I agree with Tom wholeheartedly

I totally agree with you and have seen the same thing myself.

The other positive aspect of running PPC ads is that it increases your exposure (both search and display), and leads to a rise in branded searches. Branded searches, like direct traffic, often convert pretty nicely, and helps to send more signals to Google that you're a brand and should the lovely treatment they often provide to brands. So I do think there are residual benefits to ppc advertising for SEO.

I don't think there's no reason to nofollow this branded link - you built their site, they chose you and have kept that link on there - that's a pretty good signal that they are endorsing your work. If they want it removed, by all means they'll remove it, or ask you to remove it, or replace you with someone else and remove it. So I'd leave it as followed - but definitely go with branded.

You may also want to consider creating a page of clients you've worked with in the past/portfolio type page, and then link to that page instead of the homepage. If you get hit, you can always kill that page and start another internal portfolio page. With the homepage, that's much harder to do.

I'd be very hesitant to add target anchor text in these links - I've seen sites that had built links like Web Design and SEO services by Company X - web design points to the webdev page, seo points to the seo page on the company website. These sites got rocked by Penguin - footer site wide links with keyword rick anchor text pointing to target pages leads to heavily overoptimized backlink profiles that are awesome penguin food. Don't do it! Just use a branded link or a naked anchor link (www.companyx.com) as the link back, otherwise you're just asking for trouble.

I agree with Moosa, but it may make sense to also look at mozrank for the subdomain - OSE calls it subdomain mozrank, which would look at the strength of the whole subdomain. you can also look at the number of linking root domains and followed linking root domains, compare that to the total numbers for the domain, and determine how much of the overall strength of the domain authority is resultant from the particular subdomain you're looking at. Those are just my theories, but to me it makes sense

My question to you - why do you want to blog about candles? Is this as a hobby, passion, or is this a method of bringing in customers to ecommerce site. You have to look at your goals for blogging - branding? Customer acquisition? Positioning yourself in the industry as an expert?

If customer acquisition is important to you, I'd recommend building the blog on the site itself, in a folder called /blog - this way, as an expert in your niche, you've positioned yourself in that manner, and people will want to buy from you due to your expertise.

From an SEO perspective, your high quality blog should naturally gain links, and can certainly be promoted through outreach and gather links in that way. This will help your ecommerce site's visibility and reach in the search engines, and will strengthen the domain as a whole. You don't get this if you blog offsite on a different domain - you won't be gaining this link strength for your site, which should be an important consideration.

Mark

Going over 70 characters means your title tags will be truncated by Google. And nowadays, it's not dictated by characters, but the amount of pixels those characters take up - staying under 65 will usually mean you're in the clear.

If you are formulaically creating title tags, and a few of those go over 70, I don't think it's the end of the world. It's not bad - you aren't going to be punished - Google will just truncate the tag and add an ellipsis - worst case scenario, they'll create their own title tag.

That being said, I'd make sure for your target pages (pages you really care about and are aiming for as landing pages in the SERPs), you manually review/write them and make sure they are optimized in terms of keyword inclusion, Call to action, branding, length, etc.

Think of it this way - if you're a user, and you want to find out info about this page, what is the best page for you to land on? If it's a specific keyword relevant to a deep page full of content, then you'd want Google to target your inner page. If it's a general term, maybe your best page is the home page.

Take one example - electronic cigarettes.

If someone searches electronic cigarettes, then that's the head term, and pretty generic - there's lots of relevant subtopics - so you'd think the main page should be your home page. But if someone searches electronic cigarettes quit smoking, an inner page relevant to the uses and scientific proof / lack thereof about using ecigs to quit smoking would be more relevant.

Bottom line - Keep the user in mind when doing keyword targeting, and think what the best page for you to display the keyword would be.