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Hi Rodney, Take a look at this article titled "Large Site SEO Basics: Faceted Navigation" by Serge Stefoglo: https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation It covers what you want to know in great detail and discusses the various options for handling faceted navigation for SEO. Cheers, David

Hi Jarno, This worked perfectly, thank you! All the best, Rodney

Thank you everyone, lot of interesting information. We'll take the approach suggested by Miriam of building up organic authority slowly and we're already on with Adwords (this site is only 5 months old so it was the obvious choice over the winter). I'm also going to follow Rob's advice and focus on a few local areas based on Analytics to try and get a bit more visibility until we build up some domain authority. Thanks again, Rodney

I would say... Best Answer! Great job Robert

I have it on several sites.  For most of them it has been there since AddThis was new.  We added it to a couple sites a few months ago. No problems at all. I think that it is a very good service.  We get lots of traffic back and some of our pages have received thousands of actions.

Best practice is a single per page and using CSS to style.

Ditto. I am facing a competitor who is similarly succeeding by using comment spam tactics. It seems fairly certain to me that Google is giving some value to these links even though most of them are no-followed. I suspect that at some future date they may get better at devaluing them or penalizing for them, however, at present comment spamming seems to be an advantageous tactic.

I agree, they are a very strong directory that I'm sure Google respects.  At 300/yr you may want to consider a few different directory options. How is the Yahoo directory category compared to the business.com one?  Less links on page?  Higher mozRank?  You might also consider Best of the Web and then a few other smaller (but trusted directories) that maybe your competitor isn't listed in.  You could also look for quality niche directories.  If you could get 3-4 strong links that your competitor lacks compared to one very strong link that your competitor has you may be in good shape.  Some of the other directories may offer lifetime links too, to get the most bang for your buck. Cheers, Vinnie

Rodney, Google spiders not only reads the anchor text on the link but also take into consideration ton of other factors including the text around the link, website url, domain name,  domain authority, page authority, title tag and several on page elements to decide the worthiness of a link. "Keyword 1 Keyword 2" anchor text definitely has more weight than "Keyword 1 Keyword 2 another word" or any other variation but that alone is not enough to rank for the keyword. I have seen direct improvement in keyword rank due to exact anchor text vs anchor text with extra words but too many backlinks with exact anchor text will be considered a forced attempt to gain ranking and Google could disqualify the link juice completely. Google is already beefing up their algorithm to disqualify paid and farm links. One of the most common themes in all paid links is the exact anchor text so it will be easier for Google to identify a set of exact anchor text links on a website with dofollow. Always try to use anchor text variations in the link building campaign. There are far better chances of rank improvement with an organic link building strategy compared to a forced anchor text tactic. Hope this helps. Thanks Sameer