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Having duplicate content within your own site is not as big of a deal as duplicate content from another site. Since you can't use meta tags, you'd have to use robots.txt to keep Google from indexing the PDFs. Nofollowing the links won't necessarily get or keep them out of the index. However, if people are linking to your PDFs, blocking them with robots.txt means you'll lose all link juice pointed to them. Something to consider, at least.

Yeah that's pretty odd then. I assumed it was your rank trackers since we had a similar issue once with ours and it was just an option un-ticked. I have been looking at some of our clients sites rankings today and we're not having the same thing, plus I would assume that it's not something happening to many people, such a change would mean all forums, blogs, etc... with be filled with people asking the same question and wondering what's going on. If that's the case, it means it's just this particular site. What browser did you use to check manually? It's just that with Chrome it doesn't matter if you're logged in or not, it will still give you some level of personalized results some of the time (which is stupid I know), and to make matters worse, I found FF to be returning completely different results to both Chrome and IE for a few searches yesterday. Maybe it would be worth checking in a couple of different browsers. If it's still the same then I hate to say it but you've got two options... 1) Wait it out for a couple of days in case it's just one of those weird things that do seem to happen, and/or... 2) Start thinking about what changes were made with the site recently to have caused it. I doubt that's at all helpful as I'm sure you already thought of that but like you said, it is bizarre... bizarre Google stuff seems to be happening a lot lately! Have you got points left to ask in private Q&A? That's probably your best bet since then you'll get one of the SEOmoz staff answering and if they don't know, no-one will.

Hi Mike, From what I understand, there is no definitive time frame for how long it takes to update the webmaster  diagnostics. Check and see if your changes show up in the Google cache first. If nothing is changed on the indexed pages--something is wrong with the crawl of your site. If the changes are reflected in Google's cache, but are still missing from the webmaster diagnostics, I would just re-verify your site to get a clean start. One other thing to look out for: is your non-www domain 301'd to the www domain? If not, your webmaster tools may be running diagnostics on the wrong URLs, rendering your changes useless. Good luck! If all else fails, just wait it out and take solace in the fact that you've made the necessary changes.

Based on the below two facts, I would put the snippet length for your videos in your sitemap: Google can crawl the videos and may know that the actual length doesn't match what you are saying it does. Google has a published policy for newspapers that have paywalls and don't allow free full access at http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/update-to-first-click-free.html Basically, "We will crawl, index and treat as "free" any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking."

Perfect. Thanks. This is what I get for living in the email marketing world for the past couple years ... refresher courses.

Follow up question --- not sure if I understand the entire situation discussed above, but I have a situation where a site that was ASP.net has been replaced with a WordPress site.  I've performed a Open Link analysis and found that most of the old pages, ie www.i3bus.com/ProductCategorySummary.aspx?ProductCategoryId=63 are returning a HTTP Status = NO DATA ... when followed ends up at the 404 catch-all page. I'd like to perform 301 redirects and wondering if your solution above applies? Thanks for any help.

Yes it is thank you.

How often do people repost the same ad after they expire? Or do the ads expire? I'm thinking of Craigslist, where the ads expire after a certain number of days, and people repost the same ad. I would think you wouldn't want four copies of the same ad indexed, and especially for people to come to an expired version of the ad when there is a fresh one. Also, you'd be competing against yourself with multiple copies of the same content. You'd need to make clear to the user that the ad could still be indexed, and give them a way to totally remove the ad. I agree with the other comment about wanting to strip out any contact information. I don't know the best answer from a technical perspective (though I'd lean towards a), but wanted to point out some implications of other solutions.

The Google Webmaster Central blog advises to use a 503 for planned downtown (and bandwidth-overruns) in their January 2011 post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html.

I agree, they are a very strong directory that I'm sure Google respects.  At 300/yr you may want to consider a few different directory options. How is the Yahoo directory category compared to the business.com one?  Less links on page?  Higher mozRank?  You might also consider Best of the Web and then a few other smaller (but trusted directories) that maybe your competitor isn't listed in.  You could also look for quality niche directories.  If you could get 3-4 strong links that your competitor lacks compared to one very strong link that your competitor has you may be in good shape.  Some of the other directories may offer lifetime links too, to get the most bang for your buck. Cheers, Vinnie

Hey, can you post the phrase and the page you want to rank? Happy to take a look and kick in some feedback.

Hello, could you say what the name of that plugin?

No idea on that one - it's still pretty new. The developers actually chimed in on the post, so you could ask them in the comments.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. I would expect Google to discount the duplicate links, but not penalize you. I have had my articles picked up and syndicated across spammy site networks and get a bunch of links before - I don't think it helped me much, but it didn't hurt either. Just focus on getting more high quality links to improve their link profile and give them a greater variety.