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I can't speak to how thorough OSE is. I know they don't find every link, but in my experience, they seemed to find most of the strong links. I can suggest Majestic SEO for a very thorough, but not free, backlink profile.

Pages can definitely rank for multiple terms, so having anchor text around one term does not necessarily mean you can't rank well for another term (Lots of pages rank for terms other than "click here" despite the majority of their links having that anchor text). Standard practice is to only target one main keyword per page, but that doesn't mean you can't make it work for a page to rank for a couple different major terms.

The main question I have is how different is the term your going after from the anchor text you are getting? I'm of the belief that if anchor text isn't just exact match or nothing. If the anchor text is topically relevant to the terms you are targeting you're in good shape. If that isn't the case why do you have so many links like these pointing to that page?

I could be wrong, but from what I remember of the webinar, he was referring to paid text links in her posts, which is manipulative. I believe the emails only offered cash in exchange for links.

But to the point of whether text links in a guest post are manipulative, I think it depends on the relevancy of what is being linked to. Would a user actually want to go to that site from the post they are on? I'm guessing not many people would want to go to a car insurance site from a travel blog.

I think blog owners need to remember that whether they've written the content or not, if they are putting it on their site, they are vouching for it. Your credibility with your readers and with search engines is on the line. So the blog owner should still take responsibility for making sure the links in a guest post go to reputable sites.

Pruning links from page templates (header, footer, etc.) is generally a good idea if they don't go to important pages. As Albin suggests, listen to the data. What are users not clicking on?

I can see some of these as not being needed in the footer. If your store pages are used as navigation, these are redundant, unless users like using them in the footer. Pages like "returns" and "order tracking" probably aren't making you a lot of money, and can still be easily found from a customer service page that is linked to from the footer. This way users can still find what they need, but you only devote one link instead of four or five.

I don't think removing a handful of links from the footer will diminish the look of the site or the user experience significantly.

A 301 redirect is the best solution as it will point users and bots to what will then be the only source of the content. A rel="Canonical" will tell search engines which page is the canonical version but you will still have users hitting pages on the old domain and potential creating links to those pages instead of to your new subdomains, which isn't ideal.

This probably isn't quite what you're looking for, but Bing allows you to do a search that gives these results:

LinkFromDomain:domain.com

I want to say Danny Sullivan mentioned this in a semi-recent post, but you can find more information here.

It won't be the cleanest list to work with, but it's the only thing I know of that will give you this info

Is there anything keeping you from putting the ISI content in an iframe? Search engines don't identify the content in the iframe as part of the page.

Thanks for the response, Ryan. I'm leaning towards Joomla! as they seem to have more options for each feature and a more supportive community, which I will certainly need.

I already have some experience with WordPress, but for a new site I want to use a different CMS. Anyone care to weigh-in on the pros and cons of Drupal or Joomla!?

Thanks,

Joe

Magic. Obviously.

I can't give you a definite answer but I imagine what is happening is that the data points are being pulled two different ways. Perhaps unique pageviews are being pulled from requests for a URL but total pageviews are being pulled from tracking code and the code isn't loading because the code is put in wrong or the user hits the browser's back button before the page loads.

Which tool are you using?

Move your blog within your website: http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk/blog This will allow links to you blog to increase your domain authority.

Rand's opinion on this is pretty clear in a recent White Board Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mixing-viral-content-with-business-content-whiteboard-friday

I could be wrong, but from what I remember of the webinar, he was referring to paid text links in her posts, which is manipulative. I believe the emails only offered cash in exchange for links.

But to the point of whether text links in a guest post are manipulative, I think it depends on the relevancy of what is being linked to. Would a user actually want to go to that site from the post they are on? I'm guessing not many people would want to go to a car insurance site from a travel blog.

I think blog owners need to remember that whether they've written the content or not, if they are putting it on their site, they are vouching for it. Your credibility with your readers and with search engines is on the line. So the blog owner should still take responsibility for making sure the links in a guest post go to reputable sites.

Bruce Clay might be a good place to start researching the topic of SEO certification. He offers a lot of SEO training courses and certifications. SEMPO is an organization that might be able to institute something like this. However, it is unlikely that an SEO certification will ever be widely accepted.

