Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Its impossible to know, but you can research a few things to try to confirm your suspicion:

• Where are most of the links for the affected keywords coming from (if they're mostly from these forums, that's more evidence for your hypothesis)

• What about the unaffected keyword links? If they're also mostly from these forums that's evidence against your theory.

• What about on-site SEO? Have you made any site changes recently? Are your pages keyword cannibalizing each other?

• What do the link profiles of your competitors look like? Did they get most of their links from these forums or elsewhere?

If there are only minor changes in spelling, I would go with just one site to represent both. If you have only a few pages that need to be changed, consider a subsection of your main site for that information.

If you decided to go with both sites, I would:

a) Set up geographic targeting in Google Webmasters tools for each site

b) Add canonical tags to the pages pointing to one of the two as the canonical page.

Meta Refresh can pass link juice, according to Matt Cutts:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

But as Ryan Purkey suggests, a 301 is the accepted best-practice here. With Meta Refresh you need to be careful to avoid looking like a black-hat to a picky google algorithm. Some more discussion here.

If your dropdown is powered by...

• CSS: Yes, they can see it.

• Javascrip:. Most likely yes.

• Flash: Almost definitely not.

There's some debate as to whether 302's are ok to use or not, largely depending on your specific situation. Without getting into technical details, if its possible to use http and 301 redirects I would recommend going that route because its simpler and more understood.

In case you're asking about how to build a Q&A site you will likely find this link useful:

http://engineeredweb.com/blog/09/11/building-stack-overflow-clone-drupal-part-1

I also built http://www.adoptionexperts.org in drupal in about 3 days. Its a fairly simple thing to get set up, hard to seed with good content.

Funny you should ask, Rand just did a video on this exact topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/competitive-link-analysis-tips-whiteboard-friday

This is happening because Google thinks the product is more relevant to the keyword than the category. In short, your products are more optimized. This most likely has to do with more external links with the keywords as anchor text going to your product pages than go to your category pages. But it could be any number of reasons related to SEO, all of them detailed somewhere or other on this website.

Maybe part of the literature describing your program can include the point that to be really effective the franchisee's will have to write their own content. It all depends on your business model, whether you want to make them aware that they have 100-5,000 competitors from your company alone.

You may want to re-think your strategy of franchising the product and the content. If the content is the same the only way to eliminate the duplicate content problem is to point to one of them as the canonical version, and that would very much impact the performance of the other versions of the other sites.

Download the All in One SEO pack plugin for wordpress, and then in the settings turn no-index on for all these page types.

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.

SEOmoz Term Extractor tool, followed up with some checking against the SERPs. That's the combination I've been using to learn more about my competition at least. You could always check their source for meta keywords too.

EDIT: Also take a look at the anchor tag text of their inbound links.

If you decide to change things later you can update your canonical tags and/or use a 301 redirect. Based on the information on the Google webmasters blog, it appears they consider the canonical tag on every crawl. You can read more from Google on it here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Of course, just because you can change it doesn't mean you should. Switching them around will probably cause a period in which Google is unsure of the actual canonical page, and you may see a drop in rankings while it is sorted out.

If your content is exactly the same a canonical tag will help prevent the cannibalizing you're worried about. But if it is exactly the same, you should maybe ask why you're making a separate site instead of serving up different stylesheets based on the user-agent?

As always, I like to refer back to the Googlers themselves, so I recommend checking out: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

Edit: Also this video from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k

Here's a user-submitted list using the drupal/uc combo: http://www.ubercart.org/site

One last piece of advice: Avoid CRE-Loaded. I had to help a customer out of that system once and it was a complete nightmare of no documentation and hostile "support".

I agree with your process. Its almost impossible to have too much information up front, because its hidden assumptions that are often the cause of delays and projects going off schedule.

"Then, six months or a year later, other changes had to be customized."

But here I disagree. IMHO this is the best reason to go with a well-known CMS. When that point comes in the future where a change has to be made, would you rather have a custom built web site that only the original developer knows well (if they even remember) or a popular CMS with thousands of developers around the world?

I don't know of good e-commerce solutions for Wordpress. If I was building your site I would recommend Drupal 6 with Ubercart.

You need a CMS, and the generally accepted top 3 open-source CMS's today are: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla.

You'll want to do your own research on these platforms to come up with what works best for you. They all have many things in common, and could all be used to successfully build the site you're imagining. But they also each have their quirks, their own communities with slightly different cultures, and different types of site-owners that prefer one to the others.

For whatever its worth, when I ask myself this question I come up with Wordpress for brochure-ware style sites, and Drupal for anything more complex.

Submit to Yahoo and DMoz. Then look for ones specific to your industry or area of service. After you find these, look through them to make sure the linked-to sites are at least somewhat credible before deciding if you want to pursue a link on them. Make sure your client understands that a link on a directory in the back alleys of the internet can be worse than a waste of time, they can really hurt your SEO.