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Sitewide footer links are bad. I'd go with relevant text links in copy and/or put the important links on the blog's homepage in a sidebar. Categories and tags are a good thing if done correctly. They only help in SEO in the sense that they show a relationship and relevancy between multiple posts. When done well, this can help with user experience, increase visitor time on site, and reduce bounces. Categories and Tags are almost always marked NoIndex because of the duplicate content they create. A couple relevant tags per post is a good thing. One (maybe two) relevant category per post.

Based off of what I can see... your page titles look spammy and keyword stuffed, your meta descriptions tend to be too long and are spammy, and meta keywords are not used by Google anymore (and yours are spammy and stuffed).

I'd suggest looking over all of your pages and trying to follow best practices for naming conventions and content.

Thanks guys! My coder is going to look over all of the best possible ways we could implement this and then we're going to see about doing a little testing on one of our galleries. Thanks again.

Having a similar problem with a new site that was created by copying an old site in its entirety. Went through the trouble of cleaning everything up, having pages that were no longer relevant removed, fixed the sitemaps, etc. and now months later WMT showed me a spike of 404s for the old pages with the referrers as the XML sitemap and sitemap page... but they are definitely not be linked from there. I'm assuming there was some sort of hiccup with Google using an older, cached version of the sitemap to find these links.

I wound up just clearing the errors out of WMT and waiting to see if it will recrawl the error pages again. If Google continues to crawl them even though they aren't being linked to, then our next course of action was going to be 301ing them all just in case.

No known negatives associated with doing that? If not then we might give it a test run on one of the galleries.

There was no negative impact after the Pin It button was added and effectively doubled the number of on-page links.

As for the Ajax loading idea, that was actually another one of the ideas that my coder had but I wasn't sure of what the effect would be on Googlebot indexing and following images. Though all the newer photos do get added to the top which would be visible if we implemented that.

One of the sites I work for has some massive on-page link problems. We've been trying to come up with workarounds to lower the amount of links without making drastic changes to the page design and trying to stay within SEO best practices. We had originally considered the NoFollow route a few months back but that's not viable. We changed around some image and text links so they were wrapped together as one link instead of being two links to the same place. We're currently running tests on some pages to see how else to handle the issue.

What has me stumped now though is that the damned Pinterest Pin Button counts as an external link and we've added it to every image in our galleries. Originally we found that having a single Pin It button on a page was pulling incorrect images and not listing every possible image on the page... so to make sure that a visitor can pin the exact picture they want, we added the button to everything. We've been seeing a huge uptick in Pinterest traffic so we're definitely happy with that and don't want to get rid of the button. But if we have 300 pictures (which are all links) on a page with Pin It buttons (yet more links) we then have 600+ links on the page. Here's an example page: http://www.fauxpanels.com/portfolio-regency.php

When talking with one of my coders, he suggested some form of javascript might be capable of making the button into an event instead of a link and that could be a way to keep the Pin It button while lowering on-page links. I'm honestly not sure how that would work, whether Google would still count it as a link, or whether that is some form of blackhat cloaking technique we should be wary of.

Do any of you have experience with similar issues/tactics that you could help me with here? Thanks.

TL;DR Too many on page links. Coder suggests javascript "alchemy" to turn lead into gold button links into events. Would this lower links? Or is it bad? Form of Cloaking?

The music item pages that are creating the mostly empty pages with sidebars are the ones that sound like they should be NoIndexed. Since they're essentially empty pages they would be duplicates of each other, thin content, and a canonical would be ignored because they aren't technically a duplicate of the homepage or a subset of the homepage's superset.

The rule of thumb has usually been to try to stay under 100 but that's not always a simple thing to do and many of us wind up with far more. In your case you only have 166 links I can see on the homepage and it doesn't look spammy. So I'd say you're fine.

Have you received an Unnatural Links warning in Webmaster Tools?

I have a crazy Russian coder who does all of that for me so I'm honestly not 100% sure how to find these errors more easily in order to correct them.

Just looking at the URL you posted, it looks like an open DIV tag or an incorrectly closed link in the source causing an html encoding issue.

This sounds to me more like a NoIndex situation. Really you should be adding content to them but I can understand if its a lot of work and very tedious. A canonical wouldn't really make sense here... its thin content and the canonical would likely be ignored by Google. So instead I'd say NoIndex the pages for now.

Looking forward to the more active and robust presence on the Public Q&A.

Best practices would be to 301 all those pages to their relevant new page. Now, if you're not worried about the traffic going to some of those old pages you could choose to 404 the page and let it die but you'd be missing out on any link equity going to that page... but if there are no external links pointing to them then you only have internal links to worry about (but those are likely all on old pages which no one will see anymore either via 301s or 404s).

As for those products with 5+ URLs on the old site... redirect them to the relevant new page. It doesn't matter that there are 5 URLs redirecting to one if that one page is relevant to all 5 old URLs. I wouldn't worry much about server load either with that amount of redirects and eventually any old listings in the SERPs will update to the newer URL (if relevant for the specific query) instead of constantly sending people to a page they know exists elsewhere.

Does the resulting page shown notify users that there is no relevant information to return and suggest alternates to search for or a way to contact user support/customer service? If so then I wouldn't worry about a Soft 404. Considering these internal search pages should also be "NoIndex, Follow" then the odds of them showing up in serps and/or causing you real problems is low.

Yes, those landing pages sound like they will be viewed as duplicate content with only 10 or so words different... unless you only have 25 words on each page (which would then be incredibly thin content). I've heard people say that a page should be a minimum of 60% different (No idea how that number was determined though) to avoid duplicate errors. At that point it becomes simpler and easier in most cases to write up completely new content for every page to avoid any issues.

Claiming a site on Alexa isn't a bad thing. I'm not too sure about paying for their certified metrics though. But if you claim your site then there are a few small sections you can update to make it a bit more visitor friendly instead of just a bland listing. I use it to keep a quick tab on global traffic rankings but its not something I find that I'm really using on a regular basis or digging deep into. Some other here may have a different opinion of Alexa. I'd assume those sites in the 100k and better range would be more likely to want to use the certified metrics.

Wwe should always be creating new, relevant content for our sites. Obviously don't over do it and don't write for the Search Engines alone... but if you have pages lacking much content that you feel could better serve your users with some copy added to it then by all means go ahead and write something up. Maybe look for underdeveloped pages that could be perfect for trying to attract a longtail term you haven't put much love into or expanding on a niche page with something insightful/interesting where you may have taken the page for granted before and/or assumed no one needed an explanation.

The meta robots tag set to NoIndex means that the page is blocked by Meta Robots. Not really an error to be worried about. Due to Wordpress creating duplicate content thanks to the ?replytocom= parameter you likely set it in the backend to noindex those pages.

So the actual page "http://www.fateyes.com/the-effect-of-social-media-on-the-serps-social-signals-seo/" is lacking a robots tag as far as i can see and will therefore technically be indexable but the ?replytocom= created by the comments is correctly noindex.