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Please ignore misspells and grammar, this was typed quickly as I am spending my time researching not writing a perfect book on it. My goal is to find ethical very hard to get links unlike guest posts which are now dead according to Matt Cutt's blog here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/. My journey started with a quick message to Rand Fishkin, he responded the following "Hi Matthew - thankfully, there's literally hundreds of link building methodologies that are still completely legit. Check out http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and you'll find tons and tons of them. The key is that none are easy, none are particularly scalable, and all of them require doing work that will add value for searchers, for your brand, and for your overall marketing - which is exactly what Google wants to count. Wish you all the best," Thanks Rand Fishkin! So I started my search looking for links that are hard to get other than those that are directories, forum links that are dead and spammy, blog comments which are overused, guest posts, or any type of black hat link. I figured I would start to check what other popular SEO companies were doing and that have been at the top through many of the updates. After running an analysis on the term SEO services I found the following Test 1. I analyzed Main Street Host to start with. If you type in SEO services in Google you can see they are rank 1 for it. After a quick analysis it's easy to see that they have 100's of footer links on clients that they have, some with exact match anchors and some without. My question is, is why is this a viable tactic? Lets take for example the following. If you pull up their http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ stats and look at the inbound links you will come to an exact match anchor right away that says SEO Marketing Company. I went to the weebly link that they have and found that they have put their name at the bottom of this page. Issue 1 - Why is it ok for this type of link, but it's not ok for a template link? Aren't these links suppose to be penalized? Issue 2 - Nothing on the page is even relevant to their link at all. As we have read before, you need to have links surrounding relevant text. Take a look at their backlinks you and you will find almost all of their high quality links are exact match anchors coming from their clients surrounded by irrelevant text. Why is this working? How is this different than a network? What stops someone from just starting a network and dedicating 1 footer link to a full site and putting up dummy info... Anyone can go to Godaddy and purchase a DA 40+ site or so and throw up $20 of content and a footer link. As I dove deeper into finding what is ethical and working I discovered many of the top SEO companies use this. Not just one, but over 20 of them use this same method. Lets use another example. So I started to look at what they did for their clients. How did I know who they worked for? Simple I assume that since they have their link at the bottom of the page and claim that they do SEO for them, they are indeed working for them. So I analyzed the site we talked about a while ago on the Weebly that they had their link on. It's the Valley Art Weebly link if your checking yourself. I quickly found that they are using a network to rank up some of their clients as well. For example http://firesidebookshop.com/index.html Take a look at the link on this page leading to the art place. At first glance the site doesn't look spammy, but try to buy a book, or even order one. Who has an online book store, but doesn't sell books lol? Who also puts interesting links on their home page? This screams network to me. I am willing to bet the following will happen - Matt Cutts and his spam team will ad something like the following to the algorithm or whatever you would like to call it "ignore link if total outbound dofollow links on full site = x amount or higher" = internal Google disavow tool = bye to guest blogging. So what is everyone going to do? Okay it's time to figure out what that number is right? Lets do some tests and lets say that magic number is 5 to 10 links on a whole site. What does this do? This drives the price of quick SEO up again evening the playing field for others using ethical SEO like myself. How do I figure this? Lets face it black hat SEO will never end as long as someone is able to do it. Now since guest posts are gone, the quick link on quality sites surrounded by enough text to count is gone. This means that it will cost extra money, because everyone will be forced to put a max of x amount of links to be safe and for the links to get noticed on a website. So now they have to purchase an established domain that is high enough quality to pass the correct link juice through to a clients site that they want to rank up. Lets figure a few dollars for a unique IP, another few for the hosting, $40 