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Hi Michelle. The article you link to describes pagination issues. That is where you have a single topic whose length extends the page so you see multiple pages (page-2, page-3, etc). That has no relation to what I described, although it could be a factor with the solution EGOL shared. Keyword cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages on your site competing for search engine traffic for the same key word. That does not happen in this solution.

Thanks for everyone's responses! I believe I have solved the mystery. I went into my analytics and found that traffic had been sent from cnn.com, edition.cnn.com and weather.cnn.com. EGOL had mentioned the widgets that news sites will often use to link to relevant stories. Turns out I found a widget on the weather page that is administered by outside.in - a service that localizes content. I added our blog's feed to outside.in months ago and completely forgot about it. So, I'm assuming, someone who was searching weather or news in the Portland area perhaps would see our most recent post on Portland food carts. I'm assuming these widgets don't pass any link juice, but I'm so glad to have the traffic and exposure. I suggest anyone who ever writes localized content should sign up for outside.in - your post might just show up on cnn.com.  

A few other things to note for having parameters in URLs: In Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can instruct the search engines to ignore certain parameters, so that they'll treat domain.com/topic?keyword and domain.com/topic as the same page (if ?keyword doesn't change the page content) You can also place the rel=canonical element on pages.  So you could set domain.com/topic?keyword to rel canonical to domain.com/topic to pass its pagerank along.

I would also speed up your crawl rate with Google in GWT.  Yes, you can remove certain pages, but Google will need to re-index all the other pages that use to link to them.

Yes, Google indexes XML files. You can try a search using filetype:xml I am not an expert on RSS files but I believe the XML versions use the <rss>tag. If I were to take a guess, I would say Google can easily examine the file (they read pdf's for example) and determine if it is an RSS feed.</rss>

Hi Martin, Thanks for coming back to me. You are spot on... I think I have been sitting at the desk to long today.  Zoned out! Yep, webtools in google shows the URL in full so I can find it now. Thanks for your help

Obviously you can look at PageRank, Domain Authority, and a slew of other factors, but I don't think there will ever be an exact metric to determine the value of a link.

Recently google has really downplayed the importance of exact match domain names. If the domain name is newly registered it probably hasn't earned any links yet, and therefore wouldn't pass any SEO value.

Thanks for your input. It's just as I though apparently we should re-think our strategy into using the WCM servlet directly instead of through Portal. When WCM is used through Portal via the WCM portlet the content item is fetched through that WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter, but the parameter itself seems less relevant to Google. I'll look into this. Thank you for all your help.

Pagerank is affected by other factors than number of on page links, from an April 2010 SEOmoz blog article, "1 of 200+ ranking signals - Google's representatives have continually repeated that PageRank is just one of 'more than two hundred' signals the engine applies to the rankings equation."  Some of these signals go into Pagerank distribution itself: where the link appears on the page, spam signals, etc. Remember though that Google's Pagerank is intentionally vague.  You'll have better luck figuring your numbers with SEOmoz' scoring system.

If your classifieds are categorized in any way then after a listing is expired I would always 301 redirect it up to the relevant category, but I think it would be more relevant to 301 it to the relevant category than trying to decipher a similar specific listing.  I would find a way to dynamically after a listing expires it implement a 301 redirect.  I don't believe canonicalization is going to help here unless you have other duplicate content issues with the site.  I would not worry about the size of an .htaccess file because it doesn't impact anything negatively.

Thanks for the quick reply. I am wondering if the url structure of the url for an rss feed matters? such as /rss/[content type] vs feeds/domain/topic vs any other url structure for the feed. My suspicion is it probably doesn't matter, but i just want to make sure.

Excellent, thank you for taking the time to come back to me. (*note for the admin... just tried to reply to this via my HTC Desire and clicking this text box does not bring up the keypad on the phone.  Not sure if this is a phone issue or the site not being recognised as a text box.)

Yeah... you'd probably want to redirect those offline advertising URLs depending on the device being used.  Unless your site is primarily mobile, you'll probably want to distribute your regular URLs in offline advertising, not URLs with mobile.example.com. For usability, you should have links to go between the two version of the site.  What would be even better is if you did this: set a cookie when you change the version of the site you're on, to prevent the redirect in the future.  So if you change from the default version of the site from the version that we think you would want for your device, and come back to that site later, we'll use the version you selected. For example, if a user prefers the desktop version on their iPad, the first time they go to your site it'll take them to the mobile version.  Once they click the link for the desktop version, they'll always receive pages from the desktop version of your site (for 1 year unless you renew the cookie or they clear their cookies).  This will work even if they click a new link to your site from search result pages.

We have many unique domains - websites that we built - that point directly back to our SEO page. Some of these are fairly highly ranked sites.... Just guessing..... these links sound like they are placed in the footers of websites that are topically unrelated to the keywords that you are optimizing for?  If that is the case then these links are not worth as much as links placed with in paragraph text on relevant websites. If your rankings have dropped from #2 to #8 in just a few weeks it sounds like some of your links have recently been removed, devalued or an algo change has changed something.

It sounds like you want to find some way of integrating the videos with their current e-commerce site, but you don't want to push the category links below the fold and ruin the user experience. Is that correct? I think the best way to do that would be to way to do that is to have a separate page for the video and transcription, as well as the sharing icons, etc. Then, create a thumbnail image to place on the relevant landing pages and include a short description so that it fits nicely within the site flow, but doesn't move the content too far down. Another option is to have a link to the video page using a header banner (468x60) or similar with a clean call to action. That would only push the page content down 70 or so pixels.

Thanks, EGOL and Ryan. This is what I've been leaning toward - I just wanted to make sure there wasn't an easy and acceptable way to do this on an external site that I was missing. One downside to the onsite method is that we'll have to use vanity domain(s) to send new visitors to this site since our main domain is our (relatively unknown and way too long) brand name. It sounds like it'll be worth it to avoid the hassles of dual domains, dual content and the associated mess. Thanks again for chiming in, guys :).