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I have always taking the point of view of keeping out of stock products on site and including related products on the page taking the more content more traffic perspective. As long as you don't have say over 20% out of stock products I wouldn't be too concerned about losing too much link juice to these pages. Yes they will drag down your site conversion rate but they should increase revenue. You could always have separate conversion reports for your out of stock and in stock products.

If you have more pages that all contain links to the same pages (e.g. category pages) then more link juice will be flowing to those category pages. I wouldn't just remove the content, at least 301 redirect the old products to a category page, or a newer version of that product if appropriate - include a message on the new page explaining that the product they searched for is out of stock, but we suggest this/these alternative(s), or something like that. If you don't want to 301 them, you could just have links on the out of stock pages to new item or category pages.

Two ways: 1. Find out where Google followed a link to the non-existent category pages, and get those links removed and the category pages redirected or blocked as EGOL mentioned. 2. Change your code so that non-existent categories show a 404 page, preferably a 404 crafted to gently push your user to something they may be interested in.

If it doesn't work like you need let me know, you might need to do it in scripting.

There are numerous ways for google to find your URL even if it doesnt have a regular link to it - security by obscurity isnt very effective, if you truly dont want anything to be crawled hide it behind a login. I'm not sure how these pages are being created obviously but I wouldnt redirect - instead remove them from index using meta tag or robots.txt. Or just delete them

I would not get a link from this as it seems very suspicious, are you sure the subdomain has links pointing to it? Otherwise, I would suspect a penalty from google that has not been resolved.

Hi, Moz says that keyword difficulty score is based in domain authority and page authority of the competing 20 search results for a keyword. I wonder if it only takes those 2 values because, in that case, that score would not be representative enough for the difficulty. Does not it take the onpage optimization -keyword in title, text, etc-? How do you determine the keyword difficulty? Your Keyword Difficulty Score is based on the Domain Authority and Page authority for the top 20 search results that keyword is pulling on Google. These sites are analyzed using our Mozscape index to pull Page Authority and Domain Authority. These two metrics (along with a host of others from the Mozscape index) help create the Keyword Difficulty score.

I run into this all the time with my site's keywords. If you go to Google and type in the various order of the keywords you will indeed get different results pages. If you go into Google Adwords Keyword Tool you will most likely see the exact same search numbers. What does this mean? Google obviously recognizes that these are in essence the same keyword and report back search behavior appropriately. This of course takes us back the SERPs which will be different (although often very similar - and the 1 ranking will often be the same) which is clearly more explicit in displaying rankings. One side note, I have noticed that plural and singular terms are often very different in search volume and SERPs - for example Blue Wide Widget vs Blue Wide Widgets. Here is a case were the intent would be the same (I would guess) but the user behavior must be so different that Google treats them completely separately. My recommendation: You should be building a breadth of anchor text anyway so link using them all with a predisposition to point using the term that Google suggest defaults to. Hope the helps!

I wouldn't want 300 casino and body part enhancement blogs linking to my site, but in general it's not a problem. Jen Lopez has mentioned my business (RC model warship combat boats) with a link in coverage on the SEOmoz blog in relation to a wrap-up post on an SES we both attended. I'm not going to turn down that link. A lot of the top links to our business in OSE are from SEO sites, as I usually liveblog a couple of conferences a year. Would I intentionally go out and try to build links from someone with a blog about fruit tree care as opposed to spending the same time and effort building links from a blog about WWII model ship plans? No, not at all.

Hi Dstrunin, I would still use the rel canonical tag even with or without the filter in place.  So if you have a list of products displayed unfilter at companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm, I would add a rel canonical  with it pointing at companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm.  For the filtered results,companyname.com/productcategory/filters/page1.htm , the canoncial tag would still point to companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm. It doesn't hurt to have a canonical tag point to the same page it's on. If you can't do that I would meta noindex those filtered pages and remove the robots.txt stuff.  Robots.txt doesn't tell Google they can't index it it only says they can't crawl it.  So they could still index old stuff they crawled before you did the robots.txt stuff or index the title tags. Casey