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I also find that very annoying.

I certainly know the feeling.

Thanks for your response. I can't upload a picture due to client confidentiality. Plenty of websites that do well don't have much written content on their homepage (and categories) - firebox.com is one example, and that has less text content than the example I'm referring to. Google has recrawled the page and is still showing the same meta description so I may suggest adding some content to try and encourage Google to use that if it doesn't want to use the meta description.

Some brilliant tips in here for finding toxic links that tools often don't bring up. it's worth noting that many backlink tools like Moz only crawl the parts of the internet that they feel are "important". When I worked at an agency that crawled its own backlinks (i.e. we had a tool that was similar to OSE and Ahrefs but was in-house), we did the same thing for our regular crawls. We'd do "deep crawls" that went far further only when necessary, usually due to inheriting a client with terrible spam links and needing to see the extent of the damage. The model and method taken by commercial tools has benefits and detriments. Moz, Ahrefs etc. do a great job, but they do not update as regularly as Google because they don't have the same processing power or storage as Google does. Moz's OSE updates somewhere around once a month with the team working to make this as quick as possible. If OSE were to include every forum page on every subdomain on the entire internet, this would be slower. Going off of what we would do for our every-day tool that was similar in many ways to OSE and its friends, we took a very comprehensive snap-shot that included the entirety of what appears to "matter" on the web and a selection of the deeper parts of the public internet. We did not index or show every .blogspot.com page online. For 99% of backlink analysis, this is fine and always will be. It's when you're faced with really bad spam that you need a more comprehensive view of what's out there. Majestic has a reputation of including more of this stuff in its reports, although you say you've already used it. The criticism of Majestic is that they often include stuff that was taken down a long time ago, or where pages have been offline for a long time. For the times when you ned a deeper view, Marie's suggestions are fantastic if you don't have access to a tool that can crawl deeper.

I don't deal with implementation or specifics of our site search, but we're on Magento and I know we've used Google site search and Solr for one of our sites. We haven't been able to find one we're really happy with.

Cheers - and thanks for the update too.

Both very useful answers - thanks.

There are no problems at all. Google+ Local's ranking factor is a bit different from Google organic rankings. If you actually link building for local citations, you will also find a variety of link building opportunities for your organic ranking as well.

If you believe your site's ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. Use this tool... https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 Hope that helps!

This is a fascinating question. Regarding your question about 404 pages getting a 200 status. So obviously, Google doesn't index 404 pages, and de-indexed pages do not pass on link juice.  However, like you say, some people and sites link to 404 pages and so, were these ever to go live, you'd imagine it would have some sort of strength/authority. But how could you practically accomplish this? If you make the 404 page a 200 page, you've now got no 404 page for your website, which could be very bad indeed. So, you'd probably want to substitute that page with a new, fresh 404 page. But if that sits as the 404 page and gets marked as a 404, wouldn't the links become void again? If you then moved the old 404 to a new page, it loses the links once pointing to it. The hongkiat webpage is a really clever idea as it takes all those pages and makes a shareable hub, which of course then gets all the links and strength.

Well each of those sites links to your twitter as well so its a nice two-for-one. But add you twitter link to author bylines (guest blog posts). Whenever you are mentioned online, ask for a link to your twitter (think interviews). When you say "link to twitter account... from somewhere specific", I think twitter directories.

Indeed - I don't expect to make any money but thought it's worth a try. I linked to a DVD in my first post without even thinking about affiliate marketing so I thought I may as well try and make the most of it. If I could eventually make the £5 a year back that my domain name costs I'd be very happy!

You're right about the 301s, and noindex would be a massive task that I'm not sure is worthwhile. Also I'm not sure if I want to list hundreds of pages in robots.txt. By "back to back" do you mean "compare link metrics"? A lot of these pages show as "No Data Available for this URL" some of them are quite deep down within the site, so I don't know if that's why or if Mozscape can tell that they're duplicate content. The articles that are not part of the magazines usually seem to have a PA of 30+ judging by my spot-checks, but even some of those duplicated from magazine articles (and outside of the magazines) have no data available despite being easier to crawl than the magazine content.

Wow!  Nice detective work!   I could see how that one would slip under the radar. Congrats on finding a needle in a haystack! You should buy yourself the adult beverage of your choice and have a little toast! Cheers!