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I just ran our site through Open Site Explorer.  If I run the non-www version I get 30 root domains, if I run www I get 177.  Is it wise to try and contact those sites using the non-www version and ask them to update the links to www version?  Will that make much of a difference?

I work for an online retailer, which predominantly sells perfume products. In recent months, we have been spending more and more time on SEO, particularly in terms of improving our content, and as part of our strategy we have been working with beauty bloggers in particular (independent reviews, articles etc) to increase the number of links to our website. Whilst we’ve seen steady improvements, we are concerned that some of the key words/phrases we are targeting still aren’t ranking as high as we would like. Some weeks they will move up a few places, but more often than not, they will then move back down. We are more frustrated as we are seeing other websites, which are much poorer in terms of quality content, number of products, etc., ranking quite highly for these terms. From analysing these sites, it seems they are achieving their high ranking from having a considerable number of what appear to be poor quality links. We have been warned countless times to avoid link farms, etc., yet these sites have 100s even 1000s of links coming from suspect sites and it isn’t doing them any harm. Recently, we noticed a lot of our competitors are receiving links from websites such as LinkPartners. When we checked the website, we could see that whilst it appears to be a fairly SPAMMY website, its domain authority (67) is actually quite high. Should we base our decision about whether or not to place a link somewhere solely on how high their domain authority is, i.e. would it be more beneficial to us to have a link with what appears to be a link farm if their domain authority is high, than what appears to be a fantastic independent beauty blog with a low domain authority? Or should we avoid these sites whatever the circumstances? It’s slightly confusing for us as we are being warned about placing links on websites as google is apparently going to penalise us for it, but then we see our rival sites doing well by simply placing links everywhere they can.

I have some coughunnatural linkscough on a blogger.com blog which isn't mine (it was done by an SEO company). I just can't remember which company did it. The blog is inactive and is a one-page blog. Any suggestion to get this link down or reach the author / owner of the blog? Thank you!

Prior to Penguin, I had begun a link building campaign of sorts for a tourism bureau. All it was designed to do was leverage a wealth of relevant link opportunities that were right under our noses...the bureau's own members. These restaurants, hotels, attractions, etc are extremely relevant web sites with respect to the tourism bureau's target and niche. The links were to be in the form of image badges stating "Proud member of..." with brand-only alt text and title tags. I will focus on keeping these links a reasonable percentage of the overall domains linking into the site, I will vary the alt text throughout, and cultivate the links slowly over a 5-month period. But since the bureau's site already drives traffic to these individual member sites, the links we cultivate will end up being reciprocal. Even though they are natural in the purpose they serve, should we be worried, and consider abandoning the program?

Hi guys. Just wondered what people's thoughts were on the value of a link from a subdomain vs a .com or .co.uk - I have several clients operating within the UK crafts sector, and there are a huge number of blogspot blogs with decent PR etc. Given that anyone can start one of these for free (and therefore theoretically get themselves hundreds of bogus links), I wonder whether they carry the same value as an independent site. I'll look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts 🙂

I know someone with a phone app who would like to link to my website from the app. Would there be any SEO benefit to this at all, or would the only benefit be the traffic?

That's it. I'm thinking of making a Tumblre blog (s) for inbound links. Is it worthwhile?