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I'd say less than 1% of the time, if ever.

When you're looking through the backlinks of your competitors, you are never going to be able to get all of those links that they have. In fact, the acquisition rate is often pretty low (but still worthwhile, certainly). Some of the sites will be shut down, some will have linked specifically to them for a good reason and aren't going to link to you just because you ask. So at best you'll have some percentage of what you see they have.

But of course a bigger issue is that you are likely only seeing a small portion of their backlinks, so they're also benefiting from a bunch of links that you can't even see.

Mining the competition's backlinks is a good tool in the prospecting toolbox, but you're also going to have to find a lot of links of your own as well in most cases, to have a shot of ranking up near where the competition ranks.

Is there a compelling reason that OSE treats subdomains as part of a parent domain, rather than as a separate site? Or is this just a technical limitation?

I ask because it's my understanding that Google treats subdomains more like separate domains than like parts of the parent domain. OSE treating them more like folders creates some frustrating situations when researching niches that are heavily filled with blospot and wordpress.com blogs.

First of all, the domain authority in these situations is not at all indicative of the strength of the site. It also makes it hard to evaluate linking root domains at a glance, since all blogspot blogs count as one domain. So to see all blogspot sites linking you have to go to the full link list -- where each site may be listed hundreds of times -- and you can't group them because they're all considered the same domain.

To be sure you when researching these niches you can just throw out domain authority as a metric, and export every report to excel where you can sort things in a way to make it easier to separate sites. But if there isn't a compelling SEO reason to have OSE function this way, I'd love to see those subdomains treated as separate sites so I can have access to all the easy to use SEOmoz metrics and layouts without the extra work.

And of course if there is a compelling SEO reason for subdomains to be treated as domains, I'd love to be educated! : )

Hi Umit

I took a look at that listing, and it is definitely shady, I can see why you want to know why they rank. To me it looks like they are gaming the places ago fairly hard. There are numerous things that the listing is doing that are possibly against guidelines.

The first is the name, "London Builders" it doesn't just have the location, but it is also a strong keyword variation. this keyword is then repeated in the description, and the url. Using the location in your name and description is against best practices, and can get you in trouble. However it is also extremely effective. While any one of these things wouldn't be enough to rank this high, all three could have that effect. Also, the onpage signals from the site are also reinforcing the ranking.

Frankly, the site looks incredibly spammy. Its a default wordpress template with a couple of posts over the last couple of years that use the keywords. Unfortunately its a example of some of the big weaknesses that the Google Places has right now. This looks like a case of a black or grey hat seo trying to rank a company in Google Places without the company having a actual website.

Mmmm, I didn't see anything in that article that addressed the possibility of self-hosted hurting your ranking -- though I'd love to see any research done on the topic if you have references.

I'll be the first to admit I don't have good research or testing, but my anecdotal experience is the same as several posters above: a page is ranking well, and the addition of a self-hosted video targeting the same keywords results in a video listing that is lower in the SERPs replacing the original page listing. Removing the video causes the page to bounce back up to its original, higher, ranking. It seems that for many searches Google does not want to deliver a video result up at the top.

Another concern that I have with self-hosting videos is if the search is for a product, a large number of searchers don't want to watch a video, they want to buy something (and of course some want the video). But the ones looking to just buy may skip the video result in favor of what looks more like a shopping page result -- which is another reason why unless it's a truly video-oriented search or linkbait, I prefer to go to YouTube and go for multiple rankings.

I have seen this happen, specifically when the video is self-hosted. Obviously the way to test if it's really the video and not the algorithm in your case is to remove the video and see how the SERPs shake out. If you're #1 position returns, then you know for certain (but I think it's very likely that the video is at fault).

The only real way around this I've found (without doing duplicate pages) is to use YouTube to host your videos, optimize them on YouTube and embed the YouTube video. The YouTube video will rank entirely separately from your site -- but of course clicks on the result will take you to YouTube and not your site, though you can toss a link to your site at the very top of the YouTube description.

That sounds really spammy, but honestly if they have top 5 rankings for all of those I wouldn't remove them. I would work very hard to make sure it looks as least spammy as possible (well, as good as a list of 200 links at the bottom of your content could possibly look), since that's something that could seriously hurt your conversions & bounce rate.

