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I work for an online retailer, which predominantly sells perfume products. In recent months, we have been spending more and more time on SEO, particularly in terms of improving our content, and as part of our strategy we have been working with beauty bloggers in particular (independent reviews, articles etc) to increase the number of links to our website. Whilst we’ve seen steady improvements, we are concerned that some of the key words/phrases we are targeting still aren’t ranking as high as we would like. Some weeks they will move up a few places, but more often than not, they will then move back down. We are more frustrated as we are seeing other websites, which are much poorer in terms of quality content, number of products, etc., ranking quite highly for these terms. From analysing these sites, it seems they are achieving their high ranking from having a considerable number of what appear to be poor quality links. We have been warned countless times to avoid link farms, etc., yet these sites have 100s even 1000s of links coming from suspect sites and it isn’t doing them any harm. Recently, we noticed a lot of our competitors are receiving links from websites such as LinkPartners. When we checked the website, we could see that whilst it appears to be a fairly SPAMMY website, its domain authority (67) is actually quite high. Should we base our decision about whether or not to place a link somewhere solely on how high their domain authority is, i.e. would it be more beneficial to us to have a link with what appears to be a link farm if their domain authority is high, than what appears to be a fantastic independent beauty blog with a low domain authority? Or should we avoid these sites whatever the circumstances? It’s slightly confusing for us as we are being warned about placing links on websites as google is apparently going to penalise us for it, but then we see our rival sites doing well by simply placing links everywhere they can.