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I personally have no issue with directory submission. I have grave concerns about MASS submission and won't do it (some people do and don't seem to get 'hammered' by Google, but I'm not risking a short gain against long term pain if G ever gets its algo to match the rhetoric).

The only directories I list in are those that have a reasonable chance to actually bring traffic for my customers.

I always get a little twitchy when I see a question involve the words 'focus upon' when it comes to SEO - though I will do my best to answer in a moment: however my best advice is never just worry about one thing EXCEPT if that 1 thing is converted business (however you measure that, sales, read posts, whatever); EVERYTHING else is merely a means to that end.

Out of the two, external and internal links, you would generally want to look to get more EXTERNAL links.

Internal links should take care of themselves as you add new content etc; there are things you can do to perhaps help your internal navigation to provide good links internally which would also help the search engines identify more important pages (used to be allied to PR sculpting, which has varied opinions now on its effectiveness); as with everything, if there is a good USER experience reason for doing the internal link, then do it; if there isn't a good user reason don't.

Good links are, at least to some degree, subjective. What you call a good link I may not, and vise-versa (My best link choice is the one I will list last :)). But in general, a good link for me is one that is:

On a page that is indexed by the search engines (a good start); spending time on getting links on pages not indexed is not a good thing (you could also say you want higher PR pages, which is fair enough, but not the whole story)

On a page that does not have LOTs of other links

On a page where your competitors will find it hard to get on there (the easier it is for 'anyone' to get a link there chances are the less value it will have.

On a page relevant to you topic/niche.

the biggie

My best link advice is: the one that will bring you business. Forget the 'backlink juice' completely; will it bring you a lead that you convert into business. If yes, then that is the killer backlink - give me that one every time. I don't care if it in a directory, a blog post, a forum reply, anything anywhere - if it brings me business I like it!!!!!! And guess what, if it is doing that I would put money on it being likely to be liked by the search engines too.

There are I am sure many more things that would make a 'good' backlink, but hopefully these will help you out for a while. These are the ones I 'work' for; the others I may take as I stumble upon them; but not to work hard at getting.

Shaun,

with regards to the varied results: this is normal.
Specificially:
With regards to the total number of backlinks: Google doesn't offer 100% up-to-date information, they like to keep some information obscured, and obviously OSE doesn't necessarily know about every backlink that Google does (and possibly knows some Google doesn't yet) - and even then Moz themselves say that they don't try to find every link on every site.

Either way you should only ever take link counts as a guide FROM WHATEVER SOURCE. In addition, I wouldn't focus too much on pure numbers - that way lays madness - care about the 'good' links only. (Though I don't like the way Google is going myself; latest algo changes seem to have opposite of stated desired effects)

The difference between page, sub-domain and domain are these:

Page - this is the exact page you type in, whether it is the home page or not - but www.yourdomain.com is a page in its own right, just like any other as well as being a sub-domain.

Sub-domain: www.yourdomain.com is a sub-domain though we don't normally think of it like that (you could have completely different websites on yourdomain.com vs www.yourdomain.com just like you could sub.domain.com) - so any links coming in to ANY PAGE on www.yourdomain.com would count here.

Domain: following on from the above; any link coming in to the domain yourdomain.com OR any sub-domain would be counted here. Once again, because the vast majority of sites use www this rarely gets considered (especially when we 301-redirect from one to the other) and for most sites I would expect the 'domain' and 'sub-domain' counts to be the same.

I personally have no issue with directory submission. I have grave concerns about MASS submission and won't do it (some people do and don't seem to get 'hammered' by Google, but I'm not risking a short gain against long term pain if G ever gets its algo to match the rhetoric).

The only directories I list in are those that have a reasonable chance to actually bring traffic for my customers.

Shaun,

with regards to the varied results: this is normal.
Specificially:
With regards to the total number of backlinks: Google doesn't offer 100% up-to-date information, they like to keep some information obscured, and obviously OSE doesn't necessarily know about every backlink that Google does (and possibly knows some Google doesn't yet) - and even then Moz themselves say that they don't try to find every link on every site.

Either way you should only ever take link counts as a guide FROM WHATEVER SOURCE. In addition, I wouldn't focus too much on pure numbers - that way lays madness - care about the 'good' links only. (Though I don't like the way Google is going myself; latest algo changes seem to have opposite of stated desired effects)

The difference between page, sub-domain and domain are these:

Page - this is the exact page you type in, whether it is the home page or not - but www.yourdomain.com is a page in its own right, just like any other as well as being a sub-domain.

Sub-domain: www.yourdomain.com is a sub-domain though we don't normally think of it like that (you could have completely different websites on yourdomain.com vs www.yourdomain.com just like you could sub.domain.com) - so any links coming in to ANY PAGE on www.yourdomain.com would count here.

Domain: following on from the above; any link coming in to the domain yourdomain.com OR any sub-domain would be counted here. Once again, because the vast majority of sites use www this rarely gets considered (especially when we 301-redirect from one to the other) and for most sites I would expect the 'domain' and 'sub-domain' counts to be the same.

I always get a little twitchy when I see a question involve the words 'focus upon' when it comes to SEO - though I will do my best to answer in a moment: however my best advice is never just worry about one thing EXCEPT if that 1 thing is converted business (however you measure that, sales, read posts, whatever); EVERYTHING else is merely a means to that end.

Out of the two, external and internal links, you would generally want to look to get more EXTERNAL links.

Internal links should take care of themselves as you add new content etc; there are things you can do to perhaps help your internal navigation to provide good links internally which would also help the search engines identify more important pages (used to be allied to PR sculpting, which has varied opinions now on its effectiveness); as with everything, if there is a good USER experience reason for doing the internal link, then do it; if there isn't a good user reason don't.

Good links are, at least to some degree, subjective. What you call a good link I may not, and vise-versa (My best link choice is the one I will list last :)). But in general, a good link for me is one that is:

On a page that is indexed by the search engines (a good start); spending time on getting links on pages not indexed is not a good thing (you could also say you want higher PR pages, which is fair enough, but not the whole story)

On a page that does not have LOTs of other links

On a page where your competitors will find it hard to get on there (the easier it is for 'anyone' to get a link there chances are the less value it will have.

On a page relevant to you topic/niche.

the biggie

My best link advice is: the one that will bring you business. Forget the 'backlink juice' completely; will it bring you a lead that you convert into business. If yes, then that is the killer backlink - give me that one every time. I don't care if it in a directory, a blog post, a forum reply, anything anywhere - if it brings me business I like it!!!!!! And guess what, if it is doing that I would put money on it being likely to be liked by the search engines too.

There are I am sure many more things that would make a 'good' backlink, but hopefully these will help you out for a while. These are the ones I 'work' for; the others I may take as I stumble upon them; but not to work hard at getting.