Evaluating links is a very time-consuming process.  You need to be able to look for "patterns" as a primary task IF you need to worry about links.

HOWEVER

I will also say this - your on-site SEO is suffering and just as likely or even MORE likely to be your primary problem. Why? Because you have not stated that you received a notice from Google informing you that your site was flagged for bad links.  If you did NOT get such a notice, while a poor overall link profile can certainly contribute to a generally declining ranking footprint, it's less likely to be the PRIMARY concern.

For example:  Your "Accessories and batteries" category has a terrible topical focus. The page Title doesn't mention what they're accessories or batteries for.  Which means from the very first point of reference on-site, that page fails to communicate the refined focus of the category.  Accessories could be about ANYTHING. And so could batteries.

Then, on that page, the header text "Accessories and Batteries" neither includes that topical clarification, nor is it even a proper "h1" header tag.  There's no descriptive paragraph based content on the page reinforcing and strengthening that topical focus.  Your Canonical tag is NOT SEO best practices for pagination in 2012, and thus that results in massive amounts of content within a category not properly being identified to further reinforce topical authority.  (You should instead be using rel-next/rel-prev and NOT using canonicalization on paginated content, every page title should be unique, and every page within a set should be properly reinforced with it's own h1 tag).

You're not even close to having enough depth of content on product pages (one sentence for the "detailed description), so with all the "related" . product content, sidebar navigation and other "off-topic" content, there's a lot of content on your site deemed "thin" content.

You have SEVERE page speed problems, a very serious SEO factor in 2012. (tools.pingdom.com reported a 9.3 second load time for the home page and URIValet.com reported 15 seconds).

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface here, because you have a SERIOUS on-site SEO problem that you've apparently either failed to understand or chosen to ignore in this question, which indicates there could be MANY more problems on the site.

Heck - several "minor" template fixes alone could boost your SEO, though if you really want to win, you'd be wise to really address all the high priority factors on-site.

Ah okay - that notice is definitely a factor then and an important consideration not initially mentioned.  So as long as you have someone else working on the other issues described then we can focus on the patterns concept I initially mentioned.

Several things that stand out when I'm reviewing links on a mass scale.I prefer to look at links grouped by domain in the first pass to help see these patterns.

1. Page titles of pages sending links.  Quite often, they're titles that blatantly scream junk/low-quality or irrelevant to any topic your site is about, or even link-partnerships... or even outright mention SEO.

2. Domain names/URLs of pages sending links. Same concept - they can quite often obviously communicate that they're junk, irrelevant, or blatantly specifically sites for SEO or links.

3. Anchor Text - if you group by anchor text as a next pass, look for links where the anchor text is exact match keywords and then look at the page title of that linking page and it's domain name.  Patterns can be spotted of low quality.  If needed, you can click over to a URL and just look at the page that  link is coming from.

4. After all that process, as you have marked links as being bad, regroup them by domain.  At that point you will likely still need to go through remaining links and go to at least one link from each domain to examine the page or just look at the overall domain for quality.

NOTE - the part where you examine a site sending links does require you to be able to know how to spot a bad site already.  Like - "Can I trust this site?" "Is this site obviously a fake site?" and other such questions need to be asked and answered.

And if a link is on a good site, is it a forum or blog comment?  Is it using an SEO relevant keyword as the person's signature name? Or is it even a legitimate and relevant comment, even if the link isn't using keyword anchors?

There are so many subtle indicators I could add but in reality the best way to go is to dive in and remember to look for patterns.  As you spend the time doing this work, patterns become more and more obvious...

I routinely do audits on sites with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages.  We've found good results simply by appending the page info to page Title & Description  so:

Designer Handbags | Unique Pocketbooks | Page 3

I agree with Rand's '09 article in general, however there are some things I think take it a bit too far (such as redirecting PDF documents for link juice).  If a PDF is truly the most relevant content on a topic, I believe it should be indexed.

The biggest factor is that if we get completely bogged down in this process just for SEO sake, we lose focus on user experience.

It's right up there with page and link sculpting - to me, it's a waste of time and harms user experience.  And the time spent going that far is, in my opinion, in 2011 much better spent on other SEO tactics.  Not just because Google has changed how they deal with nofollow links.

The "nearby hotels to consider" feature is a user thing.  It may or may not pass quality page rank.

