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My recommendation was just that. Take away all excessive linking with subcagegories and even primary categories and instead add more generic, but traffic hub important footer links. This is how I "always" recommend to clients, but since all of the panda updates and the external SEO partner (who is responsible for the links in the first place) protested, I just wanted to get some pro input from all of the SEO pros here at moz

I have had a long discussion with a client and their external SEO partner about their current footer. They have added all their product categories, both main and sub, to the footer.

From a pure SEO perspective is it still advisable, after all the pandas and penguines, to stay away from keyword important site wide footer linking to internal pages?

As the links will become a repeatable element and also containing the most important keywords, isn't the links actually hurting more than helping?

With 5000 index pages, it will risk "marking" the most important keywords as repeatable, lowering ranking, instead of increasing as their external part say.

Good spotted on the syntax, I actually never looked at that (blush)

But as he has the www version within his cannonical on the none www version, there is no need to redirect the none www pages as you state, as the cannonical is just that.

It looks to me like you have done it perfectly

I did a test without www.* and cannonical pointed to the www version, just as it should.

Haven't checked all your pages, but the 20 random I checked was all OK

Hi Luke!

It is my experience that title tag is still a weight element and the last one. What that means is that first word has more effect then second that has more then third etc. We are not talking about any dramatic but a little little more.

The reason for this and the strongest reason why you should "weight" your most relevant (important) keyword to the front is how the user interact with your search result in the SERP.

Users do a vertical reading which means that our eyes will catch the first 2-3 words while browsing downwards in the SERP, so if dont have your relevant keywords within that "area" you will get less clicks.

That is also why, we in most case (not always) want the brand keyword last, so we can keep as relevant keywords in the beginning of the title as possible. 
Also if you auto generate a lot of your titles, it's smarter that if you title is longer than the ~63 characters the brand tag falls out than the relevant keyword for that page.

Also a note, if Talk Nightlife Clubbing Guide for the UK is your "brand tag" I would recommend to rework it to something shorter, to leave more room to page specific information to the left.

I looks like you have some content relation issues done in your backend

If you check the link you posted above in the code, you find following in meta-keywords: tigi bed head
So your system think they are related

If you do a search with "rockaholic" you display a lot of "TGIF" products displayed on the left side

My guess is that you have some sort of keyword tagging (tags) in your system that relate your products with eachother. Hard to really know without seeing your system

As SanketPatel state, I also feel "norec" meens "No record found"

How does the Moztool compare and filter the search phrases you enter in your campaign? Or more correctly, will it filter out stop words or is it an exact match?

For example

I enter a phrase to track that say: "book ski trip austria"

Identified in Google I see that most users search for just that "book ski trip austria"

But in content, I cant write that as that is uncorrect english and I want to maby write something like: "When you book a ski trip to austria you get..."

How will this affect my on page SEO report, will it still match and mark a "V" in done or show a an error?

Even more interesting is, what happen if you do phrases in different order like "An austrian skip trip will make you feel..."

Why adding /products/ in your url? I would definatly strip that out to keep the url clean and relevant, as /products/ is just generic.

The shorter URLs you can have, but still have good "readability" for the user, the better it is, but you still want to have a good structure for inbound linking and not to deep. I would say 3 rather then 4 as the maximum.

I think, to make this fairly complex issue more simple I would say, that if you run content at your category pages, with the possibility to shop products and display of campaign information, then you really need to have the category in your URL. Same goes for subcategories.

For me this is not about how you want your structure and not trying to change a structure to meet your analytics needs. Analytics can be set to handle any structure you choose, even if it can take some tweeking of the installation of the script, but In my experience, you allways have to do a custom installation of Analytics to get what you want anyhow.

So the question should rather be, should you have category paths in your urls or not and that is a much tougher questions.

First, we need to understand that the shorter URLs you can have, but still have good "readability" for the user, the better it is, but you still want to have a good structure for inbound linking.

I think, to make this fairly complex issue more simple I would say, that if you run content at your category pages, with the possibility to shop products and display of campaign information, then you really need to have the category in your URL.

