Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Awesome. That's a fantastic way to check. Thank you.

So, on our site, we have a list of related blog posts on a page that focuses on bamboo flooring.

These blogs posts have anchor text like "What's the best bamboo flooring?" "How to install bamboo flooring." "Yada yada bamboo flooring yada."

Because the main keyword for the page is bamboo flooring, would the presence of these words within anchor text on the page be considered as keywords on the bamboo flooring page, affecting that page and possibly stuffing within that page?

Thmbs up'd. Love the idea! Not super easy to execute but could be very well it.

Exact match on subdomains have very very low weight.  Anyone can create thousands of exact match subdomains without much effort and cost - in fact the exact match weight has been on the decline even on the root domain.

It could. It shouldn't weigh in heavily as 'time on site' does not always equate to quality of page or even the relevancy of the page. Some pages are more useful when short and the 'action' perhaps does not consume a lot of time but I assume Google looks at industry or "website type" averages, sets benchmarks and considers accordingly. This is what I 'think' - not something successfully tested and proven.

I would simply leave all PDFs as dofollow - unless they are not unique or if any of PDFs have content that has already been published on the site (html/ page).

Are all 52 PDFs have same content? If so I would let get 1 of them indexed and use NOFOLLOW/NOINDEX  on rest  (use robots.txt) and may be even use 'canonical' to prevent the others from being indexed and cause any potential duplicate content issue.

Some good reference for you:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-pdf-be-seen-as-duplicate-content-if-so-how-to-prevent-it

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021584.html

Killer question.  Once I had a coder do a quick mod to have fixed/ static block of content and show all the posts under it and it worked. I didn't carry that project too long and didn't try other alternatives - would love to know if there are better ways to go about it too!

Doesn't matter much since if you use NoFollow you still lose a certain rank "juice". If i were you I'd leave them as it is - but If you are using same content from PDF on other web pages, I will nofollow/noindex them

Headers are not as important as they used to be since they can be easily manipulated so I wouldn't put in too much time and effort on that. That being said, it's a good practice to use them.

There is no penalty for using same headers but its better to use unique headers for each page so they are not competing with each other.

Meta keywords: it doesn't have value in Google and other major engines at least - it could work against you as competitors can refer to it and easily know what you are targeting.

Bold text: it used to matter - but it's very less now - most likely has negligible affect now.

Internal link anchors can be duplicate - if you have a site-wide text link menu, wouldn't technically those links be 'duplicate' throughout?  No penalties/issues. My sugggestion though is to vary it occassionally even internally to get most of it.

Image alt attributes - no issue in have same of it for the Social buttons on all pages. In fact,  you don't want to tweak them and try to rank for some keyword. They are just social buttons...

Competitor: They are using DIV Scroll - I would be very careful in how I use it. It doesn't seem user-friendly as the box is too small and there is lot of content in it. I am not too sure if Google can discount it algorithmically but if their staff see it manually, it could be an issue. There is no 100% sure way to know the outcome of using div scroll the way they are using - as of now they probably do get benefit by using lot of text but using lot of content in a little box like that is not a sound long term strategy considering the risk of manual review and also with G-bots getting smarter

I always assumed Google would have 1 or more staff dedicated to manually hunt/ look out for link building networks. It doesn't take couple of hours to get a list of dozens of these popular networks where hundreds/ thousands people buy and exchange links. If anything I am surprised it took Google so long to catch up to them.

What would be even more interesting to see is if they are able to catch up to all the 'participants' in this network and be able to discount all those links

The easiest way is the black hat way using proxy/ips. I am not sure if it can be necessarily labeled black hat but anyways...

The clean way is to have a direct link to google with the search terms - put it on high traffic pages and ask visitors to click it and find your website.

Firstly you are increasing the search count and also the likelyhood of it getting included in the Auto Suggest list of google.

2nd, you are getting your visitors back.

You can make it interesting like a treasure hunt, give them a discount or a freebie.. to go to Google and be able to find their back.

There will always be some people who can get around that. Fresh proxies, Private proxies - by the time Google has those proxies (if at all) it in their "list", they come with a fresher list of new proxies. Cat and mouse chase.. except there is one cat and too many mice. Anyways, its not something I would recommend.

Making links 'nofollow' to preserve link juice is a thing of the past. As of now, the "link juice" that you think you 'saved' just vanishes into thin air. Meaning, if you do use 'Nofollow' on links, you won't be saving it and passing it on to others.

100 links on page is just a broad suggestion for most websites. Our website have 180 links on homepage and we rank pretty well.

It depends on the kind of content you are going to have there. As you mentioned, if you expect good quality inks and a lot juice there, I'd suggest doing it on a sub-directory.

However, if you are going to be creating many pages that could be considered 'thin' (little/no content pages, no backlinks at all, no images, etc), I'd say go with the sub-domain so as to have a buffer of its possible repercussions on the main website.

This is definitely not the best technique to quickly see competition heat as it could be easily misleading. Why? The # of results with certain keyword phrases in title does matter as it does show the # of competitors but what it doesn't show is the authority of those competitors and if they are active as of now, and its anybody's guess what could happen when you go into a fight and without knowing your opponent.

Say, you are optimizing for entertainment/celebrity related keywords, you can do quick 'intitle' search and get quickly scared as it may seem as there is a lot of competition looking at the # of results.. however, if you dig a bit deeper its easy to see that majority of pages are low authority pages and are easy to beat as they do not do heavy optimizing (since entertainment traffic doesn't convert well...which means less $ for optimizing).  So my 2 cents...dig a bit deeper, check the top results in first 2 pages at least and look at their authority. Its worth spending a few hours to  know your enemy before you go against them.. rather than spending months in optimizing later and realizing your enemies are much stronger, more active, aggressive and have deeper pockets.

Fortunately or unfortunately Google still gives pretty good weight to exact match domains and for the search query you pointed you I think its definitely possible that the domain is what got it the high positions.

The #5 ranking site is:
interimcfoservices.net - registered 2 years, not many links and not much authority.

However, Google is reducing the authority of exact match domains so I wouldn't go out my way and invest in such domains as it is unlikely to benefit in SEO in the long run.

What many do not consider or cannot calculate is the number of visitrs/ potential clients lost due to to having such a keywordy" domains that not only appear unprofessional but are very difficult to remember.

Absolutely no penalty for multiple links to a single page!

Don't forget the Pininterest - if you have good images, incredible SEO potential there.

Also, find relevant websites who might find your images interesting - not difficult if your pics are unique and not-so-common. You can allow them to use it if they link to you.

May be I am not seeing properly but where is your sitemap?

Also, do you add fresh content deeper pages frequently? These intelligent little bots crawl a good deal initially but they tend to 'learn' the frequency of your content updates and update their re-visit schedule accordingly. As busy as these little ones are, you have to feed them something worth devouring and do it so frequently, so their frequent visits to your site is worth their time.  If they keep visiting your site and don't find nothing new..they have just spent all their energies for nothing and hence they become lazy for future visits, and this could explain delay to deeper pages. Just my thought... there could be something to else to it too.

Yes it could impact display and also the text ad traffic.

Display because your publishers might go up or down in traffic and you might notice a difference if that movement is big enough.

Text PPC traffic could be affected because they made some changes to Local results as well, however it completely depends on your niche, your geo target market and if your organic competition includes local listings at all.