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Hi Diane,

Yes, anchor text does matter. Anchor text on inbound links can help you with keyword rankings. However, as you've probably noticed, most inbound links to our site will be linking to your brand name. Here are some articles that can help you have a deeper understanding about anchor text: Anchor Text 101 and some more advanced stuff Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text To Next Generation Link Signals and Which Type of Link Anchor Text is the Most Effective? [An Experiment].

As for getting link (link-building), commenting on blogs/articles in your niche can be a great way to get backlinks. However, as you noted, many sites no follow links on their blogs/articles. Here is our 101 article on link-building which can get you started on other ideas to go after backlinks to your site.

Hope this helps!

Because you're using Wordpress CMS, what's probably happening is that Wordpress is putting in the canonical tag and then one of your plug-ins is also putting in a canonical tag. My guess that the plug-in would be whatever one you're using for SEO on the site. Apparently, this is a problem with (or has been one) with the Platinum SEO plug-in. (I prefer All-in-One-SEO for my own sites, which don't have this issue.)

Before you start deleting any code, I would make sure that all your plug-ins are updated to the latest version, Wordpress started adding the canonical tag at version 2.9.0, so that was a few rounds ago and most SEO plug-ins would've removed that part of the code from their plug-ins now.

I would focus on figuring out what keywords you're targeting (you are an expert for your product after all) and then compare your rankings against your competitors. You can use a tool like Rank Checker. (Though beware when using it as it will search via your profile & IP unless you tweak your search.)

Small note: You don't get link juice from email links. Just traffic if they click.

Are you just grabbing Facebook's code? Or are you using a Joomla-specific plug-in?

I'd also check out this guide to handling duplicate content.

I'd be careful about hiding text. Google doesn't like that.

Something I experienced when running an in-house ppc campaign for a smaller brand was that big companies aren't afraid to send out C&D letters from their very expensive lawyers if you bid on their branded terms (not using their name in the text). While there is certainly no law saying you can't bid on a branded term, a smaller brand is going to cave because they won't be taking on a giant in court.

Google says that what happens on AdWords doesn't affect your SEO and vice versa.

As far as incoming links from other sites, no. You should check to see if Google does index these linking sites, because if they don't, then there's no link juice coming in from them at all. If they are indexed, but labeled as spammy/junk, they just won't pass any positive link juice.

Have you updated the sitemap and deleted any older ones inside Webmaster Tools? It seems that Google's being cued from somewhere else that these pages are still live.

You'd want to make the URL paths where the display ads live to have the crawl disallowed in your robots.txt, just like any other section of your site. Here's some basics on robots.txt.

Hope this helps!

Hi Andrew, A 301 redirect will delude your link juice for the URL that's being 301'd. At to why it's so drastic on Google, you probably blame Panda as Google may be seeing it as duplicate content for the same keyword. Hope this helps! Erica

Yes, the bots will read and try to index your Javascript, which you don't want. (Google says its bots can read around 90% of all Javascript.) You'll want to create a separate .js file (like you would with CSS file).

Antonio,

For work load and ease of change, I'd edit your robots.txt. Sometimes, search engines will still show the empty page in search results with only the URL if you don't put in a nofollow meta tag, but most of them should obey the robots.txt commands.

Of course, ideally, you'd want your website not to push those "future pages" without content live, but I understand that sometimes there are things that seem easy on a website that aren't.

Hope that helps!

Erica

Thank you so much, James!

Awesome! Thank you so much.

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