Christoph put a really decent video out on how to identify spammy links, that should help

http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/link-networks/

Well yeah that wouldn't be too many at all, but then going back to what Marcus and EGOL said you're much better off using bold tags for readability reasons than simply using it on keywords really. It has little to no impact in terms of rankings (probably a tiny bit) but can have a much greater impact on keeping your visitors moving forward and converting if used to break the content up into more digestible chunks with a good scent of what's important to them and where their eyes should go next.

I'd probably use bold a few more times in a 500 word piece but use it as what it is, an emphasis tag Not emphasising keywords for Google but whatever it is in the content that will encourage the user to feel they're in the right place... if that happens to combine with some keywords or keyword phrases then great, but don't see it as a game-changer for rankings

I suppose if you were going to look at it as "how many is too many" though it would be a percentage density instead of an actual number because it would depend on the size of the piece.

If you had a 1,000 word page then 50 words in bold might look okay but if it were a 100 word page then 50 words in bold would be ridiculous.

I do hope Ryan gets "Good Answer" and/or "Endorsed Answer" for this... hint, hint

Getting great links is the way to go, but that can be easier said than done. Primarily you want to attract natural links through the promoting content, but you can build links too. Have a look at these tools: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php and http://www.seomoz.org/link-finder

Thanks. I think I can see where the main problems are... you have quite a few ads and loads, and loads of outgoing links with very little unique content. The majority of the content you have there is fed in through affiliate programs and so will exist in many other places too.

I would suggest that you separate a lot of what you have on the homepage into different categories and landing pages, at the same time as adding some static and unique content on each.

After doing that, fill out a re-inclusion request with Google.

Usually when people think they've been penalized it turns out they haven't and there's just some other issue but I think you most likely have been penalized in this case.

Can you tell us the domain?

Even though inline uses less code than usual, I'd still say always go for an external file so there is less code to crawl though for your content. The cleaner the code, the better. Inline is still more code than just a linked external stylesheet.

*Edit: Oh and CSS every time over JavaScript

I would recommend you visit conceptfeedback.com

There's a free and paid service. Paid is relatively inexpensive for what you get, but if you give some reviews yourself then you can get reviews in return from others, some of which are design and UX experts who provide comprehensive stuff. Well worth it I think

Wow that's a big, bold move! I don't know how to answer it but if I were you I'd wait until you get a few, nice and comprehensive answers on here before doing anything to drastic. Either that or use a private Q&A question to SEOmoz staff if you have any points spare to do so. With such a large change, you want to ensure you're doing it right.

I'll be interested to see the answers you get for this.

I respectfully disagree. I know they don't necessarily pass loads of link juice but some of the paid directories don't have all the millions of spammy links to spammy sites in... because they're paid. Some are very, very cheap too. I know most are rubbish and not worth squat but there's still lots which are cheap and do pass link juice which far outweighs the cost.

Also the paid ones add you much faster... and if you want a diverse backlink profile it's worth getting a bunch of directories in there as well as your other link types... rely on the free ones and you could be waiting forever for that.

I wouldn't worry about the PR. It won't be due to content changes anyway, since PR is based on incoming links only and has nothing to do with what you have on-page. We've gone from PR 4 to PR 5 with the update but I don't care as I practically ignore PR now anyway... can't wait for them to hopefully get rid of it. It's one tiny metric which isn't a true reflection of what they have anyway. So much more that matters.

At the moment you have a direct link from the homepage to the quickbooks hosting page with anchor text in the footer. Above that, you have some body content about quickbooks hosting (still on the homepage), put a link in there to the quickbooks hosting page. Body content links are better than footer links by far.

Also it seems that you've had the following URL's for that page:

/quickbooks-hosting.html
/host-quickbooks.html
/hosted-quickbooks.html

Were/are these all the same page just with URL changes? Have you put 301's in for them so that both older URL's point to the new one?

Wow that's a big, bold move! I don't know how to answer it but if I were you I'd wait until you get a few, nice and comprehensive answers on here before doing anything to drastic. Either that or use a private Q&A question to SEOmoz staff if you have any points spare to do so. With such a large change, you want to ensure you're doing it right.

I'll be interested to see the answers you get for this.

You might be joking but I've seen comments like that haha

Such services are often easy to spot I think

There can be massive negative effects.

1. You'll annoy a lot of blog owners, some will report you for spam

2. You'll get tonnes of worthless links from worthless blogs filled with other spammers, therefore connecting yourself to some iffy neighbourhoods

3. You'll end up with lots of links that have your same anchor text keywords in from one link type... blogs. This will look unnatural for your link profile

My view: It used to work, not so much anymore... might still work a little but there are risks, especially to your brand.

Panda seems to have diminished even more the value of low quality links, and low quality links is what you'll get with auto linking software. This brings down the benefits while the risks stay the same.

Yes I like the content registry idea! It would probably be necessary to pay for it as a service though, and to cover dupes that are okay maybe they could just allow dupes as long as they reference back to the source in the registry (for news, quotations, etc... where dupes can't be avoided).

Raven Tools is great for that

Well I actually don't use Raven anymore (though I would like to) because I was ending up with too many memberships and software subscriptions, etc... and I couldn't afford it. So the choice was clear and simple, SEOmoz membership wins hands down, every time!

The thing Raven does have though is the project management side of things, and the link management... the link management IS the best feature in my opinion... and at the same time, the only thing lacking from SEOmoz tools (it would need to be similar though to the Raven Tools one if they made it though as that was really well put together).

You get tonnes more from SEOmoz than you do Raven... this community for a start! lol

I learnt literally every last thing I know about this stuff from following SEOmoz's stuff. When it comes down to it, knowledge is more important than any tools, and knowledge is what you get from SEOmoz.

Righty... in the interests of defending my original position

I've looked around a bit, and granted not all of these are credible sources but again Todd Malicoat is as I'm sure you'll agree. Jill Whalen in one of the below links says she'd prefer them not to match and the others are people of whom I don't know their knowledge or experience, but (and admittedly this is hearsay) one guy says he heard Matt Cutts at PubCon say they should be at least a little different.

One guy (again I don't know how credible he is as a source) said he tested it and found it can be found as more spammy if they're the same.

Anyway, it appears this debate has happened before in other places and there are some good points made, so here's the links

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=41271

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4078221.htm

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0a4f386adacc7769&hl=en

Over all though, I think we need to know if the test Rand and Todd spoke of ever happened, and if so what the results were.

Haha, yeah Matt should be a politician