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Thanks for the link!

My first question back at you is why is your hosting company deciding your canonical structure for you? a hosting company should just host and you should be using canonical tags and .htaccess to sort out your own canonical URLs. So my gut reaction is to change hosting company. After that: Open Site Explorer - put both URLs in and see which ones are being linked to and which has the highest value. If you're not a PRO member then take the 30 day trial and use OSE to sort this issue out. You'll be glad you did. After that... seriously as a web designer & SEO, not having control of my own URLs would annoy the heck out of me, so change hosting provider. That'll be the second biggest favour you could give yourself Slightly opinionated, I know, but at the end of the day it's your website not your host's.

I'm also trying to get this done as well, not sure if its doable on Volusion(don't use them). Yandex actually crawls more than Baidu for me, and both don't benefit me at all(sucks when you pay for the bandwidth)

Dump the bad links like your doing but try and gain some 'super' links as well. Find some relevant blogs, maybe there is a hub website or a few in your industry and try and sort out a guest post or 2 on a few of these.

Well checked again, and OSE shows the product page all criterias are lower than the category page. strange!:$!$$#$!

Probably, yes. Any restriction you place on the google bot can be seen as sneaky, something like a pop up in instant preview I would not worry too much about, honestly, how much do you use it when you are looking for info or a site?

It sounds like you should be able to go into GWT and go to Configuration > URL Parameters and tell Google which URL parameters you don't want to be crawled. They have a quick guide to doing this correctly at https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687. Definitely read through that before you do anything, to make sure you don't accidentally deindex more than you planned on...

Your SEO firm is probably correct, in my opinion. Having an overly high percentage of your anchor texts be keywords is one of the factors that makes your site likely to get penalized by Penguin or other algorithmic penalties. See http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172839/Google-Penguin-Update-Impact-of-Anchor-Text-Diversity-Link-Relevancy Your SEO firm has most likely determined that your backlink profile uses too many keyword anchor texts, and they are trying to fix the unbalance by building mostly non-keyword anchor texts for awhile. In other words, they are trying to dilute your too-keyword-focused anchor text portfolio. Here are two more articles you may find helpful: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/anchor-text-optimization-case-study-whats-natural/43404/ (written by yours truly) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization

Hi, Those sites are correctly serving a 200 page. Think of it this way - if you were searching for 'sdagasdgasdgasg' in SEOmoz (as in above URL), this term is not found yet on any page on site. But, it may be contained on a page that is published in the future (highly unlikely for that term I know, but you get what I mean). Hence they serve a 200 page. In terms of usability, if you were on a site and you searched for something and were presented with a generic 404 page, you'd probably think that something had gone amiss with the search functionality. However, if you were presented with a 200 page with "Sorry, no results found" you would be more likely to assume the search functionality had in fact worked, there was just nothing to return.

Usually if you have a link on your page it will have anchor text, to place a link to another site behind an inage/ico COULD be seen as a neg signal. It may not be your intention, but google cares not about your intentions, it does what it wants. You can always use the nofollow tag if you want to keep the link and are worried it may be effecting your site.

This used to be best practice... but I suspect the technique has lost most of it's usefulness. The reason is that Google can now render CSS - and has been able to for some time. It's also better at context analysis - meaning it knows and understands sidebar content vs. footer content vs. editorial content. What is important is how much of your content is above the fold and prominently displayed to users. PRO tip: Enter your URL into the Browser Size tool from Google to see how visitors see your page. http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ If you find that you have too much non-essential content in your code that over-whelms your more important, unique content (such as the elaborate drop-down menu you describe) - folks often see improvements in rankings by trimming down their navigation and reducing their template footprint. Something to consider. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Well we still haven't had any luck resolving this when all of our competitors seem to have no issues with it. Any other ideas on this?

Man, that didn't format right. Sorry about that.

great input and much appreciated. Ideally i would like to have the blog moved over, but there is a lot of links/content to deal with.  I'm working on developing several content gen strategies, and wanted to make the blog a part of that.  Currently it's always been more a part of the social media efforts, but work has been done to better connect it to the main site and make sure it's branded to be one in the same. Where i'm a little unclear is the tech efforts of doing this.  I would assume as thomas mentioned it's a matter of creating the subfolder to house the wordpress install/content and setting up a 301 on the old domain, but the need to do each post individually is where my concern is.

The canonical tags are definitely applicable to this situation once Google goes everything again and sorts it all out with the new tags.

This site should help you: detectmobilebrowsers.com