Thanks for the update!

I should also state that this isn't a "500 Total Population" kind of town in the middle of the woods. I mean a rural pacific northwest town with roughly 50,000 - 200,000 in population. Not big enough to have local directories, per se, but certainly enough for their to be a good amount of companies to create healthy competition.

This might seem like a silly question, but It's one that I would like to get some responses from the SEO community.

Do <h>tags need to be staggered according to the numbers?

For example: A few of our clients have their h1 tag listed on a mid-way header that is halfway down their page, and there are both h2's and h3's listed before the h1 in the source code. Does this matter?

Let me know! 
Thanks! </h>

I would imagine that the date of which a link was acquired does, in fact, impact the links value.

More importantly, though, I would say it is much more important that you keep getting new links - For instance, if you got a few backlinks on really great sites a few years back and then just let those sit without acquiring new links, Google might think your company has dropped in relevance and that people no longer care about you.

Old, credible backlinks are good - consistently getting new backlinks is better.

Thanks for the well articulated response, Chris! It's much appreciated.

I'm gonna contest your last statement though, and I'd like to see what you have to say. If I use Moz to check my backlinks, and it gives me (4 root domains, 15 total links) VS. using someone else and getting (150 root domains, X amount of links) ---- How is this a good way to be equipped to act on my backlink portfolio, in regards to using Moz? I wouldn't be able to know if I have spammy backlinks, or a good amount of high quality links?

Kris beat me to it! I was coming here to say basically the same thing.

Thank you for clarifying! It's much appreciated.

Hey everyone!

Can somebody explain to me why this keeps happening: Whenever I'm trying to backlink my competitors, I typically use RavenTools. Every time, without fail, if I put that same URL into Moz's Open Site Explorer - It gives me about 1/20th of what RavenTools shows me. Sometimes it literally comes up with 2 or 3 links total.

Unfortunately, RavenTools has a cap on how many backlink checks you can perform in a month - so once I've used those up, I have to start using OSE... But, it just doesn't work.

Does anyone else have this issue?

Thanks!

I'm going to comment on here again to bump this post. This is a little aggravating: I ran a report on one of our clients using OSE and it says they have 3 backlinks. I then immediately ran a report on RavenTools and their report says we have 61 backlinks.

Why would I want to use OSE if it is only going to provide me >5% of my client's backlink profiles? I simply don't understand.

Bump.