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I created a manual for a popular piece of equipment and placed it, as a PDF-file, on my website.

The PDF contains a clickable link to the root domain of my website. Other websites have downloaded the PDF and put it on their own website, hosting it themselves.

Since Google indexes PDFs, does the link in the PDF count as a regular 'link' from an external website, and does it have comparable value? Can't find any thoughts or studies about this anywhere.

Hi there,

I was wondering if the following setup might be harmful for SEO of is frowned upon by Google:

I manage a couple of websites that belong to a specific company within a holding company. What is allowed regarding reciprocal linking? The current setup is like this:

• Site A: one-page general website about the holding, links to sites B, C, D on the homepage (follow link)
• Site B: website for a specific company branch, links to SITE A in the footer of each page (follow link)
• Site  website for a specific company branch, links to SITE A in the footer of each page (follow link)
• Site  website for a specific company branch, links to SITE A in the footer of each page (follow link)

Sites B,C,D don't link to each other, which is a good thing I guess, but should I change the links to nofollow, or is this not so harmful?

Yes. It does not contain a nofollow-directive, so it'll work out.

The onclick-eventhandler is used for linktracking. Users who have javascript disabled and search engines get a "real" link, while users who have javascript enabled will run the linkClick-function (which will probably ping the server or run a script that will redirect to the url).

Thank you guys for your answers!

I realize that other strategies are more effective and less 'gray', but I was just wondering if it could work in theory. I'm not planning on buying hunderds of broken typo domains, but I figured that a link from a direct competitor could be pretty valuable. But if 301's lose juice like Gareth said, one link might not be even worth it.

@Takeshi; Thanks for suggesting Xenu, I'll check it out!

As you all know, it's valuable but hard to get competitors to link to your website. I'm wondering if the following could work:

Sometimes I spot that a competitor is linking to a certain external page, but he made a typo in the URL (e.g. the competitor meant to link to awesomeglobes.com/info-page/ but the link says aewsomeglobes.com/info-page/).

Could I then register the typo domain and 301 it to my own domain (i.e. aewsomeglobes.com/info-page/ to mydomain.com/info-page/) and collect the link juice? Does it also work if the link is a root domain?

Hi Sebastiaan, The Google Penguin update targeted 'black hat webspam', which affected the ranking orders on some SERPs.

If your site's rankings did not drop, the change in traffic is unlikely to be connected to the Penguin update. Did you experience a drop in your rankings?

Does anybody know if non-English queries were also 'hit' by the Google Penguin update?

All Penguin horror stories out there are from sites focusing on English queries, and in some (Dutch) industries I'm monitoring, some sites with spammy backlink profiles are still ranking.

Hi Nikki,

You can fix this by editing your .htaccess (if you use one) or by making changes on the server-side, just like Steven said.

Some more info on changing it by .htaccess:
http://www.chrisabernethy.com/force-lower-case-urls-with-mod_rewrite/

I can back up Nakul's answer: When checking out a competitors backlink profile: don't be blinded by backlinks coming from a high DA website. It might look impressive, but most of the time the links are worthless (e.g. a link in the comments of a blogpost, completely unrelated content-wise). Services like Open Site Explorer remain just a tool, and DA/PA just a statistic.