Then I'd try doing a test with a few of the pages and see what happens to your conversion rates when all those links are removed -- if it makes a positive impact, then consider removing them across the site, but watch what happens to all those ranking very carefully.

It's worth noting that it's possible those links aren't doing a whole lot, because with so many links the juice from each link is much lower. But of course even with a very small benefit if there are enough of them they all add up.

Having 200+ links per page is sub-optimal from an SEO perspective, but will not trigger any kind of penalty, if that's what you're concerned about. The PageRank that is passed through links is divided by the number of links, so with 200 links per page, each of those linked pages is getting far less PageRank (you can get a general comparative idea of how much with this tool: http://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php). So having too many links just dilutes the value of each link, but doesn't necessarily raise a spam flag or anything.

As an example, I recently had a client where we dropped their global navigation from 176 or so links down to less than 90 links, and they saw rankings boosts to every single important keyword (and of course the landing pages for those keywords were still in the global nav). One ranking went from 30+ to 8, though most gains were about 10 rankings for poor ranking keywords and 3 rankings for bottom of first page keywords.

As for the title tags, I would be far more concerned about title tags that are half again as long as their maximum -- usually every time I see that it turns out the title tags are also crazily keyword stuffed (a possible spam signal). I would certainly prioritize getting those title tags down into shape.

I'd also suggest moving to a more hierarchical structure for the global navigation -- perhaps linking to one contact page, and have that page link out to the hundreds of different regions?

I don't think it's true that Google is devaluing site-wide links (at least not recently); however, Google has been sending out warnings about unnatural links, which in our observation is tied highly to unnatural anchor text profiles -- and of course your 750k sitewide link is an anchor text rich link.

I work with a couple of sites where nearly all of their links are sitewide links, because within their niche that's just how the sites link to each other. These sites ranks well and will no doubt continue to do so. However the anchor text is almost always the name of the site, and typically link to the site's blog.

Ultimately just about any link that was paid for is a link that you have to worry about on some level. I'd worry more about the fact that it's an anchor text sitewide than the fact that you have 1 sitewide link. At the very least I'd try to get the anchor text changed to a branded term, if you don't want to remove it entirely.

It looks like you may be telling Google to ignore your site via noindex nofollow. There are two possible places this could be set:

In the Yoast plugin you can tell it how you want the robots to behave: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#robots-meta  You want it to check both Index and Follow.

Similarly in Wordpress itself there is an option under Settings > Privacy. You want to check I want my blog to be visible to everyone.

In general the fewer links you have, the more PageRank your site will pass to each of those links. The 100 links per page rule is a general guideline: if you really need to have more to provide the best user experience, then you should go ahead and use more. However, if you can possibly have less, then you want to have less, even less than 100. SEOmoz, for example, has about 75 links on their home page.

Either way, you will not incur any kind of ranking penalty, and it will not hurt the indexation of your site.

The only difference is the pages that you are linking to will get slightly less link juice out of it.

As long as you're linking to quality sites, those links will not directly hurt your rankings. If they are good for users and don't make your site look too spammy, then use them.

The general best practice is to have no more than 100 links on a page (followed or nofollowed). The main reason for this is that each link detracts from the amount of PageRank that flows through the links. This is meaningful for controlling the internal linking structure of your site to maximize your site's PageRank and help Google to understand which pages are most important. You can get an idea of how the PageRank link juice flows using this tool: http://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php

But if you really need to have more than 100 links, then use more than 100. Ultimately what gives the best experience for your users is going to help your site the most -- and while PageRank is still a ranking factor, it's not a top one.

From the only things you've said, technically the PageRank 5 link is better for SEO. BUT, there's a lot of buts:

But, the link driving tons of traffic to your site is obviously better for your site in terms of sales / conversion potential....

But all that traffic may link to your site in the future, or give you social mentions, making that traffic link better....

But, a site that is sending thousands of clicks is probably more likely to be relevant to your site, thus that link is likely to count for more....

But, the only factor you're looking at is PageRank, and there are far, far more important link factors, like the anchor text of the link, how relevant the page is to your page, where on the page the link appears, the authority of the page linking to you -- every one of these probably matters a lot more to your rankings that the PageRank of the source.

So if the only thing you're looking at is PageRank, of course the higher PageRank is better.But there's a lot more than PageRank.

To answer a question I think you may have been trying to ask: to my knowledge Google does not count the amount of traffic clicking on a link as a metric for the quality of that link. I've never seen any research or statements anywhere to suggest that it might.

