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Use open site explorer to find all of the incoming links to your site. It's one of my favorite tools of the SEOMoz toolbox 
You'll have to set the filter to Show "All" links from "External Pages Only" to "All Pages on the Root Domain"
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
You can export a report or just go through page by page and identify the URLs in question.
Sounds like some questionable SEO, but I'm not surprised it's getting them by. I haven't seen a big focus on penalizing this type of activity. In fact, I used similar tactics at my previous position (against my will) to help my company rank for a few cities we didn't have offices in, but wanted to target. I didn't go as far as creating standalone pages for them, but I did target the keywords pretty aggressively.
The footer links probably aren't helping those pages rank very well as footer links have been devalued recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have a good amount of backlinking to them. They're probably also taking advantage of a very good amount of on-page optimization.
You've also got to keep in mind since they're using exact matching in their URL to rank for those keywords, they're probably not doing too well trying to rank for other keywords for those pages.
That said, sadly this kind of ranking activity will probably persist for another couple of years. Google seems to have bigger fish to fry right now.
A better suggestion would to be to try to optimize for your cities using other methods such as blog posts, unique pages, listing those cities in on-page areas of your site, and trying to get link partners to link to you in those areas.
I think you mean canonicalization.
With the way your permalink structure is set up, no, you don't need to tag your posts with an exact match of the title. You're already going to have an exact match of the title in your URL.
In fact, I wouldn't ever recommend doing this. If you match the title of every one of your blog posts with a tag you're going to have a unique tag out there for every single blog post, with just one article in it. That's not very useful if you ask me and is definitely going to cause duplicate content issues.
I tend to think of tags as more of a way for my user to navigate my blog - which is what they're really meant for. If I click a tag (unless a blog is really young) I expect to see want to multiple articles related to that tag so I can read more about that topic.
One last tip - Check out theYoast SEO Plugin for some help with Wordpress canonicalization management. It really helps when you're using tags and categories - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
It will direct the link juice from the redirected URL to your page, as long as you use a 301 (permanently moved) redirect. This will pass 90-99% of link juice from the linking URL.
To squeeze out everything you can get (pardon the pun) ideally you want a direct link, but a redirect will pass most of your juice along in the case you would have to get people to change hundreds / thousands of links.
Good decision on the CMS. You'll love it. Be sure to use it to give your product pages relevant URLs, Titles, and other good on-page SEO attributes. This will very much increase their likelihood of getting picked up. Also, if it has canonicalization features built in, these are often good for e-commerce sites. You'll have a lot of dynamically generated duplicate content across categories.
My advice to you would be to build your site to give your user's the best possible experience first, then worry about search engine rankings second.
Think to yourself - "If I were a user on this site, would additional content on what this page is about be helpful on this page?" If Yes, go ahead and do it. If No, you might want to leave it out.
If it were me, I don't know how much useful content you can put on a category page alone. It might even be distracting. At this point your goal is to get your users to clickthrough to the next step in the buying process. This usually doesn't mean reading something. It usually means clicking a picture or link, right? I might just leave that one alone, but that's totally your call. It depends on the situation.
Keep in mind that the further down in your hierarchy you put your product pages the lesser their importance is in the eyes of Google.
For example, if I have a tennis racket I am selling, the second of the examples below is going to appear more important, because it is closer to my root domain. The flatter you can make your site architecture while still providing a good user experience, the better results you are likely to see in the search engines.
example.com/products/sports/tennis/tennisracket.html
vs.
example.com/tennis/tennisracket.html
Hope this helps get your wheels turning.
Well SEOMoz is having their MozCon in Seattle in July. That's a good start for you
Also, there are the Pro Training DVDs which teach advanced tactics. They're pretty reasonably priced, however I'm not sure how up to date they are. You may want to call SEOMoz to find out.
You may also want to check out the Distilled guys for their events and training. I hear really good things.
http://www.distilled.net/events/
I'm kind of in the same boat you are. I've really been digging deep into the SEOMoz blog lately, have been attending every webinar, have been trudging through the Q&A, have been reading Danny Dover's SEO Secrets, etc.
The best way I've found so far to become more educated about SEO is just to stay involved in this community and keep busy in the trenches. When I do more managing than actual SEO'ing I find myself getting behind sometimes.
Hope this helps!
With OSE you're going to get truncated data if a given domain has more than 25 links from it. It does this to show better diversity with its results. I don't know if there is any way around it. If there is, someone please tell me
I always find that if I set it to - Show "All" links from "External Pages Only" to "All Pages on the Root Domain" then I can get some pretty good data. I think this would work for what you need it for.
Maybe you could use the SEOMoz API to gather the data you need.
You may be correct about your sitemap. If you didn't include your category pages in there Google may not be seeing them.
Something else to keep in mind is that your product pages have a much higher likelihood of being more targeted than just your category pages. Google aims to deliver very targeted results.