In some cases, that extra link could dilute the topical focus / strength of the page it's on.

So if I get to resort X's page, and there's a link to "nearby hotels", there's an implied relationship.  Good for users.  But for SEO, sure it's related stuff, yet maybe not laser focus related.

Another example is blog posts that end with a following box "related articles" and that box contains three or five links to other articles.  Maybe they're highly related, maybe loosely.  If they're loosely related, sure it MIGHT be good to help users.  Yet it probably dilutes this article's topical focus.

The slides will be going up at some point in the next few days.  And I'll have a follow-up post that includes the notes for each slide.  In the mean time, I did an article on Search Marketing Wisdom yesterday directly related to the last slide in that deck.

just to clarify regarding my input - my perspective is based on my experience with client sites on all scales, small, medium, large and mega sites.

To me it's more important to see how things work on our own sites and evolve them over time as compared to purely looking for what others do or say as it's own reason for taking action.

Screaming Frog is my go-to crawler.  One of the many data points it provides is page level. Level 0 is home page, level 1 is one-click from the start, etc...

It's an invaluable tool for anyone wanting to check on a vast range of crawl efficiency and SEO factors.

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/tabs/

If I have a category California Hotels, sub-category San Francisco Hotels, then having links in a sub-navigation bar to each (if there's only a handful), each of those links reinforces the strength of the top level Hotels, 2nd level California, and third level San Francisco related phrases.  They all support each other.

If, on the other hand, I have a link to "nearby hotels", that implies I'm going from a single hotel details page to a uniquely filtered "geo" category page that shows hotels based on some criteria - it might be all San Francisco, or all within a distance radius, or all within a zip code radius.

Even if it's all other hotels in San Francisco, it's not a link pointing to another (or several) same-level page(s).  It's pointing one layer higher.

That's a filter more than a properly constructed category drill-down.  And it implies that the page I'm on will NOT be listed on that target of the "nearby" link.

hahaha wLoudogg - don't even suggest that - I've been offered such nonsense plenty of times.  Never makes it any more worth the insanity

Having all listed and linked is ideal for SEO, however you rapidly cross into usability problems if there are more than a handful. (Would you want 50 or hundred links in a sidebar nav? ) When a site is so big that there are more than a handful that could be linked from that sidebar, it's actually best practice to NOT have any others linked from the sidebar, else you confuse users even more (listing only some, but not all). User Experience is paramount when making these decisions. Even at the expense of SEO in some cases. And if that happens, other tactics need to be employed. Like having a separate, dedicated funnel for "featured properties". Which requires even more unique content in that funnel. But it at least boosts the ranking value for those properties included.

In reality, there is not specific "right" length of anchor text.  Search engines fully expect everything from single word to several word anchors, a mix of keyword specific, brand, and generic random text.

In an ideal world, it should come down to "what makes the most sense here from a user perspective".  In the case of the example you point out, it looks odd, but not from a spammy perspective - you don't get seo value (perceived or otherwise) from including "click here to view" in the link.

Instead, it is less than ideal from a user experience perspective.  It's actually a failed marketing attempt at motivating people to click on the links.

Etsy's got a good structure with their category and sub-category sidebar that balances SEO and user experience.  note though that when you get deep into the individual Etsy stores, that's gone, because it would dilute the individual store owner's account focus and distract users.

I'd like to offer recommendations where the existing site could possibly just have an SEO problem that won't go away just by getting the new domain value, however when I went to rocketproblems.com just now, I got a "server not found" message.

So without seeing your site, I'll offer insight on what to consider doing if you do the switch.

Exact match or partial match domains do offer value.  They are, however, on Google's radar for possibly getting less value than they do now, though Matt Cutts' exact language in a video earlier this year was they're considering a minor / slight reduction in value.

I wouldn't go by the competitors visible actions.  Just one month is not long enough to determine value of such a transfer.  It could easily take a couple months or longer to rebound and build the proper new trust factors that the new domain name will require, including links to the new domain.

Links to the existing site should be examined to find out which ones you can request being changed to the new domain name as well, since 301 redirects (vital to ensure these are implemented across the board and tested for verification) do take a hit on passing value.

I would also recommend a full press release through PRWeb.com or PRNewswire.com upon change to the new domain, as well as a social media campaign to promote the new domain.

So if you are prepared to wait out the potential drop over an extended period of time, do a full-court press.