to $100 for the domain if your lucky on Godaddy auctions, and then $40 for the content to make it look realistic if your getting it for $0.01 a word. Plus the time it takes to setup your site. This price of that $30 Odesk guest post backlink just went up to a min of $100 or so. Diving deeper into what's working and moving past the networks, because I feel this will only work temporarily as well if you are brave enough to use this and I know I am not. It doesn't seem to ethical to me at the end of the day even though some may argue, you are just creating more relevant websites which can maximize your traffic streams. The problem is I have stopped here and am stuck. Sure I have looked at http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and read the most recent post where it talks about 31 types of links. Most of those links don't apply or are outdated and you shouldn't use them. Some of them talk about forum links,directories, bookmarks.. Those have been tactics for years and sure you may find 1 out of 1000 that are good, but the rest are just spam. I have been over to search engine land, and a handful of other sites. I have talked to many other SEO's as well. They are emailing me asking what they should do after guest posts, because they are unsure. The question is, what is ethical? Let say you have a plumber, or a roofer, .gov links are nearly impossible for them and quite frankly that seems spammy to me to even post them on one. I know what many are going to say, build links as if your not worried about Google and you will grow.. Where are you going to build the links to if everything is unethical? As we know clients will walk if they don't see improvements quickly. What's quickly? I would say around the 3 to 6 month period using ethical SEO. Sure there is onpage, a great blog, etc., but what is there left truly ethical for offpage SEO besides some good press releases, some social profile links like a pinterst, and the normal? I must be missing something! I am not looking for the easy way, I am not afraid to get my hands dirty and work hard. If anyone can show me a quick example of a truly ethical link I would be grateful to see this. I can't seem to wrap my head around something that I can do that will last at this point. If you don't want to share it to the world, please PM me. [edited for formatting by Keri Morgret]

I am getting a bit tired now writing all of this so please excuse grammar and spelling mistakes, I wanted to post this up quickly tonight so I could possibly get some feedback by morning. So I feel I figured out some of the new update that just hit and I am sure the update will continue to keep coming and rankings will most likely change for a while, but I do have a few questions in the mean time if they stay. Please look below, why would some of those sites be ranking?  Some sites utilize no onpage SEO, some no backlinks, one of the sites is a single page site and every page is a broken link even the contact us page and it's rank 1..... I am not 100% sure that Google got this one right.  I see many instances below where other sites are much higher quality and have more authority.   It's as if Google took terrible sites and said here is a site for you, now deal with it and I hope it works out at the top. I do see several sites that belong on the first page, but I see others that are very questionable. This is how the following is written below. Before the url is the anchor text density % for the site.  This indicates the percentage of the amount of times the anchor text was backlined versus other anchor texts they used. Issues with the sites. Most of these sites don't utilize onpage SEO and it's clearly not a factor for onpage density purposes, there is a site with 37% keyword density on it. Some sites even have broken links. Please note: I already know that there is a lot of data that is analyzed to determine rankings more than this, but PA/DA is suppose to be a major factor according to everyone that believes in SEOMOZ.org.  So I am taking in account for many of those factors being calculated due to this. These are just some random keywords I picked, because I know you need to analyze other SEO firms after and update to figure out what lasted and what didn't.  All of my sites lasted due to ethical tactics, but I had some rankings move down and others go up, very odd. Keyword Analyzed:  CHEAP SEO Not Knowng http://searchengineland.com/the-hidden-cost-of-cheap-seo-social-labor-131585 92-DA 75-PA   -    A lot of content 4715 words on the page including comments. not known http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-cheap-seo-or-link-building/45932/ 87DA 63 PA    Words on page 3673 Not known www.cheap-seo-solutions.com 26 DA -- 38 PA      1112 words on page 9.52% www.cheapseocompany.com 34 DA ---- 41 PA 10 + anchor texts but   623 words on page 10.26% seocheap.net 35 DA --- 45 PA 10 + anchor text  855 words on the page I am not 100% sure why this is ranking lol, the services page isn't even working it errors out.   