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There's a 100 different ways to do this, but typically my favorite approach is to try to work the synonym into the same copy without seeming spammy. For example, if my primary keyword is "GMO" and my very literal synonym is "Genetically Modified Organism" then I'd try to work both variations into the copy. <title>GMO Dangers - Knowing the Risks of Genetically Modified Organisms</title> Here's a great article that goes into depth about the advantages of incorporating multiple variants into your SEO targeting http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5370/941-traffic-increase-exploiting-the-synonyms-seo-ranking-technique/

Hey Fuel Interactive -- To answer your specific question, I would use the meta (noindex, follow) tag instead of the canonical. It doesn't pass authority, but it is the correct usage. It will strike the page from ranking consideration, and allow the overall course page to have less competition. Another question for you: is the article listing page already ranking higher than the overall course page, or is this a worry? If it's a worry, I recommend testing it out first so you don't prematurely optimize. Just a thought. Hope that helps -- Andrew

It's quite possible that at one point there was a link there--because the page rendered for some reason. I would crawl the site yourself using a crawler (there are several available) to make sure that the page isn't reachable from, perhaps, a bad link on the site. Check the archive.org to see if the page existed at one time or not. I would also take a look at the page's server header again to see if the site is showing a 404 error or a "200 ok" along with a "page not found". It's possible that the page doesn't exist but it delivers a "200 OK" server header anyway. Another option is that it might be in your sitemap.xml file. When in doubt, if the page doesn't exist, I would mark it as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools and watch if it comes up again. If it doesn't come up again as an error, then I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I wish I had a good answer. When Google takes liberties with snippets, it's not always easy to sort out why. The first stop is usually making sure the query is in the META description and the description isn't too long, and you've got both of those covered. Two long shots, but easy to try: (1) Add the NOODP Meta Tag (). Sometimes, it prevents not only descriptions from the Open Directory Project, but also Google taking liberties. Sometimes. (2) Consider pulling your domain name out of the META description. You're saying "Myrtle Beach Hotels" twice in both the title and META descriptions, and it's possible that that looks very slightly spammy to Google. If you can, make the description slightly more natural - the length is about right. Again, these are in no way guaranteed, but they're easy to try. I don't think tweaking the structure of the page is going to help. It's not Google recognizing the search results that's a problem - it's why they choose to rewrite. Unfortunately, we don't have a good handle on the why, at least in some cases.

Had you received an unnatural links warning at all? Usually people suggest not using the Disavow Tool unless you've received that warning. What does your link profile look like? And have you worked on gaining more relevant links and social signals in the time being? If it was an algorithmic penalty in July then it was possibly Panda related but, as I don't have any more information to go on, that's just speculation. Assuming it was Panda then your main issue was likely thin content not links. How does your site look concerning duplicate content, spammy content, and thin pages?

i also run a hundred hotel sites that has that, it doesnt really matter SEO wise. I would test it and look into conversions instead. Good luck!