Comment on Stallion Responsive SEO Theme Layout Options by SEO Dave.

WordPress 2 Column Layouts For usability reasons (users come first) I wouldn’t remove the link part of the images, it would likely confuse site visitors.

Looking at your site amishamerica.com you aren’t using Stallion Responsive to it’s full SEO capabilities.

For example the links you are concerned about can all have unique anchor text IF you use the Stallion Responsive keyphrases. Looking through your site and it looks like you aren’t adding any Stallion keyphrases even to new posts?

If you aren’t planning to use the Stallion keyphrase under “Stallion Theme” >> “SEO Advanced Options” set “Stallion SEO Links Plus OFF”.

This will remove the #something added to the links and Google will only count the first link to a posts anchor text. This will remove your SEO concerns about so many duplicate links, but won’t be taking advantage of one of the most important Stallion Responsive SEO features.

Basically if you have 5 links on a page to a webpage with the exact same URL only the first links anchor text found in the code is indexed as anchor text (passes SEO benefit to the linked to page), the other 4 links would be indexed as body text (Google ignores them as links).

As long as the URLs don’t have #something at the end doesn’t matter how many duplicate links you add, Google only counts the first one.

If under “Stallion Theme” >> “SEO Advanced Options” you set “Stallion SEO Links Plus ON”.

The links will include #something at the end and each link will be indexed by Google as a unique link.

You only benefit from this SEO wise if you set the Stallion Keyphrases for pretty much all your posts. If you don’t set any keyphrases all the links will use the WordPress post title. If you have 5 links from a page and they all use the WordPress post title there’s not much point having Google index the anchor text of 5 identical links with identical anchor text.

There’s no SEO harm having multiple links with the same anchor text, though no SEO benefit either.

To use Stallion Responsive effectively you have to do what I’ve done on this site, every post has the Stallion keyphrases set.

Created a post recently: The Future of SEO.

Below are all the Stallion Keyphrases etc… that are used as anchor text for internal links (added on the Edit post screen).

WordPress Post Title : The Future of SEO
All In One SEO Title : SEO 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 1 : Google SEO 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 2 : Search Engine Optimization 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 3 : Google Search Engine Optimization 2015
Stallion Keyphrase 4 : 2015 SEO

By setting all the above the internal anchor text of links to the article will use those 6 phrases (other parts of Stallion use them as well) and Google will rank a webpage for multiple keyphrases.

The most important is “All In One SEO Title”, it’s used as the title tag for the post as well, if not set the the WordPress Post Title is used as the title tag. This is a new article (published 3 weeks ago) and the Google rankings for the above phrases are:

The Future of SEO = na
SEO 2015 = 5th
Google SEO 2015 = 4th
Search Engine Optimization 2015 = 2nd
Google Search Engine Optimization 2015 = 2nd
2015 SEO = 10th

This is without any incoming backlinks (not done any link building), all from onpage SEO including internal links.

The above is a major part of my SEO 2014 strategy and will be a major part of my SEO WordPress 2015 strategy.

I’m afraid it’s a lot of work, it’s taken months to create new posts here, do the SEO research for finding relevant phrases to target each post at. In comparison your articles tend to be poorly targeted, looking through your Google site search results the title tags aren’t very good.

Some bad SEO examples:

Stepping up, once again
Three sights
Food and Faith
Quadruplets!
About
Leaving
Debunking some Speech Myths

Better SEO examples:

Amish and happiness
The Amish Church District
Amish trivia
Getting off the Hedonic Treadmill, Part 1
So you want to join the Amish
Amish Easter and other holidays
The Amish and Meth?

Do you use any tools like the free Google Analytics Keyword Planner Tools for determining SERPs to target?

Your comments tend not to have comment titles and when they do they aren’t SEO optimized. There’s not much value in having your comments indexed if there’s no optimization of the title tags and the comment titles are when available used as the title tags.

Do this Google search

site:amishamerica.com ?cid=

and note the title tags, few are optimized for any money SERPs.

No one will search for

“Hi Katie, thanks for your question on Amish and technology”

Had you given it a comment title like “Amish and Technology” it might rank for relevant SERPs.

Without putting the time into keyword research, adding Stallion keyphrases and comment titles you won’t make the most out of the WordPress SEO package. Right now you are using Stallion Responsive V8 like it’s Stallion WordPress SEO V6.

David