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Hi Aaron, Do I get some examples those links ?

Ok, thanks.  I'll check into it some more.  I didn't renew the yahoo directory so we'll see how long it stays up.

I see NASA.gov being beaten for quotes from their own content - sometimes even a quote of their title tag.  So many people scrape their content or republish it verbatim. A city newspaper near me had a lot of pages of crappy content.  They simply posted a page for every business around with biz name, phone address and couple other pieces of info.  These were really skinny pages.  Their rankings have been in the dumps and I think these skinny pages are the reason.

Sorry for the late response, still getting use to the Q&A and didn't know how to view the questions I had answered. I would suggest anchor texts that are natural but nothing too unrelative. Links like www.example.com as the anchor text will still be better than "click here". As long as its not being spammed too much, it would be fine to request a certain anchor text, but nothing obsessive, try to keep it even.

Hey, great thoughts.  Much appreciated! I could do a survey around job satisfaction pretty easy.  Have tons of data there. Was looking into that. What did you mean by the 'ego bait angle' and top 10 lists?  Sounds interesting. Also, could you elaborate on the inspring people with online presence/profiles.  Those seem pretty intriguing/possible. Thanks!

Ok cool, yeah I think it's mainly comment pages.  Which no following them is standard on Wordpress. The blocking of the robots notice threw me a little off though.  Obviously you'd want your comments to show up in the search engines as well. Thanks both of ya'll for the help!

Is nesting a native function of wordpress?  Is it when you create a new category inside of another category in the post options.  I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Yes, nesting of categories is native to WordPress. No plugins or anything required. I believe you control this in the Categories menu (sidebar) Also, I think it's somewhat helpful letting people search by 'Jobs involving travel', 'Outdoor Jobs', etc.  Are those good examples of tags?  Or does that fall into something else? Yep, tags can be anything that is not already a category, and more detailed than the categories. I would just try to keep them specific. -Dan

I really liked what Daniel said about using Crazy Egg to analyze user behavior, but you can also do something similar using Google Analytics. Unfortunately, my suspicion is that very few of your users are clicking on those links. Google knows that footer links are rarely clicked, and scores of SEOs have abused this area in the past, and that's why Google tends to devalue any links placed there. So even though in this case, the links there may provide some user benefit, Google most likely doesn't pass much link value through them, and may even devalue the anchor text text used, as these are site-wide footer links. On the other hand, even those those links aren't helping you from an SEO perspective, they probably aren't hurting you very much either. You've chosen broad, partial-match anchor text, and the number of links seem within reason. Food for thought: If the links are important to visitors, is the footer the best place for them? Perhaps if you found a more prominent location higher up in the navigation, you might see improved click-through rates, and you might even gain an SEO benefit from it. Just something to think about.

anyone that knows a good one isn't going to give it up! I would checkout http://www.onlinemba.com/ and http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/ to get started and see what kinda competition is at the top very competitive niche

Thanks, looked that over.  Not sure if that's what happened or not.  Pretty wild though, like a roller coaster right now.

One last thing to note is that by doing this you're not 'fixing' the errors; you're preventing the search engines from seeing them. In the case posited in the blog the errors were actually caused by the search engines going after wacky URLs but there may be other problems with your site that were causing those errors. So I guess I'm saying don't stop looking into it after the pages stop getting indexed just in case.