15 Article submissions
"Submitted to where?" would be a better question than how many is good or bad. If these are legitimate articles through a legitimate source such as PrWeb or the like, you should have no issues. Just depends on where they are placing your articles, the article quality, and the linking domain.

46 forum links
Could be good, could be bad, depends on how you were linked to, and the trust factor of the linking site. See above. You may also want to see if the linked is followed because if not, it holds little value unless it was posted on a relevant forum as helpful advice, that has good visibility.

10 local classified searches
Not sure what this is indicating, but again, it depends on how the linking was done, and where the links are coming from.

As to the people stating that having a lot of new, varied links is a great way to get banned/penalized, just NO. That is not true. You want link diversity and many places linking to you, and in the business world, you can't always keep posting great blogs/posts/pages/articles hoping and waiting for the links to come to you.

I have also never seen a link campaign that got someone penalized unless it was just blatant disregard for link quality or lack of knowledge.

Hope this helps...years later lol. Or at best, it will help someone that comes across this article in the future.

Not to bring this topic back up, but is this still valued?

I understand the perception point of view, in that a lot of people still trust the BBB as a company that highlights good businesses to work with.

BUT, as the links are now no followed, and the price for the accredited profile is very high, is it worth it? I can see it being so for a contractor, but for an agency?

In looking up some stuff to answer that question, I found these requirements: 1. Ratings must be sourced directly from users.
2. Don't rely on human editors to create, curate or compile ratings information for local businesses. These types of reviews are critic reviews.
3. Sites must collect ratings information directly from users and not from other sites.Here are the guidelines: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review#review-snippetsDoes this help?

Backlinks. Anchor text. Find people that will link to you using the words you want to rank for.

"Their site has no purposeful SEO in it, there is barely any text on the homepage at all and none of the text are the keywords it is ranking for."

The above statement is concerning. If they have a good budget, as their SEO and design advisor I would say what needs to be said. Text can be added in a stylized way to help improve the SEO of any site without taking away from a good design. Google likes words, not CSS and images. Without a reference, it's hard to judge what can be improved, and how you should go about suggesting it to your client. You also mentioned rankings, but what do those rankings look like? Are we talking page one, or top 3?