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Hi Simon,

Assuming your client's website has been around for a couple of years or more, these links will have no negative impact. Low quality links won't ever get an aged site penalised - going around and removing them would be hugely time consuming and you're better off focusing on building better quality links instead.

Good luck!

You should definitely not be hiding the sub categories. This could land you with a nasty penalty.

It's a case of PageRank flow and what pages you want to prioritise. If you add more links to the home page, the PageRank that is passed to the deeper pages is weakened. A good rule to follow is to make it possible for a user to reach any page on your website within 3 clicks of the mouse i.e. Category > Sub Category > Product. If it took much longer you may want to think about giving the option of a shorter journey to the user from the home page.

Linking to sub categories from the home page totally depends on your conversion and SEO objectives. Personally, I almost exclusively link to 1st tier pages from the homepage and expand from there - that way I have the most PageRank passing to the pages I want to rank. Deeper pages will still get some juice but generally speaking they're not as important for me.

If you want to allow Google to crawl and index your pages easily - create a HTML sitemap (WordPress plugin does the trick in seconds) and submit your XML sitemap to GWT and BWT.

Hope this helps

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

That is blocking every bot from crawling anything.

User-Agent: * = every robot

Disallow: / = every directory

It sounds like your question is about measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts more than anything. In this case, number of external links really isn't going to give much away. Here are some alternative metrics:

Search traffic excluding brand name

Increases in search traffic volume is strongly and positively correlated with SEO. Because you will always rank for brand name queiries and searchers will always find your brand if they are searching for it - these searches add noise which is why we exclude them when measuring SEO effectiveness.

Keyword rankings

You may be focusing on 10 to 20 keywords on your campaign. Measure the rankings and see if the pattern is increasing. However, this metric on its own can be misleading as keyword ranking may not improve while long tail (search) traffic is sky rocketing!

Absolute conversions

The end goal. Have you seen an improvement in the number of conversions? Use Google analytics to set up goals and measure the number of goals coming from visitors that found you through search.

Apologies if I've somewhat strayed from your original question - but I feel that you should not be measuring whether or not your SEO "efforts are fruitful" by monitoring new links.

Nick

Almost certainly not. I've never seen any action links index when checking back link profiles of anyone. I've created a fair amount of forms too. On the absolute possibility that I am completely wrong - the value of this link would be pretty minimal.

Better way of passing link juice?

You could only allow affiliates to come on board if they place a link to your website (perhaps give them a tiny increase in revenue share). This could be a text link or image link with alt attribute keywords. An image would probably go down better.

Now I have seen people add anchor to their 'modules' that they place on other websites. I would strongly advise against this though for risk of a Google ban.

It's not easy really. You'd have a hard time getting away with SEO anchored links so you're probably best just getting image links. All the ideas I can think of pretty much fall into the grey area and could have serious consequences for everyone involved. Sorry!

I recently had one of my personal affiliate sites drop from the SERPs. It's relatively new so it's hard to tell if it's been sandboxed or penalised but I have done some things to correct this.

The reason for your site dropping is almost certainly because it was perceived as a 'thin' affiliate site. i.e. low quality/duplicate content that was geared towards squeezing people through affiliate links. Google is coming down on these guys harder than ever - I wrote my own content based on research, but my possible problem was that there were only 10-15 pages at the time.

Since then I have quadrupled the content and the reason I didn't switch sites is because I had an exact match domain that I didn't want to lose. I would say, in your case, start again - get all your content indexed first without affiliate links and then add them to places that you see are most appropriate.

Don't just throw affiliate links everywhere, the links work far better in some spots than others; take your time to add them and be careful not to go overboard.

Usually these are called 'landing pages' because that's the first page users land on when they visit your website.

The SEO principles are the same as ever.

"What is a good ratio for inbound to outbound links?" is what I think your question is.

The fact is that there is no magic number - nowadays, you need to write your content as if it was designed largely for the user. If that means that you should be linking to a Wikipedia page to explain something you said more thoroughly then so be it.

Matt Cutts said himself that the 100 link rule on a page is no longer true. (no more than 100 links per page). If your content is massive and you have a huge amount of other resources to link to, then link to them - if it's really useful then you'll find the lost PageRank will be countered by more external links (link bait).

Although I do say this - it's important to prioritise internal linking over outbound linking. From a purely SEO point of view, you never want to be in a position where you get anywhere near to having more outbound links than internal ones on any given page.

It sounds like it's just a simple case of deletion? In this case, set up a 301 redirect so that it points to the employee bios 'home' page. That way any links that were pointing to the removed page will have their 'juice' moved to a page that does exist. Although with the content not being the same, the amount of PageRank passed is dubious but still worth doing.

If you do a 301 then you wouldn't have to worry about updating HTML sitemaps. But Bing does openly admit that they hate untidy XML sitemaps (i.e. URLs that include 301s, 302s, 404s etc) so I would clean that up - and probably do the same for Google too while I'm at it.

Personally, as an SEO (with varying degrees of tunnel vision) I wouldn't want to ever delete content.

I think that's a great idea! Having a custom 404 for deleted employees would be great for branding purposes and general web 2.0 friendliness - I'm sure SEOmoz would agree.

However from a strictly SEO point of view, removing the content and replacing it with 404esque material wouldn't help. However my comment(s) is pretty much a moot point given that there is almost certainly no SEO value on this page anyway. But I guess I'm just a principles kind of guy.