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Mike,

How many keywords are you optimizing for?  If we're talking 100's/1000's, I would personally tend to lean towards pointing towards the most relevant content on your site. This will up "time on site" and lower "bounce rate" because the content the user just clicked the anchor text of will be more relevant than pushing them to your home page and having to search allover again. How many times have you clicked a random link only to be pushed to a home page and thought, "Well hell, I'm not going to bother!"

You should have a base set of "core" keywords you can target for your root domain.

Hope that helps,

dan

Only thing i would be to add is to review your google webmaster account and seomoz spidering results to see if any of this is already showing up as duplicate. that way, you know for sure that you have a problem "right now".  You're ahead of the game though in recognizing that the thin-ness of your product pages will cause an issue.

Check your spam folder. When did you set up the rank tracking report? sometimes it may take the report a couple cycles (a week or so ) to generate the report which would explain why you haven't received anything. If it's been a few weeks, you may want to email into support at SEOMOZ to have them double check.

Sites have Authority because they are relevant.

Example:
Topic: Bee viruses

site#1: New York Times - highly authoritative site about all sorts of news posts a story about Bee viruses and links to your Bee virus website

site#2  Martha's Bee Virus fan site - has 2 articles about her part time hobby of  Bee viruses, but is new to the community and hasn't really built her links. A link from her will certainly be relevant, but is she an authority yet? Nope.

dan

I'd suggest checking with your host. I'm not sure if your reference to reg ex means "reg ex" in the sense of it being reforwarding software, or in the sense of using regular expressions to type syntax to handle it.

most hosts will have reforwarding software of some sort installed with their user accounts (the 301 thing is pretty common). once they let you know what it is (for example it might be apache's mod-rewrite or isapirewrite.com), you can figure out the format you need to write the rewrite commands in.  some of them use IIS, some of them use .htacess, it all just depends.

if your old url and new urls are in respective "structures" you may also be able to put in wildcards to handle the directory words all at once.

Not sure you can or that it's really worth the effort. I requested once right when i was getting familiar with things, and the crawl test had finished by the time support got back to me. Crawl credits are monthly on paid accounts i believe.

hi,

you can do more than one page:

http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com/pageaboutscheduls">

http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com/pageaboutbustimes">

you wouldn't want http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com"> on every page.

the point of this is to say to google "hey, this is the authoritative page about this  specific topic on our site - if you see other URL's similar to this one, use this"

So you are optimizing 10-20 keywords each with those expansions? if the base keyword is the same you would probably want to minimize this and sectionalize where-ever you can.

ex:
grapes section
   free grapes subsection
   how to order grapes online subsection

a warning, if you're building sections on those expansions individually you are going to have a tough time building content and earning relevance as you are kind of competing with your own keywords, against SERPS that are targeted with relevant content.

you may be better off just targeting "free grapes" in 1 section with some keyword mix in the content and having 1 good relevant page instead of 10 low quality pages.

hope that helps.

dan

hi

it could be a lot of things. google may be a/b testing changes and collecting data. any other seo related changes to your site may be "re-spidering" and temporarily swaying rankings while the new data "settles in".

additionally, if you are viewing this in your personal browser on google, cookied information (i.e. you are logged into google) may be affecting personalization results which can mess with the order of competitive results.   location may be doing it to.

read up on "keyword cannibalization" - it will give you a better view of how you can compete with yourself on keywords.

best of luck!
dan

hi -

it looks like the links you have on there are relevant to your website. that's good.

have you review the links you have there in open site explorer? are they QUALITY websites?

furthermore, are these websites linking back to you?

if the answer to the above 2 are both no, you may want to reconsider linking.  there's nothing wrong with indicating you are a part of a community  and link to relevant content, the the key is that it is actually relevant. if those sites are low in quality and don't reciprocate links, you may want to reevaluate.

work on getting more external links from relevant websites in your field. that will have a much higher impact that a page of links on your site. :>)

i would cull some info from here:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

additionally, i would explain the very basic idea of spidering, countered with the size of the job, to explain that ROI isn't going to be an overnight/1 month think.