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There aren't any perfect tools for this. Virante has an in house tool for this purpose but it is by no means perfect - essentially we determine the footprints of many common forms of websites that link, then spider all of the backlink pages to see if they meet any of those footprints. However, even this is imperfect --- how do you easily distinguish a link from a comment vs. the body of a blog post?  At best it will give you a high-level idea.

Do you have multiple categories on the site? Why not just collapse 1 category and see how it performs (give it a good 6 months though before making a final verdict)

Most likely. Unless the parameters are greatly changing the content on the page, rather than simply sorting, you will want to block them or just use a canonical tag.

Drop the canonical, leave the 301.

Use rel=next and rel=prev for pagination: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

The only thing I would double check is to make sure that there is nothing being parasitically hosted on your site that those links are trying to promote (ie: hacked wordpress and those links are promoting pharma pages injected into your site). More likely than not, it is nothing to worry about - maybe a scraper translation link.

BTW, which site is this for? your personal site or the VA site?

So, I would recommend you take a look at a piece i wrote called "The Wikipedia Model" http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-wikipedia-model a little while back. It doesn't look at the type of sites, but it does look at lots of link characteristics.

As for grouping sites by type, this is a little harder. We have done this before, but basically you will need to harvest the links to the sampled high authority sites, spider them, and use footprint detection to determine whether they tend to be certain types of sites. Not terribly difficult to do, but  will be a lot of data.

Go to Google Keyword Suggestion Tool (first result: http://www.google.com/search?q=google+keyword+suggestion+tool)

Type into the keyword list your options. For example, if the service is "electrician" then try...

chicago electrician

electrician chicago

chicago il electrician

electrician chicago il

Then choose "Only show ideas closely related to my search term" and "exact match" on the left hand side.

Run the report. Do this for several cities and, in a spread sheet, determine which ordering gets the most exact match traffic. Use that directory structure for your whole site.

• I am not sure what "url enforce writer" means.

Hey John,

Shoot me a message directly and maybe we can figure something out that is beneficial to both our companies. We do extensive work both with the SEOMoz API and Google API (I assume you mean Google Analytics, but we have also worked with several of their other API options as well).

Russ

We've been pretty pleased with Wordstream. KeywordDiscovery.com is a decent alternative as well. The real question is what type of keyword research are you doing?

Are you researching keywords for expensive link targeting, where getting search volume and competitiveness accurate are very important? If so, I'd stick with Google's results or Wordstream.

Are you researching keywords for blanket content creation? You probably want a bigger keyword database like KeywordDiscovery.com

Depends on your needs, I suppose.

I'll do the SEO for you if you make your company a performance based wheel chair company. People get the wheel chairs for free and if they like them then they pay you. Sound fair?

You should look into using using Robots.txt to filter out specific querystring parameters

You can use asterisks (*) to match the URL type above...

Disallow: /index.php?a=reg

You can find potential new backlinks to your site by monitoring all the referrers to your site. This will sometimes allow you capture links before Google actually indexes them, but it limits you only to links that actually bring traffic.

This is shady, but it probably would leave very minor footprints. It also would likely deliver you few if any quality links unless you create quality content. Good link building services come from good link building agencies. Go take a peak on the SEOMoz recommended list - http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/companies/recommended

Nope. Don't worry about it. I just ran a more comprehensive internal tool that we have which not only looks at keyword occurrences, but also looks at the other sites ranking for that term to see if you are out of sync with them as well. You are within reasonable levels of keyword usage on the page to not be overly worried.

1. If you do want to re-balance, switch the links to use some obscure long-tail anchor text and see if you move up for that term. This is an easy way to find out if they are actually passing juice. Drop the ones that aren't.

2. Build out and balance your link profile. If you can't beat your competitors with less than 20% exact anchor text, then you need to increase your overall link profile.

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule

Agreed with Ryan for the most part here - especially competitive short tail words like web design or web development. If you must, at least make it readable... "Graphic Web Design & Online Marketing in Ireleand"

I think the moral of the story is that unless you think you are going to get traffic from DMoz or Yahoo Directory, they aren't worth your time. You can get far better, more relevant, higher PR passing links than those for less effort.

I think that an important part of the process would be, if it is a true statement, let SEOMoz know that as a customer you prioritize the predictability and frequency of new data releases over the release of new features. SEOMoz can only be as good as their customers' feedback.

I no meaningful way will that second link harm you. Even if it did pass on equal amounts of PageRank, the minute volume would be inconsequential. Go ahead and do what is best for your users.