Having 200+ links per page is sub-optimal from an SEO perspective, but will not trigger any kind of penalty, if that's what you're concerned about. The PageRank that is passed through links is divided by the number of links, so with 200 links per page, each of those linked pages is getting far less PageRank (you can get a general comparative idea of how much with this tool: http://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php). So having too many links just dilutes the value of each link, but doesn't necessarily raise a spam flag or anything.

As an example, I recently had a client where we dropped their global navigation from 176 or so links down to less than 90 links, and they saw rankings boosts to every single important keyword (and of course the landing pages for those keywords were still in the global nav). One ranking went from 30+ to 8, though most gains were about 10 rankings for poor ranking keywords and 3 rankings for bottom of first page keywords.

As for the title tags, I would be far more concerned about title tags that are half again as long as their maximum -- usually every time I see that it turns out the title tags are also crazily keyword stuffed (a possible spam signal). I would certainly prioritize getting those title tags down into shape.

I'd also suggest moving to a more hierarchical structure for the global navigation -- perhaps linking to one contact page, and have that page link out to the hundreds of different regions?

This is standard practice of almost all web design agencies. Giant blog platforms like Wordpress and Blogger also put in a credit link by default. The presence of a credit link like you described the footer will not hurt you in any way.

There is some debate about whether or not it will help you at all (I think it will -- footer links are greatly discounted, but still seem to count for something) but it won't hurt, and it makes sense from a branding/advertising perspective.

Hi Umit

I took a look at that listing, and it is definitely shady, I can see why you want to know why they rank. To me it looks like they are gaming the places ago fairly hard. There are numerous things that the listing is doing that are possibly against guidelines.

The first is the name, "London Builders" it doesn't just have the location, but it is also a strong keyword variation. this keyword is then repeated in the description, and the url. Using the location in your name and description is against best practices, and can get you in trouble. However it is also extremely effective. While any one of these things wouldn't be enough to rank this high, all three could have that effect. Also, the onpage signals from the site are also reinforcing the ranking.

Frankly, the site looks incredibly spammy. Its a default wordpress template with a couple of posts over the last couple of years that use the keywords. Unfortunately its a example of some of the big weaknesses that the Google Places has right now. This looks like a case of a black or grey hat seo trying to rank a company in Google Places without the company having a actual website.

I'd say less than 1% of the time, if ever.

When you're looking through the backlinks of your competitors, you are never going to be able to get all of those links that they have. In fact, the acquisition rate is often pretty low (but still worthwhile, certainly). Some of the sites will be shut down, some will have linked specifically to them for a good reason and aren't going to link to you just because you ask. So at best you'll have some percentage of what you see they have.

But of course a bigger issue is that you are likely only seeing a small portion of their backlinks, so they're also benefiting from a bunch of links that you can't even see.

Mining the competition's backlinks is a good tool in the prospecting toolbox, but you're also going to have to find a lot of links of your own as well in most cases, to have a shot of ranking up near where the competition ranks.

No, you can't actually tell or suggest to Google directly which sitelinks it should use.

You can tell it which site links not to use, and hope that it chooses another instead. In Google Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration > Sitelinks there is an option to "demote" specific sitelinks that you don't think should appear. Sometimes Google replaces it with another sitelink, sometimes Google just removes it, and sometimes Google decides to ignore your request.

But for getting new ones on there, the best you can do is make sure that the most important pages are linked to from your site's global navigation, and make sure there aren't too many not-most-important pages in the global navigation to confuse Google.

From a pure SEO perspective, it's better to have the link in the footer appearing on each page.

It looks like you may be telling Google to ignore your site via noindex nofollow. There are two possible places this could be set:

In the Yoast plugin you can tell it how you want the robots to behave: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#robots-meta  You want it to check both Index and Follow.

Similarly in Wordpress itself there is an option under Settings > Privacy. You want to check I want my blog to be visible to everyone.

Most of the time I would go with relevancy over authority if it's a link to a page that you're trying to rank for. My general rule of thumb would be to try to get more authority if linking to my homepage, and more relevancy when linking to an internal page.

There is really no "right" answer here, other than if your site's links are weak in one area (authority or relevancy) then pursue that one. And hey, how cool is it that you get to choose what page they link to you on!