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I'm not sure what the deal is with blue flags and report cards, but if you have duplicate pages, you should either use the 301 redirect or the rel=canonical tag. My guess is that maybe you had a rel=canonical tag on a page that pointed to the same page, so maybe the crawling tool took that to be some kind of error? I don't know, but make sure your duplicate pages are either redirected to the original or that they use a rel=canonical tag to specify the original, and don't worry about any reports that are simply notifying you of the purpose of a canonical tag.

Are they paid directories? If so, probably not worth it. There are very few directories out there worth paying for. So many free ones you can get decent links from, just worry about those. Only pay for a directory if you think it can actually bring you quality traffic. Never pay for perceived link value as it's usually very low anyway.

That is a whole lot of questions so let me do my best to sum it up for you.

Your new pages are not ranking because new pages don't just rank. The quality of your content helps Google know what phrases to rank your pages for. The links to that page determine its relevance and authority, or how high it will rank for those phrases.

Putting up new content just because does not guarantee any rankings. Are there internal links to these pages? Are they in your sitemap? Do they have any external inbound links coming to them?

Make sure you have internal links to these pages as well as external links to them. Make sure the content is more than just original and well written- it has to be optimized. Make sure your title tags are all unique and keyword rich. These types of basic SEO practices should be followed first and foremost. Then if nothing is ranking like you think it should after 3 months, you can look at other things.

I would imagine that if they have been indexed but aren't ranking that they just need some optimizing and some link juice. That tends to get pages ranked pretty well.

Freshness bonus is all. Looks like it was indexed in December. I've seen this A LOT since Penguin first came around. Google takes about 60 days to respond to new spam. The funny thing is in my industry I have seen this a lot and the spam just goes away on its own. Doesn't happen with an algo update or anything. It's as if Google just ranks any new site that gets an influx of links and then after two months figures out if it is spam or not.

You can literally rank anything new domain for any keyword you want to. Just buy as many links as you possibly can to your new domain and you will shoot up. But beware, your glory will be short lived. Google will remove you before too long. But if you follow that same pattern again and again (which I personally witness people doing) you can keep popping up in the top ten regularly.

Someone did this in my niche recently by copying everyone. Huge blog with tons of pages, each page a ripoff from a site in our niche. My home page was even ripped off. Filed a spam report when I found them. Little less than two months later they were gone, nowhere to be found. Registered in China, bunch of links all at once, you know, the hallmark of spam. Not sure why Google takes so long to respond, but they always do. Give this one some time. Just a new site with lots of links. Google will take care of them sometime in February would be my guess.

Google strips special characters out of search. For one, no one in a million years will do a search with Google and include a trademark symbol anyway. But if they did for some reason, Google would simply strip it out. You do not need to optimize for keywords with special characters. Just optimize for the keyword itself and you will be fine.

I'm not sure on the DJ passed issue, but the 4.00E-05 looks like some kind of scientific notation which means 4 with 5 zero's in front of it, or 0.00004. The decimal is too long so they anotate it as 4.00E-05. If it said 4.67E-08 then that number would be 0.00000000467. Hopefully that makes sense.

How mozrank passed is calculated is based on the pagerank algorithm that says each link on a page passes juice. So if the mozrank of the page is 5.56, then you look at how many links are on the page and each one passes a portion of that 5.56.

If all you have is two hours per client then there are two options you could be doing:

1. The most effective thing you could do would be to build citations and listings in local directories. These links will help immensely because they will also push up the dentists site in Google Places as well.

2. If you aren't concerned with Google Places, then in only an hour or two each month I would comment on as many dental/health related blogs as you can with a real name and not spammy comment. This is the fastest way to create a halfway decent link.

Good luck!

Also make sure you 301 redirect every page of the old site to its counterpart on the new .com site. So many people just redirect their home page but forget about the rest or don't know how to do it right. And you don't just want all your old pages redirecting to the new home page. Every page should go to it's .com counterpart. Make sure that is going on and that will help you avoid losing too much in the rankings.

I think you are misunderstanding the reasonable surfer patent. This means Google can weight links on a page differently based on the likelihood they will be clicked. The random surfer model for the original pagerank formula counted all links on a page the same, so if there were 20 links, each would pass 1/20th of that pages pagerank.

To adapt to the times, that model has changed so that if there are 20 links on the page, and 5 are navigation, 5 are sidebar, 5 are in the body and 5 are in the footer, then Google will probably have the body links pass more than the navigation links, which pass more than the sidebar links, which pass more than the footer links.

