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If we get any backlinks from discussions/forums of top websites like wordpress and joomla forums; do they count as valid and authority improving backlinks? I mean about the dofollow links.

We are currently doing some outreach to bloggers to review our products and provide us with backlinks (preferably followed). The bloggers get to keep the products (usually about $30 worth). According to Google's link schemes, this is a no-no. But my question is, how would Google ever know if the blogger was paid or given freebies for their content? This is the "best" article I could find related to the subject: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2332787/Matt-Cutts-Shares-4-Ways-Google-Evaluates-Paid-Links The article tells us what qualifies as a paid link, but it doesn't tell us how Google identifies if links were paid or not. It also says that "loans" or okay, but "gifts" are not. How would Google know the difference? For all Google knows (maybe everything?), the blogger returned the products to us after reviewing them. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Maybe Google watches over terms like, "this is a sponsored post" or "materials provided by 'x'". Even so, I hope that wouldn't be enough to warrant a penalty.

Hello, Is finding backlinks through competitive analysis only for high quality links these days. It seems commonly thought that link building is dead. If the site with a link section in my industry has a DA below 35 should I leave it alone? Or what's safe and future (update) proof these days? Thanks!

I have been doing some back-link checking and found that 25% of the total back-links to my PR5 site are Spam and generated over the past 8 weeks. There are 189 links in total from 38 different domains and the anchor text is a combination of 'ugg boots for women' from TLDs in China, Russia and North Korea. The PR of these sites is 15 are n/a, 12 are 0 and the other 11 range between 1 - 6. More interestingly, all the links point to 1 single page on the domain. I have taken down that page now and wondering if I should 'disavow' the offending links in Google and Bing? Clearly with such a high % of my total links now being Spam, I want to be proactive so this does not hurt my rankings in search. If a Spambot is behind it then the issue is going to get worse moving forward. Any advice is welcome...

We dropped significantly (from page 1 for 4 keywords...to ranking over 75 for all) after the Penguin update. I understand trustworthy content and links (along with site structure) are the big reasons for staying strong through the update...and those sites that did these things wrong were penalized. In efforts to gain Google's  trust again, we are checking into our site structure and making sure to produce fresh and relevant content on our site and social media channels on a weekly basis. But how do we remove links that were built by our SEO company, those of which could be untrustworthy/irrelevant sites with low site rankings? Try to email the webmaster of that site (using data from Open Site Explorer)?

What are the best practices for getting links to my site indexed in search engines.  We have been creating content and acquiring backlinks for the last few months.  They are not being found in the back link checkers or in the Open Site Explorer.  What are the tricks of the trade for imporiving the time and indexing of these links? I have read about some RSS methods using wordpress sites but that seems a little shady and i am sure google is looking for that now.  Look forward to your advice.

I don't think there is a definitive answer to this, but worth the discussion: How to handle an expired ad in a classified / auction site? Michael Gray mentioned you should 301 it to it's category page, and I'm inclined to agree with him. But some analysts say you should return a "product/ad expired" page with a 404. For the user I think the 404 aproach is best, but from a SEO perspective that means I'm throwing link juice out. What if I 301 him from the ad, and show a message saying why they're seeing the listing page instead of the product page? Thoughts?

Hello, I have talked to many SEO companies about their services and rates. I noticed that all of them will buy thousands and thousands of links once you first join. That is why they always want a start-up fee, so they can purchase the links. I know the best method is doing it the ethical hard way of asking sites to link to them, but I dont have time to do that. I mainly want to know where the SEO companies buy their links from. I am figuring that them buying the links are not negatively affecting the sites or they would lose their clients if they got into black hat links. It must be good inorder for them to keep their clients. I was interested in buying links, but do not know who to trust. Does anyone have a recommendation?