Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Here is a post on the Seo Moz Blog a couple of weeks ago. Provides good information to understand how shortened links work with ranking. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-shortener-owl-li-indexed-in-google

I used http://deletebacklinks.com/ yesterday to search 7 of the directories they have access to for searching bad links.

I found one of my sites had links on these directories and I was able to remove them for fairly reasonable price.

Thought this is a good tool to do a free quick check for any bad linkbacks on deindexed directories. I know this may be a small portion but every little bit helps.

I have a competitor that also ranks well for competitive search terms with very few links and mediocre on-page optimization and social signals.

I asked the question on Q&A recently and was told that is it possible for them to have links that bots from site explorers can not see. Google bot is able to see them but the site explorer you use won't be able to show them.

I also learned that having done no SEO efforts can be better than having bad links pointing to your site.

I am still researching and learning how this is possible. I would like to see what more people in the industry have to say about this.

Hey Alex,

Did you end up using Sponsored Tweets? How were the results?

Great info guys! I am going to try putting form on homepage on a few sites to see the response rates. Ill let post the data later. Thanks again!

In the past, I have offered a variety of benefits to the sites I am contacting. Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:

• Relevant and original blogs or articles

• sharing their site or advertisement on social media profile

• writing a testimonial for businesses or individuals that I have worked with

• "how-to" articles

• Infographics or visual guides

• Bringing typos or broken links to webmaster's attention

• A reciprocal link

How important is it to have a contact form on the homepage of a service-based business?

I am trying to decide if having a form on front page will increase the number of people filling it out.

In my experience with sending out link request emails, they always want to know how it benefits them. Whether you are offering content, infographics, guest blog post, broken link corrections, reciprocal link, endorsing them on a social media or providing a testimonial for their business, I have seen the best results by telling them how it will benefit their website.

Create a compelling title that mentions the benefit so you have a higher open rate. Getting them to open is half the battle.

Also, try including your website url in the body of the message so it easy for them to click through and review your site:

"Our pagerank 4 website - http://www.example.com - which carries (Here I said what we carry) You have similar sites located in the "Other" Section on your link page."

Make sure your request is short, clear and direct. Possibly rewording your opening sentence to:

"Would you consider adding our site on the "Links" section list?"

I was in a similar situation where I created unique pages for multiple cities in our service area. The pages are linked from my home page in the footer. At first, the city pages did not do well in google. I recently have started to obtain high-quality links to  my homepage and have seen the city pages increase in ranking.

While it still is good to build links to each "office" page, building links to your homepage will give enough juice to your other pages for them to rank well.

More competitive areas may need to have links built directly to the office page. You can try doing this with local directories - for each directory listing use the office page as the URL for that listing.

The value of the link is probably less than a link from a site from a different IP address but it is still a counted link and your site shouldn't be penalized.

Here are some good discussions and studies on the topic:

http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/548022-getting-links-site-same-ip.html

http://tomaltman.com/link-juice-based-on-domain-ip-addres/

I would focus more on each individual site's Page and Domain Authority. Take a look at their backlink profile as well to make sure its not a link farm or spammy.

If each site looks legitimate, I would submit blogs to the other sites.

I have used the wordpress multisite for several domains. Each domain is managed under one wordpress install but each of the sites have unique content.

All of the domains are indexed as separate and rank well for their search terms. You shouldn't have a problem with google omitting your domains if you provide unique content on each site.

Some of the exact-match domains that we own have been devalued by google. However, there are a few that have increased in ranking for exact match keyword searches (much less competitive keywords). There still is hope!

I would include the keywords in the h1 and content. Also, create a blog on the site that includes the keyword you are trying to rank for. The power of an exact-match domain alone won't make your site rank well. Include some good content on the site with the keywords included.

my URL is ________________________

Competitor site is __________________

I thought there might be a way to block some link explorer bots but wasn't sure. Thank you for verifying that.

I was able to find a few more links on Bing's Link Explorer but still no substantial links.

I didn't think on-page optimization would put you above a site with decent on-page optimization and a better link profile - but maybe it does.

They don't have any social profiles so social signals can't be a contributor to their high ranking.

I tried some other site explorers. There were a couple links that were shown on Majestic but not on OSE. None of the linkbacks seemed to be of any quality.

I dedicate one of my browsers for checking rankings and I never sign in, so it should be a pretty accurate SERP.

The content has remained the same since I have been tracking them. The only difference with their content and other competing sites is they have the exact-match keyword listed multiple times throughout the site. However, it looks and reads very unnatural.

I have been following a competitor's link profile on OSE for over 8 months. Their linkbacks have remained the same (3 follow, 9 nofollow links), all from low-quality directory sites. However, my competitor continues to improve in rankings  and is now #1 for competitive keyword searches.

How is this possible? Is there a way to hide your link profile or links from OSE?

Any tips are appreciated - Thanks!