I understand the desire for a certification process, but personally, I think certification has the potential to be more damaging, by giving companies a false sense of security when hiring an SEO consultant/agency. Knowing how to do SEO and acquiring certification doesn't mean you won't take the easy way out with your clients and resort to black hat tactics to get quick results. Like with anything in business, the more research you do yourself, the better decisions you'll usually make. Don't rely on people who aren't really invested to make important decisions for you like whether someone is a credible consultant, especially when knowledge usually isn't the biggest factor in the success or failure of a person.

SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer can give you a fairly deep backlink analysis. Majestic SEO also gives a very deep look at backlinks. Is this for your own site or a competitor? If looking at where your own site's traffic is coming from, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics will give you better insight than a backlink profile will, as a backlink might not actually get any use from humans.

In my opinion, these sort of blog comment links are pretty low quality. A handful of these shouldn't hurt you but don't expect them to bring a lot of value. It is a pretty common practice, because it is such an easy link to acquire. Which is often one of the things to consider when evaluating the quality of a link; how difficult is it to acquire a similar link? Some easy links will be of decent quality, but not many. Other things to consider when evaluating the quality of a link are:

Page Authority.

Number of outbound links on the page. The more links leaving a page, the more diluted the link juice will be.

Relevancy. Would it ever make sense for a user to travel from that page to your page and be satisfied with the experience? Users don't have to use the links, but this is a good way to judge topical relevancy.

Anchor text. The more descriptive the anchor text, the better. Expect poor anchor text ("click here") on some links, but good anchor text is a definite bonus.

Pruning links from page templates (header, footer, etc.) is generally a good idea if they don't go to important pages. As Albin suggests, listen to the data. What are users not clicking on?

I can see some of these as not being needed in the footer. If your store pages are used as navigation, these are redundant, unless users like using them in the footer. Pages like "returns" and "order tracking" probably aren't making you a lot of money, and can still be easily found from a customer service page that is linked to from the footer. This way users can still find what they need, but you only devote one link instead of four or five.

I don't think removing a handful of links from the footer will diminish the look of the site or the user experience significantly.

Good question, Melissa. Unfortunately, there is no tool I know of that evaluates the strength of a specific incoming link beyond an evaluation of the page and domain that OSE gives you.

You're on the right track using OSE and considering Page Authority and Domain Authority, and the general perception of spamminess. Other things to consider when evaluating backlink targets:

How many outbound links are on the page you're targeting? Link juice gets divided (not necessarily equally) among all the outbound links on a page. So other things being equal, a link from a page with 5 outbound links is better than a link from a page with 150 outbound links.

When looking at PA and DA, if PA is less than 10-20% of DA, your getting into a less than ideal scenario. There is a chance that page isn't getting crawled . As to "what is a good PA or DA" it's depends on your niche and competition. Run OSE on competing domains to get an idea of what you're up against.

Anchor text. A "click here" link is not going to help you as much as descriptive anchor text like "super awesome widgets".

Alignment. Links from relevant pages/sites are going to be better for your site than links from general/unrelated pages/sites. This not only helps your SEO, but hopefully you actually get good/qualified traffic through the links.

In most situations, you will want the canonical tag pointing to the page that it exists on. The canonical tag tells search engines which page to index, if there are multiple URLs for the same content.

Considering how massive the changes are, I'd say it's best to do them all at once. This will let you start rebuilding as soon as possible. Making one big change and then waiting to start ranking again, followed by another big change that could drop them out of the rankings again would likely cause a longer period of your client not getting traffic. I wouldn't say that the on-page and metadata changes need to be made at the same time, if there are limited resources.

One problem with doing this all at once is that it will be more difficulty to evaluate the effect of each change. This might not be a huge deal to you, but sometimes it is nice to know what return came from each change.

I agree with Ryan that a Like Button on your homepage is best utilized by that user "liking" your FB page, as this is likely a vote on their part for your brand.

However, I think for deeper pages, like a product page or a blog post, it makes more sense to have the like linked to that specific URL, since that is what the user most likely is "Liking". And this should help that page rank better. There are others who would disagree with this advice, though. I believe Ian Lurie from Portent has the Like button on his blog posts pointing to his FB page to gather a stronger following there.