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Assuming you have built a new sophisticated site that involves high user engagement as in bounce rate < 30% sophisticated genuine content (pages > 2000 chars) best possible site speed what are some of the boilerplate link building activities you would execute under which considerations? Activities: I am thinking of things along the lines of building X social media links using a fiverr submission to curated link directories reach out for high quality links with thought leaders etc Considerations: I am thinking of things along the lines of keep a constant link gain velocity over the first 3 months make sure you place links across pages not just the root domain make sure you have a mix of follow and no-follow links and a natural anchor text distribution In short I am hoping we can crowdsource a linkbuilding starting guide in the SEO world of 2015. /T

Is there a consensus in the SEO world around the best practice on how to treat the multiple auto-generated links for a domain? With a lot of the link profiles we have been analyzing nearly 70% volume of the backlinks relate to these auto generated links (e.g. similarweb.com, informer.com, webstatsdomain.org etc) I can see arguments for disavowing them (low-quality links) as well as keeping them (skew anchor text distribution towards URL mentions, natural link profile) but would be interested if people have run experiments or prefer strongly one way or the other.

We have been doing a good amount of competitive research lately and have noticed sites that have been changing their TTLD quite often to escape manual penalties / DCMA filings. An example evolution: brandterm.com -> brandterm.bz -> brandterm.me These competitors are able to quickly rank for money keywords in the top 3 soon after another domain switch. What we have noticed is that while its obvious they received Google penalties they continue to 301 redirect the old domains to the new ones. We have experienced first hand that penalties travel along domains with 301 redirects. Does anyone have an explanation how these companies are able to achieve quickly high volume of organic search while 301-redirecting from burnt domains? The only option I see is to disavow all previous domains in GWT to be able to employ 301 redirects without risking carrying over the penalty. Are there other theories ppl can think of? T

We have been diligently managing our index size in Google for our sites and are returning a 410 status code for pages that we no longer consider "up-to-date" but still carry value for users to access to have Google remove them from our index to keep it lean. However we have been receiving GWT warning across sites because of the 410 status codes Google is encountering which makes us nervous that Google could interpret this approach as a lack of quality of our site. Does anyone have a view if the 410 approach is the right approach for the given example or if we should consider maybe simply using 301s or another status code to keep our GWT errors clean? Further notes there is hardly ever any link juice being sent to those pages so it is not like we are missing out on that the pages for which we return 410 are also marked as noindex and nofollow