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He also said: "We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves." This is what I am after, personal opinion from people who have either tested or experienced the effect first hand.

Thanks had read about canonical, but did not think it applied until i saw an article on the Google Blog about cross domain support for this exact reasons since setting up a 301 is not an option. Google is now picking up the correct domain and removing the incorrect cached pages. Thanks Shane

Hallo Bernd, Of course, I agree with everyone else that you need to fix your robots.txt file. However I'd also add the suggestion that you setup Google Webmaster Tools for your site. These will help inform you about crawl errors and your robots.txt file and might be helpful for you in future. Also whilst having a quick look at your site I noticed some duplicate page title issues. Make sure you are tracking your site with SEOmoz's campaign tool. It will really help you find these types of issues. Viel Glück!

I hadn't heard of the farmer update, thanks for the tip.  After researching it, this could definitely have contributed.  My client had previously had SEO work done by a company that relied heavily on Article Marketing and it also appears that they submitted the site to a multitude of link farms.

Thanks, Keri. Great pointers. I didn't know Google had been doing 'title altering' for 6 months. Looks like they're using internal link anchor text to substitute new titles if they are related to the query. I don't really like them changing my carefully crafted titles but it's also true that I don't know if their change is helping or hurting my CTR in the SERPs. Hmmmm...

If the content is simply duplicated then moving it over with a 301 redirect is the best way to go. If, however, you've got separate, unique content, you may need to export those posts (or copy + paste) from the old Wordpress install into the new one before the shift or you could lose old content from the prior install. I'd probably recommend contracting a Wordpress developer you trust or who has some experience (many contractors can be found on sites like oDesk, Freelancer, etc.) and asking them to help with the file move if the content isn't duplicated. Best of luck!

These two pages are similar but definitely not duplicates. I wouldn't worry about that being the issue. The first two answers in this thread have it right, you need to build links internally and externally to these new pages to help them out. You are indexed just fine, just need some link love. Kate

That's a really tough one. For paginated search results, I would normally go with @128K's suggestion - let Google follow the search results, but don't index them. Unfortunately, these are both search results AND your content, which is a bit unusual. I would still consider the META robots tag. Here's my argument - while all of these results are unique, landing on question #21 isn't very useful to search visitors, and they might bounce. It probably makes more sense to land them all on page #1. While you'll lose some indexable content, I suspect the higher conversion and loss of duplicates would offset that. Rand had a good post about pagination, but again, it assumes a more typical search-results scenario (like a list of product snippets and titles): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience Likewise, the pages aren't duplicates, so I'd avoid the canonical tag, in the usual sense. There are viable AJAX approaches, but some will make the full content invisible to spiders. There are SEOs who advocate using the canonical tag, but canonicalizing to a version of the page that displays ALL of the results on one page. That way, visitors still go through the list, but Google would see the full page of answers. You could also default Google to a different count of results/page (like 100) but then default visitors to 10, etc. It borders on cloaking, but it's off-white at worst, in my opinion.

Sounds like you need to sort out a canonical URL issue. In your .htaccess file, redirect /index.html to www.example.com. It's easy to 301 it but you may also have non-www and www issues. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, check out that link above and it might make it all clear. This should stop the XML sitemap generating the two pages.

Here's what Google officially has to say about how they determine organic sitelinks, updated in October of 2010. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334

I'm noticing the same thing. All of our rankings took a huge dive in Bing and Yahoo while our Google rankings remained steady. Not sure what to make of it just yet so I'm researching the issue a bit to learn more and what I can too to rectify this.

Yep, if you add a robots.txt it won't redirect. But I would look to remove the 404 redirect as well. It also looks to me like a meta refresh as well which has potential SEO problems. I would much prefer a 301 if they are really keen to redirect 404s. The main reason for not redirecting 404s is that it stops you from seeing broken links on your website. Imagine you have a discreet link to a services page that is broken - you wouldn't be able to pick it up with link checkers like Xenu and it could go unnoticed for months if not years. Might be worth suggesting to them that they remove it.

The search engines see the page without the tabbed style. On the page, use view source to see what search engines see most of the time. On your page, all tabs are indexed, not as separate pages though.

Is it rude of me to bump this question? I would love to hear a response even if it's not from the Moz team!

You can't have 2 HTTP codes on a page. I don't know what platform you are using for your products, but I would delete everything on the old site and put one (or several) scripts that does nothing but redirect 301 to the new site corresponding page. This requires some programming skills, htaccess + regular expressions and this should be done