The onpage SEO is sloppy and the writing looks forced.  Why is this even ranking?  The site also looks low quality.  The density is higher than SEOMOZ even and it has less words.  In this case DA + words carried this site up, not the anchor ratio being low. 6.17% http://www.cheapseo-services.com cheap seo Page Authority DA 28 -- PA 38    276 Words   No onpage, 35 duplicate pages, free template, etc.. etc.. 10% www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-do-seo-cheap DA 94 --- PA 56 only 5 anchor texts used on this page.    8651 Words   I am willing to bet if you diversified this with about 5 more anchor texts this could be number 1 easy.  This only has 5 total diverse anchor text backlinks for this page. Keyword Analyzed:  Affordable SEO Services Rank 1  47% www.affordableseoservicesx.com/‎ 24DA PA36 New site It still has broken links all over the page The Contact us page doesn't even work lol. Great going Google on ranking such a high quality 1 page website.   471 words  How is this site ranking?  How could Google even rank this site? Rank 2 The Term isn't mentioned at all accept in title and header not known mbseoservice.com/‎ da 20 pa 32 PR 0  Just has affordable seo services in title anchor   Possible New Site  627 words Rank 4 12.77% affordableseoservices.net 22 DA 35 DA  - Proof Exact match domains still work great with high diversity rates, low word amounts, bad DA, etc.....    348 words Rank 5 4.24% www.howardsemgroup.com DA 39 PA 49   893 words. Rank 6 2.49% www.i4.net/‎ 59 DA and 66 PA   588 words Rank 7    4.71%  www.bluefrogseosolutions.com/‎ DA 31  PA 42   527  Words This site looks like it was created in 1998 and never updated.    Low quality site IMO Rank 8 Not Known www.mainstreethost.com/ 76 DA 81 PA possible co occurrence added in with main domain name /url   281 Words  not 1 exact anchor text match Rank 10   2.7% bestcheapseoservices.com/‎ 18 DA 29PA  This is just a blog site, come on Google... 4379 Words

Hello, We used IBP for over 2 years and it worked great.  We were able to schedule every clients site to auto run and email our clients. Now IBP is terrible due to Google's new updates. We are looking for something cost effective since we have 100's of websites we check on a weekly basis. We are either looking for a great software that uses proxies to check, or a service that offers unlimited sites and is cheap per month. We have searched for many, however there are so many that we aren't sure what is good and what isn't. We tried Jonathan Ledgers new one and it's not good, we looked into Web CEO and it's per amount of websites which is expensive. We tried cute rank tracker which is free and added proxies and it doesn't work, it lags out and doesn't even track ranks properly. It wouldn't hurt if it had a built in report analysis of the website as well. So whats a good one?

If anyone knows of a design someone has built, or if you know of one that we can purchase and customize ourselves that would be an option too. I am looking to have a company build us a white label SEO dashboard that integrates SEOMOZ api and SEMRUSH api.  I also like majesticSEO api for the lost links only, the rest of majesticSEO I don't really care about I like SEOMOZ much better hence why I am here. I need the following 1. Someone to be able to login and add their logo if they are a reseller company of our services, so we can offer white label solutions to them. 2. I need to have an admin section where we can upload backlinks.  The admin section should do the minimum 2.1 Allow us to select a website, select a link type, and upload the backlinks. It should extract specific columns from a CSV and upload them into the desired website/link area like a guest post or a social bookmark etc.. 3. We need graphs and all of the fancy looks for others to look at.. 4. We want to make sure that someone can download the report to their desktop in a doc, excel, or pdf form. Extras Automatic rank checking like IBP or Jonathen Ledgers new software etc.. If not I will just continue to use IBP it's not a big deal.

I have ran across a very good .CO domain and am thinking about making it into one of our main websites.  I have no experience with them.  I have used/bought just about every other domain type out there, but I have never used a .CO yet. The domain I was able to purchase was seobusiness.co  for $5.00 - regardless if I am able to use it for our main brand if they don't rank up the same, I will use it for something else.  The site isn't up yet btw, so  no need visiting it... The keyword gets 1600 exact hits a month give or take a few of course - thats just the Google tool estimate. Matt Cutts says that they can rank up the same, but I am looking for more than this. Does anyone have some proof that .co's can rank up?  I hate to put 2-3 months of solid work into this to rank it up for SEO business and it doesn't want to rank due to the .co. Thanks in advance for your time.