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I can't speak to how thorough OSE is. I know they don't find every link, but in my experience, they seemed to find most of the strong links. I can suggest Majestic SEO for a very thorough, but not free, backlink profile.

Pages can definitely rank for multiple terms, so having anchor text around one term does not necessarily mean you can't rank well for another term (Lots of pages rank for terms other than "click here" despite the majority of their links having that anchor text). Standard practice is to only target one main keyword per page, but that doesn't mean you can't make it work for a page to rank for a couple different major terms.

The main question I have is how different is the term your going after from the anchor text you are getting? I'm of the belief that if anchor text isn't just exact match or nothing. If the anchor text is topically relevant to the terms you are targeting you're in good shape. If that isn't the case why do you have so many links like these pointing to that page?

I could be wrong, but from what I remember of the webinar, he was referring to paid text links in her posts, which is manipulative. I believe the emails only offered cash in exchange for links.

But to the point of whether text links in a guest post are manipulative, I think it depends on the relevancy of what is being linked to. Would a user actually want to go to that site from the post they are on? I'm guessing not many people would want to go to a car insurance site from a travel blog.

I think blog owners need to remember that whether they've written the content or not, if they are putting it on their site, they are vouching for it. Your credibility with your readers and with search engines is on the line. So the blog owner should still take responsibility for making sure the links in a guest post go to reputable sites.

Pruning links from page templates (header, footer, etc.) is generally a good idea if they don't go to important pages. As Albin suggests, listen to the data. What are users not clicking on?

I can see some of these as not being needed in the footer. If your store pages are used as navigation, these are redundant, unless users like using them in the footer. Pages like "returns" and "order tracking" probably aren't making you a lot of money, and can still be easily found from a customer service page that is linked to from the footer. This way users can still find what they need, but you only devote one link instead of four or five.

I don't think removing a handful of links from the footer will diminish the look of the site or the user experience significantly.

A 301 redirect is the best solution as it will point users and bots to what will then be the only source of the content. A rel="Canonical" will tell search engines which page is the canonical version but you will still have users hitting pages on the old domain and potential creating links to those pages instead of to your new subdomains, which isn't ideal.

This probably isn't quite what you're looking for, but Bing allows you to do a search that gives these results:

LinkFromDomain:domain.com

I want to say Danny Sullivan mentioned this in a semi-recent post, but you can find more information here.

It won't be the cleanest list to work with, but it's the only thing I know of that will give you this info

Is there anything keeping you from putting the ISI content in an iframe? Search engines don't identify the content in the iframe as part of the page.

Thanks for the response, Ryan. I'm leaning towards Joomla! as they seem to have more options for each feature and a more supportive community, which I will certainly need.

I already have some experience with WordPress, but for a new site I want to use a different CMS. Anyone care to weigh-in on the pros and cons of Drupal or Joomla!?

Thanks,

Joe

Might want to check out Bazaarvoice's Ask and Answer product. I haven't used this product but they are a pretty solid company to work with.

I agree with Ryan that a Like Button on your homepage is best utilized by that user "liking" your FB page, as this is likely a vote on their part for your brand.

However, I think for deeper pages, like a product page or a blog post, it makes more sense to have the like linked to that specific URL, since that is what the user most likely is "Liking". And this should help that page rank better. There are others who would disagree with this advice, though. I believe Ian Lurie from Portent has the Like button on his blog posts pointing to his FB page to gather a stronger following there.

These are called sitelinks and Google derives them from your site navigation. From Google Webmaster Tools Help:

"The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for."

You might still see the red-shoes URL for a brief period of time, but it will eventually disappear from the rankings. While the brown-boots page will receive most of the link juice from the 301, on-page ranking factors will diminish this page's ability to rank for "red shoes". This is one of the reasons, you want your 301 redirects to be to a page that delivers similar content. This redirect should help you rank for terms that are targeted in the on-page content of the brown-boots page by increasing the link juice passed but the anchor text might not always be relevant.

I use the same manual approach, manually dumping into Excel on a regular basis. I'll usually increase the frequency if we are making changes that should effect indexation.

Sorry I forgot to specify that this has been over the past week.

Thanks for the reply, Ryan.

I've noticed some significant changes in the number and percentage of indexed URLs for the sitemaps we've been submitting to Google. I've been tracking these numbers directly from Google Webmaster Tools>Site Configuration>Sitemaps. We've made some changes that could be causing the changes we're seeing, but I want to confirm that this wasn't just a change in the way Google reports the indexation.

Has anyone else noticed major changes, greater than a 30% change, in the indexation of your sitemaps in the past week?

Thanks,

Joe

Sorry I didn't make that a little clearer. But, yes, it sounds like you understand. Only serve one product page. List the product page in whatever categories seem appropriate.

As to which page to serve, I actually like the URL www.site.com/home-gym-equipment/body-solid-g9s.html as it provides additional keywords as opposed to just repeating keywords. But if Body Solid is a popular enough brand where lots of people shop specifically for that brand, then you might want to go with www.site.com/body-solid/body-solid-g9s.html.

If you are worried about the category pages having duplicate content, that shouldn't be a big concern as most of the content should be unique from one page versus any other page. Some content is almost always going to be repeated to some extent on a website. You need to make sure there is enough unique content on the page to differentiate it as The page on your site about that keyword. Having multiple navigation paths to the same product is going to increase conversion as it makes it easier for customers to find what they want, so I would not shy away from that.

I believe the problem is how you serve the product page for products that are cross-listed. I don't know how your product pages are created, but you won't want more than one URL for any one product.If you use breadcrumbs, you'll have to choose which set of breadcrumbs you want your users to see, even if they came to the page via a different path. If any other content is dynamically created based on the category it is listed in, you'll have to make sure that the one page you serve adequately fulfills what the customer would expect to see based on other experiences with your site.

I believe you will have to wait until Friday. Another solution, depending on the size of your keyword list is Rank Checker . It can check lists of keywords for you and gives you data that seems to be only a day or two old.

Neil, after reading through your situation, I think it is remarkable that you've been able to sustain these changes as you have. I think you could make a remarkable case study out of this.

Taking care of the 301 redirect chains is definitely a good step. Other things to consider include the Panda update, but looking at your content, it looks really solid. I considered the Google's ever growing preference for big brands, which could be playing an effect, but it looks like you've done everything you can on the site to signal a legitimate brand.

When I started looking a little closer at the site, it seems like the word "travel" has almost intentionally been avoided. I actually like that you don't overuse the term, but possible using the term a little more could help signal to search engines the types of search queries that you are relevant for.

Another on site enhancement I'd suggest is re-examining the site's navigation and internal linking structure. For instance, the SEOmoz analysis tool shows almost 5000 internal links on the homepage. When I look at the source code, I don't see nearly that many. But you might want to look into how search engine bots are crawling the mega dropdowns to make sure your internal link juice is flowing to the pages you want it to.

Unfortunately, I can't offer much more advice than that. While I don't think search engines are going to be distrustful of your site for the moves, the 301s still lose some link juice. And I'm a believer that SERPs are somewhat self-reinforcing (i.e. getting good rankings will make it easier for you to get more natural backlinks as you're getting more traffic), so time spent in search engine oblivion is always going to be tough to come back from.

Best of luck.