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"What’s up with these dl.dropbox.com High PA & DA links?"

You know, It's frustrating to spend almost an entire day getting a few great link backs... then to find out your competitor has hundreds of cheap & easy link backs for the keyword you are going for with greater Authority [according to SEOmoz's OSE].

So I ran a search on one of our top competitors in Open Site Explorer to gather an idea of where the heck they are getting all of their links. Please feel free to copy my actions so you can see what I see.

1. Run a search in OSE for www[dot]webstaurantstore[dot]com.
2. Click on the ‘Anchor Text’ Tab.
3. Click on the first Anchor Text Term, which should be ‘restaurant supplies’ :: Then it will expand, click on the ‘View more links and details in the inbound links section.’

As you scroll down the list you will notice that they have a bunch of linking pages from dl.dropbox.com, all of them are .pdb files, for their targeted Anchor Text, restaurant supplies.

Q: So my question is can someone please elaborate on what .pdb files are and how they are getting this to work for them so well?

Also you will notice, on the expanded Anchor Text Page, that their 6^th most powerful link for this phrase (restaurant supplies) seems to be linked straight from a porn site, I thought Google does not rank adult sites like this?

Q: For future reference, does anyone know legitimate websites to maybe file an SEO manipulation complaint?

Thanks!

Thanks, that webinar and powerpoint presentation was great.

"You can't outsource giving a shit" - Tom Critchlow

lol

Yeah I think we all agree guest blogging is a powerful way to attain quality backlinks. It’s not easy though, that’s why time and time again people just can’t help themselves from submitting articles to Article Directories and/or Linking their Keyword Term to Industry Site Directories.

Plus, as I was just reading this post http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-da-a-reliable-domain-metric :: And I feel the same way about the DA. Point being, some blatantly obvious spam sites have High DA, which is confusing.

We have very few backlinks and horrible anchor text associated with them.

Realistically speaking, I think finding a good blog to guest post on, writing the content and getting it on the internet would be At-Least a 2-3 week process. So if we guest posted every 2 weeks, in 1 year we would only have 26 backlinks.

Such a small number ....It's just really hard to justify the Time and effort this will take to get 26 back links when our competitors already have thousands for the competing anchor text. It's worth it right?

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, both I and our general marketing coordinator agree with this strategy. What do you think about the Article Directories though? Should I totally avoid them completely?

I too have had some success (in the past) with getting traffic from articles, but the quality of this traffic was 'fair' at best.

But to be clear here the goal is not to drive traffic.

The goal is to build a back link portfolio and from quality anchor text.

I appreciate your reply.

Ok I know there's a lot of information already on here about Article Marketing for SEO, but I need to know if anyone here has recently ran an article campaign successfully?

Correct me if I am wrong, but submitting the same article to a bunch (more than 1-2) article directories for back links is a bad idea. Right?

Maybe it worked in 2006, but now even the site themselves (Article Directories) are just so polluted with spam from the pass that, that Even if you submitted a genuine article.. it would still not give you as much Juice because the sites themselves are considered spamy.

Looking at Alexa's ranking of Ezine Articles kind of proves that, after Panda Hit.

The bottom line is, my boss says I have to start writing articles for backlinks. He wanted me to blast them across multiple directories. So I need to be absolutely certain that where I place these articles will have Quality impact on our sites SEO.

Tips, Advice, Links, THANKS!

We are a prominent ecommerce site in the food service industry.