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That's basically what I was thinking as well, and I appreciate knowing I'm on the right track. What do you think about varying the anchor text by including nearby words like this (links would be the underlined text)?:

Brandname is one of the many brands who make women’s widgets.

For more information, visit our page about women’s widgets and check out the other brands.

If you’re considering buying women’s widgets, you can’t go wrong with Brandname widgets.

Thanks!
John

We're writing a number of blog posts, all based around a particular head-term (call it "women's widgets"). Each post will be centered around a different long-tail keyword (e.g. "women's brandA widgets", "women's brandB widgets", "women's type1 widgets", etc.).  We want to link from the blog posts back to the main "women's widgets" category-level page on our site.  Should we:

a) Use the words "women's widgets" in each blog post and link that to the "women's widgets" page? This would be the most relevant, but it also seems like using the same anchor text on all of the posts, and linking to the main page, is not good since Google doesn't like seeing the same exact anchor text all the time, right?

b) Link the long-tail keyword ("women's brandA widgets") to the main "women's widgets" page?  That would solve the anchor text duplication issue, but then the anchor text doesn't seem relevant to the page being linked to (it might never mention "brandA" on that main page at all), and I think it would also hurt the blog post's chances of ranking for the long-tail keyword since we're basically saying that there's a more relevant page for that keyword somewhere else (i.e. you shouldn't link out from a page using the phrase you're trying to optimize that page for).

c) Link a nearby word/phrase instead? For example, we could say "Trust Companyname.com for your women's widget needs", and link "Companyname.com" to the "women's widget" page.  By proximity to the keyword phrase, that may help a bit, but again the relevancy of the anchor text to the page being linked to is fairly low. I'd hate to have a bunch of "click here", "read this" or "company name" anchor texts being used, just in the name of not overusing the head-term in the anchor text.

Are we just missing something, or misunderstanding Google's preferences? What do you do when you don't want to overuse a keyword in anchor text, but you still want to link to a main category-level page using the head-term in order to tell Google that that is the most relevant, best page for that keyword? Is anchor text duplication more of a problem for external backlinks, and less of an issue for internal interlinking? Do you have a different suggestion, other than what I outlined above?

Thanks for the help!
John

We just got a postcard today from Moz saying the following:

You may have heard that custom reports aren't available in our new software platform, Moz Analytics, yet. We're working on making them easier to use, with more flexible reporting options--and more beautiful, with cool visualizations of your data.

In the meantime, custom reports will be hanging out in PRO until they're available--and awesome--in Moz Analytics.

We know it's inconvenient not to have this feature available in your Moz Analytics workflow, and we're here for you. Just give us a shout on Twitter @Moz, and we're happy to chat!

So, it seems that you have to click the "Back to PRO" button to use your custom reports, for now.

I don't know where the right place to ask this is, but I work for an SEO agency, and we are looking for someone to help us with development of some tools utilizing the SEOMoz API and probably the Google API as well.

Does anyone know where I could find a person with some previous experience with development using these APIs? We've had poor luck just trying to use a developer without specific experience in this area or at least some SEO knowledge.

If you're a developer and would like to talk with us, you can contact me directly if you prefer, rather than post your contact info publicly, but I welcome any helpful thoughts or ideas regarding development of SEO tools.

Thanks,
John
jmaher [at] mcdia.com

My understanding is that in the Keywords Difficulty tool, "Page Linking Root Domains" is the number of different root domains linking to that exact page that is ranking for the keyword that you entered into the tool, whereas "Root Domain Linking Root Domains" (kind of mouthful) is the number of different root domains linking to anywhere on your root domain (in other words, any page on your site). The latter should always be higher than the former, whether it's the home page or not, unless the only links you have are to your home page.