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Wow. Definitely a hard lesson in checking the obvious, eh? Thanks everybody. Total oversight not to even bother checking what I never considered to be an issue. Now to go talk to our dev team to figure out how this even got in... Thanks again everybody!

Hi Brandon, I guess the part I dont understand is why you need to create a new campaign for the /widgets/ part specifically, the overall campaign for example.com will cover all sub folders and sub pages. So you can just set up the main campaign, create as many keywords as you like and label them for easy filtering into logical buckets (widgets, purple, brand, whatever suits). Then all pages in example.com will be tracked for these keywords and whichever page is highest ranked for each keyword will be shown in the main ranking page. If you have any other pages ranking for the same term but lower, they will be visible in the ranking history page. Hope I am not missing something obvious!

Hi Brandon, About your questions: How you call the subdirectories shouldn't be a matter: /es/ or /es-es/ (it's meant to be descriptive and short for users but non-relevant at this point as a signal towards search engines). However, what's important is how you name the URLs of each language version later: they should be in the language of the content that they show. If your international versions are country targeted (meant to be focused on users in a specific country and not language targeted, meant to focus on any user speaking a language) then you should geolocate them through Google Webmaster Tools. You should also use hreflang annotation in your different pages, referring to each URL language (and country, if they're geotargeted) too, so you won't end-up facing any content duplication issues, since you might have for example a Spanish version targeting to Mexico with a very similar Spanish copy than your Spain version.  If you add the annotations then Google will know these different URLs are targeting to different countries or languages audience and shouldn't cause a content duplication problem. If you can't just translate/localize the whole site structure to other languages, then it's a must that you prioritize. Start with those language / countries that have the higher current audience for your site and have the higher potential to grow too. Enable just the most important landing pages / sections of your site if you can't do them all, the ones that you can really maintain, translate / localize well, to give also the best user experience to those visitors (besides of being able to rank with them well in search engines). Take a look at this post where I wrote about how to set an International SEO strategy well from the start and avoid running into issues in the implementation later. Thanks! Aleyda

Yep, if Bing Webmaster Tools doesn't show problems with the sitemap, I'd focus on the points I highlighted back in mid-June on this thread (make content robust, unique, and make sure text is in HTML). Good luck, Kristina

I'm sure people on this forum can come up with plenty of theories, but the easiest way to get a definitive answer is to test it. Remove the anchor text for a few weeks, and see if rankings change, then add it back in again and see if there is an impact. My guess is that a small change like this won't move the needle either way, but if you want to obsess over the small details test it and see what happens. For bonus points, add Google Analytics tracking code and see if anyone even clicks on the link. If the users aren't clicking on it, then it makes sense to go ahead and remove it.

Thank you both! You've confirmed what I believed. Just wanted to be on the safe side.