External link optimization

[henners]

The company I work for sells software online. We have deals learning institutes that allow their students to use our software for next to nothing. These learning institutes, which are usually quite strong domains, link to our sign in area. Nice way to get powerful links hey… or is it? There are a couple of problems with these links:

1. They all link to a subdomain  (signin.domain.com)
2. The URLs also contain unique identifiers (so that we know which institute they are coming from). Meaning they all link to different signin URLs. (eg. signin.domain.com/qwerty, signin.domain.com/qwerta, signin.domain.com/qwerts, etc. )

So all these links aren't as effective as they could be (or at all?).

In a perfect SEO world  these links would all point to the start page, however, due to the fact that our start page is of a commercial set up this would run the risk of communicating the wrong idea to the institutes and their students.

So… are there any extremely brilliant pro mozzers that have a savvy idea how set this up in a more SEO friendly way?

Thanks in advance!

[elephantseo]

Regarding #1: Link to your home page or another page that you want to flow link juice to on each subdomain; and have non-linked text around the anchor/link. Ideally you would find a way to migrated these to subfolders rather than subdomains but that might not be an option.

Regarding #2: Using a rel canonical tag will help.

[henners]

Thanks for the feedback mate!

[henners]

Hi mate,

Thinking about the canonical tag, are there restrictions with how to use it? Is it just for pages with the same content? Or could I put a tag like this on all the subdomain pages in question? In turn telling the SEs that the subdomain page is a copy of the homepage (even though the content is different)? Or is this not kosher?

Thanks once again!

[elephantseo]

You wouldn't want to do that because most likely Google would just ignore your tag. Here are some good write ups:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html