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It looks like I have done it correctly with the rel canonical.  Open Site Explorer shows it as two different pages.  I suppose that is just the way OSE works.

This line:

is in the header of both www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/default.asp.

www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/default.asp are both showing up in open site explorer.  How do I make sure that these are not being interpreted as two pages when they are the same page?  (Both in search engines and OSE.)

Yes, I was specifically referring to Penguin.  I am seeing uplift in rankings for specific keyword phrases that dropped last October.  These keywords had backlinks disavowed in March 2013.

I just had a page/keyword that had an algorithmic penalty jump in rank significantly.  Once was ranked 3, ranked 80+ since October 2012, overnight it jumped to 31.

Google search is creating 4 sitelinks for a website.  One of these is the blog (blog.website.com).    Webmaster tools allows for site links to be demoted, but there is no way to demote the blog we which we don't want to show up since it is not a "/" extension.   Is there a way to remove it as a site link?

The best way for me to address this is to tell you how I would structure the products.

I would have non state specific category pages for each product.  These pages would talk about the product in general.  Within these category pages, I would have a product page for each state.  On these pages I would have content that explains what is different about that particular state.

I would have a separate category for each state.  This page would talk about the states issues in a general way.  This page would link to all the same state specific items.

document type  - document A  - Alaska docA

- Ohio docA

document B - Alaska docB

- Ohio docB

States    -Alaska  -Alaska docA

-Alaska docB

-Ohio       -Ohio docA

-Ohio docB

Daily tasks:

1)  Looking for things that are broken.

2)  Making sure changes made the day before are functioning as expected.

Most other tasks are weekly tasks.  This is because it takes a certain amount of data to make decisions.

1. negative keyword review from broad match searches

2. split test ad review

3. new exact match keywords from broad match clicks.

Other days can be used to create new add groups.  This can be based on new products/services and splitting ad groups up that have become larger than needed.

This list is just the basics.

Volusion is based on programming that is over 10 years old.  It is difficult to customize as much of the programming is not touchable by the site owner.  They moved their hosting from Rackspace to their own servers.  Up time reliability is not what it needs to be.  They spend money marketing their product and not enough money on customer support.  Communication is not very open.  When a problem occurs, they blame it on third parties.

In short, they are riding on previous success and not making the needed customer requested improvements.

A couple comments:

On where to place you emphasis:  Both products, categories, and home page should be used for SEO.  You will capture the greatest number of long tail phrases this way.  Product pages will capture searchers with specific intent for individual products.  Category pages will capture searchers who have a more general intent.  Home pages can be leveraged for a few items or categories you want to spotlight. (Often used for new "featured" items).

Search term:  Basket ball shoe  - goes to category page

Search term: Nike 980 size 11  - goes to product page

On your Volusion / Magento issue:

Your Volusion issues with bandwidth can be solve with offsite hosting of images.  This will save you the bulk of your bandwidth problem.  (There are other issues with Volusion, but this one is easy to solve)

Magento seems to have speed issues when you scale up your web site to thousands of products and high order counts.  I have been looking at Megento, but do not use it.

Google isn't seeing the "hover", Google is seeing the code for the page.  If your menus are made with html, Google will be able to read the links just fine.  If you are using Java, Google has historically had a difficult time reading Java Script.  I have programmed menus that are html, but will substitute fancier Java code when the client can use Java.  This has given the best user experience while making sure that Google can read the links.

We are getting many crawl errors listed in Google webmaster tools.  We use some faceted navigation with several variables.   Google sees these as "500" response code.  It looks like Google is truncating the url.  Can we tell Google not to crawl these search results using part of the url ("sort=" for example)?  Is there a better way to solve this?

I always go for the "like".

The more "likes" you have, the more potential future interactions you can have with your customers.  This is what creates the "shares".

There is only one solution.  Write original content.

One easy way to do this is

1. read the manufacturers product description.

2. set it aside.

3. write you new description using your words

4. compare the two descriptions; make sure you have used the same sentences and make sure you have covered all the important facts.

5. (Bonus time) provide additional useful information that the manufacturer didn't.

Sigh....social spam.  We recently had a link go viral and had a site gain 2.500 real likes over a weekend. (it started with 1,500).  I was wondering how Google would view this "like" velocity.  I haven't seen any effect from it, but it sucks when you start worrying about too many people "liking" you to fast.