Just make your navigation as you normally would. There is nothing about the first link on the page or anything like that which should cause you any worry.

I have an opportunity to take over a massive domain name list (several thousand). If at all possible, I'd really love to not have to search each keyword individually in the tool and map out the priority score for each.

Is there just a way to view the keywords by highest priority scores? Then potentially download the csv and alphabetize to help me narrow in on domains that would be the most worthwhile to develop?

I know it sounds like a big ask, and likely not possible, but never hurts to at least ask about it. Thanks!

The SEOMoz tools currently do not show search volumes with your rankings and traffic reports. This may be a feature later, and I really hope it is, but currently you cannot do this, have to keep two spreadsheets for now.

I've only ever submitted my sites to tons of free directories, not the paid ones. I'm thinking of getting into a few paid directories now, but just wondering, anyone had experience with a paid directory link being treated like a paid links an penalized or anything? Has it helped you?

My competitors has a lot of backlinks from paid directories, so I"m thinking of doing the same thing. But if Google thinks of paid directories as paid links, I would be better off just turning him in

There's not enough information here to help you. How long did they rank? How old is the site? When were the pages removed from the rankings? Are they still indexed? Did this happen at the time of the recent algorithm change? Answer some of these questions and we can more easily answer yours.

Straight from Google's Webmaster Guidelines:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

• Using white text on a white background
• Including text behind an image
• Using CSS to hide text
• Setting the font size to 0

I would not text indent or anything like that if I were you. Based on what Matt Cutts said last year at SMX Advanced, I would not nofollow any internal links either.

I am saying this:

User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*?*
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*.rss
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*feed
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*trackback
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*wp-
Noindex: /key-west-blog/tag/
Noindex: /key-west-blog/search/
Noindex: /key-west-blog/archives/
Noindex: /key-west-blog/category/
Noindex: /key-west-blog/2009
Noindex: /key-west-blog/2010

and this:

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Noindex: /key-west-blog/?
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*.rss
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*feed
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*trackback
Noindex: /key-west-blog/*wp-
Noindex: /key-west-blog/tag/
Noindex: /key-west-blog/search/
Noindex: /key-west-blog/archives/
Noindex: /key-west-blog/category/
Noindex: /key-west-blog/2009
Noindex: /key-west-blog/2010

They use Noindex which is a syntax I am unfamiliar with in robots.txt. So you can check out http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html for more info on robots.txt and proper syntaxt. I would change Noindex: to Disallow: and that should fix the error in the robots.txt file.

Webmaster Tools takes years to update. It's data is more or less worthless for how out of date it is. I still have crawl errors last detected over 2 years ago that are not errors anymore. Still coming up. There was also a known bug recently with the inbound links, so that could be affecting things.

Either way, don't put too much credence in it, no one knows how often these figures are ever updated so Google is likely way ahead of what they are telling you in WMT.

I don't think it makes a difference either way. One advantage to your current pagination is that if you want to block those pages you can robots.txt block the /page/ directory and that handles that. Not sure how SEOmoz would go about it with those dynamic URLs. From an SEO perspective I don't think it matters either way.

IT is absolutely critical to 301 redirect every one of your existing .com URL's to its new .co.uk counterpart. That's really all you can do. I would certainly be using a .co.uk domain if you are in the UK, so that's a good move.

What you don't want to do is have a URL structure that looks like this:

/products/wii/best-prices/lowest-price/cheap-wii-products/mariokart-best-price/lowest-price-mariokart/mariokart-with-wii-wheel-cheapest-price.html

Your URL structure should just make sense. Yours doesn't look that spammy compared to what Google probably considers spam.

Finding relevant article directories is very easy. Simply go to Google and search your keyword + articles. For example, if your niche is widgets, search widget articles in Google and see what comes up.

What you will find are generally sites that contain articles related to your niche. Google obviously values these sites if they are ranking them so highly.

You will usually find a bunch of sites that don't accept just any author and that's fine. Some you will find you can apply or register to become an author. There you can produce an article to be published.

Just some tips though, always include internal links in your article. So few article directories do this and that's why articles get dinged. Find some relevant articles on the domain to link to. Also, link out externally to more than just your website. That makes for a good article with natural links, one of them being to you.

I wouldn't spend too much time on this, but if you could find a relevant article site each week and get a decent article posted on it, that's pretty good.