Panda 14th update.

[parttimepoker]

Why was the sig link removed? PAL links are def decent links.

If everyone in your niche has crap links, sounds like you should develop an authority site and sell them good links.

Buying links is black hat. If you're buying links for advertising, you're not doing SEO anymore. You're buying advertising. There might be some ancillary benefits, but it's not an SEO strategy.

Comment links are probably fine, but for the love of god don't hire them out. Do it yourself and you'll probably make some contacts in the process if your comments are useful. I hired out links once and the results were embarrassing - ended up spamming a lot of sites of people I knew.

[Casius14]

Get premium links and then you should be able to get the crap ones more safely. Although I never get anything but good links these days to be honest.

Without de-railing this thread too much (start a new one if you wish) , I'd be interested to know what you consider a good link, Seb? And how you would go about finding them? Rough cost? etc......Realise this is probably a pretty big noob question, but there are so many people flogging links and blog posts that's it's sometimes tough finding the good from the bad.

[Sebastian]

Hey Man,

The experts at SEO are Kaus and Martinez on this, but quality of links has nothing to do with price lol. In fact, price is the only factor that you can safely decrease without affecting rankings. Look for stuff like fresh cache date, low outgoing links, website age etc..

I realize that "white hat" wasn't a great term. But what I mean is that if you purchase links well, the site will do nothing out of the ordinary from a search engine's perspective. Your are losing Karma points in the grand scheme of life though.

If you get huge spikes of links from one source, then it is definitely strange. But if your strategy is a very slow and gradual build up of links from many sources, while building brand value to back up the artificial links, then you can get away with murder.

It's "emulated White Hat", hehe. There is no white hat, agreed. But don't use that as an excuse to justify spamming, just because everyone is breaking the rules... Then you'll end up crying in forums like the Squizz. Just stop worrying about SEO, and apply what makes you an ROI while minimizing risk. No BS, just find what works.

[leporello]

I've bought a lot of links in the past year and Google are devaluing more and more. Article directories where hit in the 1st panda update, killing 2 of my sites traffic that had only used article directories for links. It's no surprise they're being devalued. In the same way that blog comments and other standard spam tactics should at some point be devalued.

For me a quality link is one that is hard to get and one that when affiliates reverse engineer your link profile, will find it very hard to replicate. Attaining them is hard, but if you keep up to date in the SEO world, then the top SEO agencies are always giving out free tips on ways to do it.

[GFPC]

I agree with you leporello you make some good points!

[Squizzel]

I duno why i even bothered to ask.

This was a straight up penalty, not devaluation of links. Half of you guys don't even understand what the question was.

If i ranked page 3 for all my terms with basically no links, and then i go out and get a ton of links and rank first page for all my terms. Link devaluation isnt the reason why i am not on the first 10 pages for any of my terms.

Ive got a penalty. I think its clearly something to do with my site in terms of UI/aff links not cloaked/ad volume or user data. That is what ive gathered from the majority of panda advice.

[pokeraussie]

I doubt anyone would care if you didn't bother to ask.

[CK]

Edit - * Your right.

[Mr-AJ]

I doubt anyone would care if you didn't bother to ask.

And I don't get why some of you guys even try to help this moron, sorry.
We're all dumb and OP found the holy grail. Why can't we see that? Why do we think we could help him somehow?

[Squizzel]

I cleaned up the site now, redirected the affiliate links and excluded a bunch of pages from robots.txt.

The reviews look a lot more clean:

Here is an example: 888Ladies Review + £5 Free No Deposit Required.

Do you think i have done enough? What other stuff should i look to do?