good one!

Hope it is not in bad form to post a possible answer to my own question. I couldn't find a lot of info out there but this is what I gots:

I found something that said a naked link was a link with no anchor text. Well how the heck can someone click on a link with no anchor text!?!?!?!?!!!! So I did a little research using Open Site Explorer and found a few links with no anchor text. For the most part they were images that had a link back to our site. I found some non-image ones but those look like mistakes. I checked out the code and found instances of a link to our site with no anchor text then a link with text like this:

<a href="http://www.sierratradingpost.com">a><a href="http://www.sierratradingpost.com">www.sierratradingpost.coma>who knew!

Hello SEOmozers!

I have a question for you all. What are "naked backlinks"? Can you also give an example?

Thank you!

woo aka STPseo

If you are talking about the shopping cart itself, after folks put stuff in it: I would make that a noindex. I get paranoid about security and privacy so I would keep anything that is personalized in any way out of the search index. You don't want a link to a shopping cart with specific shopper id to get into Google. Even if the shopper id doesn't tie back to any personal data, you could have multiple people with the same cart id.

Anyway... I would suggest making the cart a noindex... I'm paranoid about it so I'd play it safe.

You can have canonical from one domain to another.

I am talking about have the ability to actually control eBay's meta data at the canonical level. They already have canonical tags going back to their own pages and I doubt they would give you control over it. Again, I am not 100% sure but I would be shocked if they gave you control of that field. eBay has its own SEO concerns so I image they would retain control of that field.

I just don't consider a product page on eBay to be a duplicate of a product page on a third party site even if the site were feeding the data to eBay. Your site and eBay are 2 totally separate entities and I don't think these would be considered duplicate pages.

I am not sure you can control the canonical tag of an eBay page. I think eBay will have the main control... you can maybe add it to the iFrame but I think eBay's headers will be the ones that have dominance.

I also don't think having eBay product pages would be considered duplicate content. We have numerous product feeds going to third party shopping sites and I don't consider this to be duplicate content at all.

However, I am only slightly familiar with eBay. It will be interesting to see other answers on the subject.

I'm sorry but I do not know of way to get the info across many domains. I have been noticing some patterns like - newspaper sites seem to have high domain ranking. I will say just finding pages with high page authority is going to give you sites in thousands of categories, many of which may not be related to your site. I have been compiling lists of links that point to our competitors to narrow down the data for what best relates to my site.

If it is for link building you can run your domain as well as competitor domains through the Open Site Explorer tool. This will give you a list of URLs that link back to the domain including Page Authority and Domain Rank. If you put the data into a spreadsheet you can simply sort the results page by Page Authority to see the top ones.

I don't know of a way to get that info. That's why sometime back I started a spreadsheet that tracks my ranking on certain keywords I think are important. I have a spreadsheet for brand based keywords and one for product category keywords. This way I check my ranking over time. I would recommend starting a spreadsheet and pulling the campaign keyword ranking reports each week from an SEOmoz campaign. They will keep some historical data as the campaign ages. I still pull them each week and add them to a spreadsheet just in case.

I know this doesn't help your current situation but will help prove that you are making progress. You could also see if they have historical keyword data in Google Analytics to see if they were getting visitors and/or sales on terms they claim they used to rank highly one.

Okay... when I think of cloaked link I think of a link that is being hidden from the user and is there only for keyword or other SEO purposes. If your link has a function, I think you are okay and the nofollow should do the trick.

So are the links usable to visitors of the site?

If you think the links are valuable, you should add the "nofollow" tag to not send over any link juice. Keeping them hidden from the visitor is a bad practice and I think could potentially get you penalized. If you don't want them used, then don't have them on the page.