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I did not know that about SEOmoz.  I guess I need to work on getting more points!

Thanks Mark, what I'm trying to get people's opinion on is whether it would be considered people "paying for links" if I give them followed links on my site that are not explicitly paid for (i.e. not in their advertisements).

Most companies I have done advertising with in the past have allowed follow links in profiles, press releases, etc. , but I've also encountered those that no follow everything and told me they were doing it to protect themselves from getting penalized by Google.

I wonder if they were scared of being penalized, or just wanted to sculpt PR and keep it all on their site?

Oleg- Thanks for the answer.  I should be more clear with the question.  All user submitted links will be set at "no follow".  I was interested in what to do about company profile pages, product pages and press releases which we will enter and/or approve.

If I run a site that charges other companies for listing their products, running banner advertisements, white paper downloads, etc. does it make sense to "no follow" all of their links on my site?

For example: they receive a profile page, product pages and are allowed to post press releases.  Should all of their links on these pages be "no follow"?

It seems like a gray area to me because the explicit advertisements will definitely be "no followed" and they are not buying links, but buying exposure.

However, I still don't know the common practice for links from other parts of their "package".

Thanks

Julien-

When I do a non-personalized search on Google  for "Job etudiant Paris" I see the first two results for jobetudiant.net and the fourth result is for "studentjob.fr" which I assume is your competitor based on the metrics you provided.

I agree with Devin that OSE probably has not crawled the page and that is why the authority is coming up as 1.

Based on the strength of their root domain, keywords in URL, on-page optimization and content their ranking at number four make sense to me with a quick look.

I don't want to be rude, but my original question has not been answered.  Any thoughts?

Erica,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to this question.  Unfortunately, one question still remains unanswered.  I understand the limitations of OSE, and I can live with that for now.

However, I still do not get why the root domain metrics for my competitors show significantly more "total external links" than the Advanced Inbound Link report I ran.  I do not believe this has to do with filters, especially since OSE is reporting **fewer  **links when I run the advanced report.

It might be that I just don't understand the terminology, which is what I am trying to figure out.  What is the difference between Total External Links that I see in Competitive Domain Analysis for a campaign and the Advanced Inbound Link report analysis for the same domain?  Since the numbers are different I assume the terms are not the same, but I do not understand why.

EDIT - I figured out the internal links showing up issue, they are actually from a different language version of the companies site so they show up as www.example.de linking to www.example.com.

Thanks

I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links.

I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports.  The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B.

Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something?

Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site.

Is there a reason these are appearing?

I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors.  However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate?

Thanks

Kyle,

Thanks for the quick response.  The data is being displayed in the title and meta description field.  I also did some searches for specific terms with my parameter search from our site and filetype:pdf, which shows that the content is being indexed.  It also shows that the PDF titles and meta descriptions are not optimized, so I have some work there.

Thanks,

Anthony

I've searched extensively for this, but could not find a definitive answer.

We recently updated our website and it contains links to about 30 PDF data sheets. I want to determine if the text from these PDFs is being archived by search engines.

When I do this search http://bit.ly/rRYJPe  (google - site:www.gamma-sci.com and filetype:pdf) I can see that the PDF urls are getting indexed, but does that mean that their content is getting indexed?

I have read in other posts/places that if you can copy text from a PDF and paste it that means Google can index the content.  When I try this with PDFs from our site I cannot copy text, but I was told that these PDFs were all created from Word docs, so they should be indexable, correct?

Since WordPress has you upload PDFs like they are an image could this be causing the problem?

Would it make sense to take the time and extract all of the PDF content to html?

Thanks for any assistance, this has been driving me crazy.

I did not know that about SEOmoz.  I guess I need to work on getting more points!