The 301 Permanent Redirect is the Google-preferred way to handle redirects. Never set up a 302 Temporary Redirect unless it truly is temporary and then don’t keep it going for very long.

And you’re right — the Gogle Webmaster area is very important; it pays to know what Google thinks of your website and any problems that Google is having with links to your site, or links within your site, when the Googlebot tries to crawl your site. We’ve seen it make a huge difference for some of our clients. If you’re stumped by why a site isn’t doing well in its rankings at Google, the Google webmaster zone is the place to try to figure it out.

http://www.google.com/webmaster

You sent a link to websitegrader.com in your post, but I removed it as I do not put a whole lot of stock in automated software that tells you to do various things to rank well. IBP (Internet Business Promoter) has one of the best tools, but even that one makes mistakes and gives silly advice about keyword density and other things that don’t work when you apply their advice. IMHO, anyway.

To see whether a link from a particular forum or blog is worth pursuing, click “view source” and see how they treat the links that are already on that forum. You’ll find that most of them are set to rel=”nofollow”, so that they don’t give away any page rank from the forum or blog when someone does put in a link.

So to answer your question, I’d say, “No, it’s not an efficient way to get high quality relevant links to your website.”

There are two efficient ways to get high quality links to your website, that I know of:

1. Publish articles through http://www.sendarticles.com. The service is very inexpensive for the number of good links you get from it, and it is part of my standard recommendation for our clients. (Disclaimer: that’s an affiliate link – I sent them referrals for two years before they set up their affiliate system because their article publication service works well. Now I make a small amount if you sign up.)

2. Register your site in the top 30 directories online. You can do this yourself using this page of my main website: http://www.wordsinarow.com/wheretogo.html. It’s not free (for example, Yahoo Directory charges $299 just to review your site to see if they want to include it) but it is money well spent. The directories are crawled by Google, and a link from a human-edited directory page about your keywords is a very relevant link.

Those two things are the most effective and efficient ways to get high quality links, IMHO.

Best,

Jere Matlock

Are forums and blogs an efficient way to get high quality relevant links to the website?

Step 3 above costs nothing but some time. You can do it yourself and get great results — the thing to do is get *relevant* links — and that site shows you what Google thinks are relevant sites for your keywords.

Also, you can buy Bryxen software’s Directory Submitter for about $100, and use it to register your site at about 2500 small directories. We don’t recommend that you reciprocate links if they ask for them (many little directories do) and we don’t recommend you pay for every one of the little directories that ask for payment. Instead, just find the ones that are free and submit there. That will give you about 800 “free” directory listings.

Here’s my affiliate link to buy the Bryxen Directory Submitter: http://jerematloc.bryxen5.hop.clickbank.net

I did a site search for my site and it came up with only 5 mentions. Is there any other to boost you viewing without spending tons of $$?