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All makes sense Thanks very much

Never heard of it but I'm intrigued. I will go and check it out and hopefully be able to give some valid input! Cheers

Hi Rick, sorry for the hiatus, I have a couple other questions for you. 1. Have you set up conversion tracking? Has there been an increase in conversions? 2. Do you have any campaigns running? Print, broadcast, radio, etc.? Many offline campaigns cause a boost in organic searches for my clients.

This might be a problem.  If you submit a DMCA agaist a page and that DMCA is rejected, Google will often not accept a second attempt.  This seems to be a problem with Google's DMCA system. Good luck.

I almost didn't go look at that Walmart page because I thought that they were above keyword stuffing for SEO purposes.  However, I did go look at was surprised. I my opinion, WalMart has added a few hundred words of total yada yada yada text that is designed for nothing other than search engines.  They probably know that humans are not going to read it and they floated it so low on the page that nobody is going to see it.   So, without knowing who did this and their intent, my guess is that this text was created for nothing else other than SEO purposes.   They want some paragraph text on the page and have done a fine stuffing job on it.  Overstuffed in my opinion, but done in a way that search engines are probably not going to be concerned about it because it is in natural language.  This stuff might have positive ROI.

Alick300 and Hurf, thanks so much for the answers and especially the resources you shared! Very helpful!

Thank you Thomas, that was my biggest concern. I'll definitely take a look at the guide. Cheers!

Spam score can be a useful adjunct when helping you decide which links to disavow, but you should never make a disavow decision based on spam score alone. The disavow tool should be used by site owners who have a huge problem with unnatural links. If you know that this link is one that you yourself made for SEO purposes alone and that you have lots of links like this, then yes, you should probably disavow it. But otherwise I wouldn't be too concerned.

Thanks Tim. Do you have any examples of what those problems might be? With such a large catalog managing those rel canonical tags will be difficult (I don't even know if the store allows them, it's a hosted store solution and little code customization is allowed).

This issue just keeps getting murkier and murkier... Even though ahrefs 'overview' reports 104 backlinks from 46 domains, when I go to The Best Pages by Backlinks, it says there are 691 results with a 429 Too Many Requests error. Anyone know how to fix 429 errors on Shopify? Or even what causes them?

You may want to have a read of this. I wouldn't change the domain name to a .photography TLD - .com is much more recognisable and easier to remember for any potential clients. Just my opinion.

More often than not, you wouldn't be expected to have any particular influence over these inbound links - assuming they have come about naturally. A popular site (which doesn't engage in illicit practices) will, over time, gain a high percentage of nofollow links (MOZ, for example has a split of around 60% nofollow/40% follow), the anchor text will vary, and usually links to a relevant page within the site i.e. the kind of anchor text you see across good quality blogs, which reference external sources/articles. A percentage of these inbound links will also be "naked" i.e. a straight hyperlink showing the URL in full. Expect to see a good few brand anchor text links, too (Moz). So, "good" sites, get a broad mix, of good/bad and indifferent anchor text links split between follow and nofollow. Conversely, "bad sites" (who try to game the system) will have a disproportionately high number of exact match keyword anchor with an extremely high percentage being follow links, quite often from lower quality or irrelevant sites and they stick out a mile when you do any backlink analysis. If you have any influence over this process it might help you get a better understanding of this by taking a good look at the backlink profile of a big player within your vertical (who is unlikely to need to try and cheat the system) in Open Site Explorer. If you're not going out of your way to manipulate your rankings you should be able to let the anchor text links develop naturally, without concerning yourself too much about it. So, in summary, "Should the anchor text vary per customer and if so how?" Yes. You would expect to see it vary significantly, especially when spread from a broad range of sources and in numbers, as highlighted previously. Natural links look natural (you'll smell the bad ones a mile off!). **As the customers aren't totally relevant to my own product (although the anchor text is) would this also be hurting my ranking? ** **No. **Not if they are out of your control, gained naturally, and vary in nature. Millions of links are created between sites of all different varieties, every day. The best ones will be from high-authority sites, often with some connecting theme - but that isn't essential - and that doesn't mean the lower-authority, unrelated sites are going to do you any harm whatsoever. However, you wouldn't want to encourage everyone to drop an anchor text to your service in the footer of their websites, for example, because that isn't natural and will not be rewarded. If you've got that many customers who are happy to link to you, you'd be wise to generate some great content and encourage them to engage with it - the kind of stuff they'd be keen to share, and others would be keen to read and you'll never have to concern yourself with your anchor text again.

Thanks for the answer & confirmation. What if we get back links from different social channels like tumblr, digg, stumbleupon, etc.... Back links from these social discussion forums hurt?

Thanks just what i wanted to know.

Sometimes it's easy to be blinded by the technical aspects of SEO and overlook the most basic things. Put it this way, my troubleshooting started from the links down, rather than the site up, so don't feel too bad - there's a lesson there for all of us, I'd say. P.S. I think I preferred Toast Good luck and happy snapping!

All this ^ and that ^^

To what degree if any would the loss in traffic be offset by the gain in strong inbound links from apparently authoritative domains doing the republishing?