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I wouldn't be overly concerned.

For some terms, especially product codes and the detail pages of your site there are probably only going to be three pages where that term appears. The product page itself, the page within the navigation that links to that page (normally a list), and the sitemap.

Your sitemap is probably heavily linked to across the site so it does kind of make sense that it would appear as one of the top URLs for a term.

The reason I wouldn't be overly concerned is that I would IMAGINE (and I could be totally wrong) that the top Pages list is generated by a very simple algorithm that doesn't reflect how the organic search algorithm sees your site.

In answer to question 1 - yeah. Happens all the time. They're spammy sites that are scraping the serps to get some relevant content. There is nothing that you can do about it and personally I wouldn't worry about them too much.

In a word?

No.

Or at least so little that the answer is basically no.

Hi Karen,

8 months is a long time when you're in the throes of Google. Your problem might not revolve entirely around your navigation.

However in answer to your question - are they the right subpages?

Personally I'd do a card sorting exercise to determine which sub categories your users are expecting to see.  You can normally back this data up with some keyword research to see which sub category type terms are generating a lot of search volumes.

For example if you've got a page called "English Literature 1800-1850" and more people are searching for "Romanticism period in English literature" then maybe you've got the wrong subpage.

It is a bit of work, especially joining up the keyword research with the card sorting  but at least you'll know that you've got the right sub categories.

Hope that helps at least a little.

+1 to notifying Google through Webmaster Tools.

However this may not solve your traffic problem so I'd probably get to work doing a little social outreach/linkbuilding as well if I were you.

Don't think it can be done legitimately.

As evidence I present  point 7.2 in this doc

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

However I'm in a little over my head on this one so would love to see some verificaion/rebuttal for this.

Then real benefit of contributing to an industry forum is that it allows you to build authority within that industry and to connect with other webmasters. You can then leverage the relationships with those other webmasters at a later date.

The actual benefit of having a signature link is negligible.

Because you are an Australian company with an Australian domain and hosting in Australia you will find it harder to rank on Google.com - especially for competitive keywords.

To be honest after looking at your site I don't think you're quite at your fighting weight for competing on tough keywords in a foreign search engine.

If you really want to rank in the US you might want to conduct an onsite audit to check for issues (example-home link in top nav links to /index) and also invest some time into link building.

Hope that helps.

Obvious one first - it could be an error in how you've implemented the canonical tag.

Or Google may have decided that it trusts/likes the duplicate page more than the original. As with anything if Google think you're wrong then they'll override your decision and do as they please.

I doubt that very strongly.

Your breadcrumb displaying in this manner is a bug or loophole in the way Google displays snippets. It's not going to affect rankings.

If it's on your own blog then link to any content that is relevant within the body of the article but you don't always have to link back to the main site.

You're probably going to be linking to the main body of your site in the top nav anyway aren't you?

You can learn a lot.

But what you'll learn is probably a lot different from what you'll hear on SEOMoz.

I wouldn't want to say that one is right and one is wrong but right now I wouldn't pay for access to Warrior Forums.

I'd say do your best to get the links removed/fixed at the other end but other than that just leave it.

So long as you're returning a proper 404 you're doing the right thing (on paper).

Totally agree with Stefan on this point.

Although, why are you so keen to keep the original URL? Already built a lot of links to it? Is it a homepage?

Do you mean the different types of vertical search options that Google has - Google scholar, Google images, Google video etc? there's a decent list here.

Or do you mean the different ways that  Google modifies universal search? 1 box, map, SPYW etc? I've not seen such a list and I think that's a great infographic idea.

Since sometime around 2009 Google will replace your URL in the SERP with a breadcrumb  if they feel it adds a better user experience.

In itself this isn't an issue.

That it takes you to the wrong is odd but I've noticed it happens to a couple of you other pages as well. At a guess I would say that if you complete the breadcrumb so that the last section points to the URL that is being displayed (see this page for more detail) it will solve your problem.

Hope that helps.

I'd go for a separate page for CityA and CityB.

You'll probably want to promote the CityB page on other sites that are relevant to CityB - local directories etc.

Which updates did you have in mind?

Have you checked that the rank checker is using the same version of Google as you - Google.co.uk instead of Google.com for example.