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I've edited this question to keep it TAGFEE, especially empathetic to both the potential client and to their current SEO company. This can be a good discussion question when talking in general terms, but given how Q&A is visible to everyone and indexed, we need to pull out this type of identifying information.

Hi! No-indexed pages are actually pages that have a "rel=noindex" tag in their source code. When crawlers hit this, they stop crawling the page per the directive so we can't report any data on them. Because of that, you won't see the links referenced to anywhere except the bottom of the page where we provide a generalized count. Hope this helps clear things up and that you have a great holiday! Best, Sam Moz Helpster

You need to add hreflang tags: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en Basically tell Google to index the .co.uk to Google.co.uk visitors and everyone else sees .com

Good question.  You are in a unique position of starting from scratch and expanding, but the SEO and branding principles would remain the same in my opinion: Do not 301 or rel=canonical anything.  Your homepage is your brand identity not only to consumers but to search engines as well. If you start doing funky things like redirects or other markup to "point" google in a direction to maintain some sort of rankings, you will regret it moving forward as your company grows.  Its harder to go back and fix those type of permanent decisions. Don't worry about the homepage rankings for product 1 vs. product page.  Just make sure your site is flat enough that your main product pages live off of the homepage/root from and information architecture standpoint, the homepage will carry enough authority to carry the product 1 page and maintain its rankings. Google is smart enough now that putting that product one level deep will not change much.  Internally link to it properly, mark it up, utilize breadcrumbs and eventually the homepage ranking for those specific keywords will move over to the product page and your rankings shouldn't see a dip.  I have done this a handful of times without negative consequences. The sooner you move it, the better and let it start sitting with the search engines.  You will be fine.

My SERPs for a competitive term I felt I underperforming for dropped about 10 spots overnight after I added "noindex,follow" to the product pages. From the 3rd page to the 4th page, so it's not like I had a lot to lose. My SERPs for less competitive long tail keywords, which is where I'm getting most of my traffic, have dropped slightly or stayed the same. Should I cross my fingers and hope for a recovery? Revert the product pages back to "index, follow"? Any thoughts?

Keri - Thank you so much for this, not only the answer to my question but the FAQ section I couldn't find! Vikki

Ashley & Kerri. Thanks for getting back to me and for the great resource links. I'll dive into those.

Here is the best answer to your question. Dr. Pete did a great job rating this article. http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many More info here http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/understanding-site-architecture-with-xenu-and-excel/ http://www.searchenginesbook.com/absolutelinks.html Thomas

Thanks Thomas!

You are welcome. I am more than happy to help and I am sure that you are going to absolutely love WordPress. It's a fantastic platform I'm glad I could  be of   help to you sincerely, Thomas

A fantastic answer, as always Tom !! Many thanks for clarification All Best Dan

Personally if you are using a tool like Open Site Explorer and are already undertaking a link cleaning exercise. If you identify no follow links on spammy or dodgy sites then I would add to the disavow as you are doing this anyway. I would rather clean all links as who know that Google will change next so I prefer to ensure everything is legitimate and as it should be even if our clients currently aren't being penalised. I wouldn't go out of your way though to disavow these no follows if you are not cleaning your links anyway.

If you are using rel canonical, you're doing it right. The real question is why that second link exists.  Somewhere on your site you are linking to that snap-picture-poster-frames subdirectory.  I would spend some time figuring out why that is the link and not the direct canonical link.  Then fix it.  It's unnecessarily confusing and points to some poor site architecture.  Removing it will both eliminate the dupe problem and also just leave you with a cleaner link structure.  Being in two categories shouldn't mean you need two different URLs for the same product...

Thanks dude. But there's a of these pages, the damage control is just too much. But if I set products as configurable can Google read the products that are not visible individually or it just reads the configurable. We use Magento so it creates simple product variations which are then used to create the configurable. Like if you visit samsonite.com they have different products of different variations but it is one product that is configurable.

But what if I remove the 301 redirect rules in my .htaccess file right(a few minutes) after successfully checking the redirected URLs?

Google does have a TOS line against doorway pages: sending traffic to Domain1.com, but Domain1.com has no other purpose than to send its traffic based on any action to Domain2.com

Hi Pugh, Good question. Unfortunately, no, you do not qualify for inclusion in Google's local index or use of their local products. In order to do so, you must have face-to-face transactions with your customers, which is not how e-commerce companies operate. You can read the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which cover eligibility, here: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en