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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.

To clarify - It's a popularity thing to me. It's not directly related to overall traffic, but if a site gets more traffic, it's going to be talked about more, linked to more, etc, which increases SEO.

That's what I was getting at. Guess I didn't make that clear

This is giving you a score of the popularity and trust of the links. Links that are more popular and that have more trust will provide you with better link juice than those with low popularity and low trust.

These pages should be helpful for you.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust

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.

Of course they take traffic into account. The more traffic a site has the higher the likelihood is that it is going to move up in the rankings. Some traffic is more valuable than others. If a site is getting a ton of traffic, but it's all just bouncing back to the previous page or bouncing back to the SERP, then that traffic isn't going to be as valuable as traffic that flows through and interacts with a site.

Do you mean do they rank pages based on how much traffic is flowing through from each link? Perhaps you could be more specific with your question and exactly what you mean by do they "look at traffic".

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.

I don't know what the rest of that passage says, but I don't see in that excerpt how the author says they should be separate. All he is saying is what a blog is meant to accomplish.

It can still be a part of your site, hosted on your domain, without being fully and completely integrated with all of the pages. It can look a little different, have a different feel about it, etc, but still be run within the parameters of your website.

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.

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.

I can't say I've analyzed this in detail, but I would believe since rel=canonical is meant to be used to denote extremely similar content or even content that is exactly the same, that the way it handles links on the B page shouldn't matter, since this should be essentially the exact same as the content on the A page.

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

The thing is, in the eyes of a crawler, they are different pages, just like http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com are the same page, but the crawlers will see them as different pages.

Are you using URL rewriting to get rid of the extension? If so I could see where this might cause a canonicalization issue if you don't tell the search engines which page you want to be ranked by using rel=canonical or redirecting from pricing.aspx to pricing.

Try using OSE on pricing and then pricing.html and see if you get different statistics.

You found the issue here with your question. They have similar content, so Google is showing only one. I would try to change the on-page SEO attributes of your articles to target different keywords.

It's not very often that Google is going to show the same site for the same search unless the articles are quite unique. They strive for diversity in their links.

You may be able to accomplish a little more uniqueness by changing the Title, H1, name of the article, subheadings, content, incoming links, etc.

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.

Gotta say I've never heard of this either, but I would say you're taking the correct course of action implementing a 301 to the correct URL. You may also want to throw a rel="canonical" tag on those pages if you haven't already - just for good measure.

That's certainly odd.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would say this is something that's extremely low on the ranking factors totem pole.

Ref new 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors (love this report!!) - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#overview

However, something that is high is the number of shares you get, likes you get, interactions with your facebook page that you get, so whichever method agrees more with the browsers your visitors are using, the software you are using to run your site, etc - would be my recommendation.

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

Well SEOMoz is having their MozCon in Seattle in July. That's a good start for you

http://www.seomoz.org/mozcon

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.

http://www.seomoz.org/store/4

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.

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.