I would analyze the SEO of a few of the pages in question to see how many backlinks you have to each page, what keywords they're ranking for, etc, and see if they are in fact better targeted than your category page. This could very well be a contributing factor.
I would analyze more for you, but I'm at work right now and I don't really want to be on what looks to be a risqué site for work eyes
It's hard to pick your exact question out of that long paragraph. I would imagine that's why you haven't gotten any replies.
Could you briefly summarize in one or two sentences what your question is?
There's no way that I know of to adjust the frequency of their crawl. I'd put in a call to support about this. You'll get a much quicker response from SEOMoz staff there than you will here.
Depends on how the URL is being written. URL names can get ugly with dynamic writing if they're not cleaned up with URL rewriting methods.
This is something that can have a fairly significant effect on your SEO. You may want to look into configuring a URL rewriting method to write pretty URLs.
Here are a couple of articles to get you started.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/using-mod-rewrite-to-convert-dynamic-urls-to-seo-friendly-urls
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-the-best-practice-for-seo-is-still-clear
If we look at a site like a human would, which is what search engines are evolving to do, then always matching exactly your Title and H1 tags is going to be pretty silly in my opinion.
Good practice is to use a few targeted keywords in the Title tag that describe your page well and the content within up to 70 characters. Of course not all pages will use the full 70 characters. That might cause stuffing penalties.
For H1 you might match some of what you list in the Title, but not exactly. You're going to have commas, pipe characters, other kinds of descriptions, brands, etc. Matching all of this would be crazy and would make a site appear very spammy.
Since the search engines are striving to be more and more human every day a good long term strategy is to build sites for humans first, and search engines a close second.
Sounds like a result of the Panda update. Is this syndicated content or original content? From the looks of it it may be syndicated, or at least some of it.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers
It also looks like the point of the site is less to give the visitor good content and more to attempt to collect ad revenue. The adblocks go well past the actual content of the site in many places, and they're on both sides of the blog. The domain authority is a 19, which tells me this site is in no shape to have as many ads as it does. This is no doubt being punished.
You may also want to run a crawl with the Campaign tool to check for duplicate content issues if you're not using a canonicalization plugin.
On a short term basis, I suppose it's possible if your site is down while your domain propogates to the new host, but on a long term basis this shouldn't be an issue, especially if your site performance is improved due to the change.
If your new host is known to have poor performance or is at risk of frequent outages it could negatively affect your SEO. Page load times do factor into your rankings.
Did your friend give you any kind of specific reasoning why he/she believes that changing your webhost will negatively affect your SEO?
The question to ask even if a slight drop in rankings may occur is - Why are you thinking about changing hosts in the first place, and will the small chance of a potential drop in rankings trump your reasoning for switching hosts?
I don't think you have anything to worry about, but if you do, think of the long term positive effects, not the short term (potential) negative effects.
First - stay calm. Is your traffic noticeably dropping? Have you been penalized in any way in the SERPs? If not, you might just be experiencing regular fluctuations and have nothing to worry about. Look at that first.
Next, I'm assuming you have a Pro campaign set up.
The first course of action there would be to analyze your warnings, errors and notifications to minimize those. Fix the low-hanging fruit there and move on. Next, make sure you're following proper on-page SEO architecture throughout your site. Proper titles, H1s, interlinking, hierarchy, sitemapping, etc.
Now analyze your link profile. Do you have a lot of low quality links? If so, you may need to do some cleanup.
Additionally, you're in an e-commerce sector, so you may also want to check out the most recent Pro webinar - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues
There are a number of things that can contribute to this. Without more information, all I can tell you is to start with the basics and move up. Have you made any significant changes lately?
Hoping someone can answer these questions. We've got some AJAX coding on our site too and I'm concerned it's going to cause a lot of indexing problems.
The obvious answer is to see if you can find another way to build your site where it will be viewable, but often times (and in my case too) that isn't possible from a development standpoint.
Run it through HTTP Live Headers in Firefox (it's an addon). Just search for HTTP Live Headers. That will give you some insights as to how the browser is reading your page.
It's very useful for when you need to diagnose issues like this.
The trend nowadays is definitely a downward one when it comes to domain matching. I would advise you to continue to optimize for casino, because one of these days Google will stop giving so much ranking to exact match domain names. What you do have in your court is the fact that you have a real website. If the site that outranks you does in fact only have a few pages and a few incoming links, then you have a much better opportunity to rank for other similar keywords.
In a nutshell, keep at it with casino, but I honestly don't think it's a great idea to buy a domain solely for the ability to rank for that one keyword. Looking at the trends, I doubt that is going to work out well in the long run.
If you're wondering if you get any SEO benefit from this, I would say the benefits are going to be indirect in the form of more traffic to your pages eventually causing your rankings to climb, etc, but I don't think you're going to see any direct benefit such as ranking higher for those keywords on your own site.
That's somewhat of a drawback to CDNs, although unless your site is extremely image driven I wouldn't worry too much about image traffic. The Google Images engine is known to provide pretty terrible traffic in terms of quality.