This is because you want the user to be able to just delete the product in the url after finding it in Google to get to the category of that product. For inbound linking its also nice to have a clear and nice category in the URL.

On the other hand, if you dont have content on your category pages, then I woulnd't display them in the URL, mostly for the same, but oppositie, reason as above and as you get shorter URLs

You should not add parameters to your URLs if you dont need them.

If you still go ahead with parameters, just make sure you add link-cannonical to point on the none parameter url, to prevent duplicate urls of the same products

I think most is covered in the above answers, but will add my thoughts on this element.

Yes, you should have "unique" and good content in your meta-descriptions, as well as in any content element. There is no short cuts for good SEO. Meta-description is not a ranking element by it self, but its a big factor for SERP CTR and driving business.

With that said, I don't think there is no need not to be as smart as possible and here is when CMS with auto-generation rules comes into play.

I recommend any site to use preamble as a content element as it will be a short descriptive keyword rich text that is selling and should get the user to quickly understand the content on the page and get them to move down the page or into a conversion funnel. For me this is exactly the same as the function of a meta-description.

We allways set up our clients CMS's to autogenerate meta-description from the preamble text, as this saves times. But, we also creates an override rule with a field for meta-description that we code that if meta-description contains content, then it overrides the preamble (as a meta-description).

That way you get the best of both worlds. The possibility to write good "on-page" SEO as well as saving time.

For me this is not about how you want your structure and not trying to change a structure to meet your analytics needs. Analytics can be set to handle any structure you choose, even if it can take some tweeking of the installation of the script, but In my experience, you allways have to do a custom installation of Analytics to get what you want anyhow.

So the question should rather be, should you have category paths in your urls or not and that is a much tougher questions.

First, we need to understand that the shorter URLs you can have, but still have good "readability" for the user, the better it is, but you still want to have a good structure for inbound linking.

I think, to make this fairly complex issue more simple I would say, that if you run content at your category pages, with the possibility to shop products and display of campaign information, then you really need to have the category in your URL.

This is because you want the user to be able to just delete the product in the url after finding it in Google to get to the category of that product. For inbound linking its also nice to have a clear and nice category in the URL.

On the other hand, if you dont have content on your category pages, then I woulnd't display them in the URL, mostly for the same, but oppositie, reason as above and as you get shorter URLs

You should not add parameters to your URLs if you dont need them.

If you still go ahead with parameters, just make sure you add link-cannonical to point on the none parameter url, to prevent duplicate urls of the same products

It looks to me like you have done it perfectly

I did a test without www.* and cannonical pointed to the www version, just as it should.

Haven't checked all your pages, but the 20 random I checked was all OK

I think most is covered in the above answers, but will add my thoughts on this element.

Yes, you should have "unique" and good content in your meta-descriptions, as well as in any content element. There is no short cuts for good SEO. Meta-description is not a ranking element by it self, but its a big factor for SERP CTR and driving business.

With that said, I don't think there is no need not to be as smart as possible and here is when CMS with auto-generation rules comes into play.

I recommend any site to use preamble as a content element as it will be a short descriptive keyword rich text that is selling and should get the user to quickly understand the content on the page and get them to move down the page or into a conversion funnel. For me this is exactly the same as the function of a meta-description.

We allways set up our clients CMS's to autogenerate meta-description from the preamble text, as this saves times. But, we also creates an override rule with a field for meta-description that we code that if meta-description contains content, then it overrides the preamble (as a meta-description).

That way you get the best of both worlds. The possibility to write good "on-page" SEO as well as saving time.

Good spotted on the syntax, I actually never looked at that (blush)

But as he has the www version within his cannonical on the none www version, there is no need to redirect the none www pages as you state, as the cannonical is just that.

I have had a long discussion with a client and their external SEO partner about their current footer. They have added all their product categories, both main and sub, to the footer.

From a pure SEO perspective is it still advisable, after all the pandas and penguines, to stay away from keyword important site wide footer linking to internal pages?

As the links will become a repeatable element and also containing the most important keywords, isn't the links actually hurting more than helping?

With 5000 index pages, it will risk "marking" the most important keywords as repeatable, lowering ranking, instead of increasing as their external part say.