There is also a question of what you mean by being "penalized". Do you mean dropped from the homepage SERPs to page 20 or do you mean falling a few places in the rankings because you're linking to...

I think you still have to be careful about linking to bad neighborhoods since this is one aspect of a website that is totally in your control. You may not be able to control who links to you, but you...

Use all the usual SEO link building techniques and avenues including gift and shopping directories.

To add to the list: Squidoo, Gather, press release, article submissions …

I started see some older sites yesterday drop out of the top rankings and then back to the top within the same day, so this could be one of those reindexing issues.

Thanks for the list. THis is better than some of the other lists I've seen.

Besides using Google, it’s also important to know how to search. For instance, using Boolean search operators are helpful for some. I find that using quotes for some searches often gives me the...

I occasionally still submit articles to the article banks for back links and visitors, but since the value has been discounted in recent times this has fallen off somewhat. Instead, I’m putting the...

Okay I see it now. I see that your website ranks number one with sitelinks using the same words in your URL. This is consistent with what I’ve seen from other websites.

It may be that the words in the URL are important, since I'm not seeing seeing sites without the the words in the URL have sitelinks.

Yes, I don’t think a drop in PR correlates with a drop in the rankings. I think the penalty is to prevent sites that sell text links from passing PR along to those sites and not penalize them in the...

That is an interesting point whether or not Google, Yahoo and MSN treat old trusted links that have recently been nofollowed differently than new links that are nofollowed.

I tend to think though...

I think a lot of unfocused or poorly focused directories are dead. But, I also believe some tightly focused niche directories are still alive, doing well, and providing a valuable service. One of my...

Yes, I’m mostly seeing sitelinks for proper names (such as DMOZ), which is the name of the website and not so much for generic terms. One except would be for the search “hydrogen cars” which is both...

I just did a search on google.co.uk and I'm not seeing any sitelinks either. All I'm seeing is one listing on the frontpage for the first term and on the second page for the second term.

I think the Yahoo directory is still of some value (if you can afford it) since it does provide a link from an authority site to your website. Otherwise, I don’t think people search this directory...

I would like to see this. Can you show me an example?

Buying a lottery ticket is a good analogy. I also like to think of DMOZ as a long-term stock investment. You won’t know for a year or two whether or not your stock pays off. If it does, then great....

According to Google if you don’t want to see a drop in PR, then nofollowing your paid text links is the way to go. Now, good luck on selling text links to customers with the nofollow tag on them.

The number of unique visitors is relative. If you’re selling a $10,000 item then perhaps all you need is 1 unique visitor per day. If you’re selling $1 items, then perhaps you need 10,000 unique...

In order for sitelinks to be included your website needs to be number one in the Google rankings, been around a couple of years and be considered the authority in its industry.

Do keyword research, create compelling content and get many back links and you’re on you way to high rankings.

At one time, it was posted on the Google website that it recommended being in both the DMOZ and Yahoo directories because they are both old, trusted authority sites, which Google places a high value...