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I have an odd situation. I have a CMS that has a global robots.txt which has the generic

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

I also have one CMS site that needs to not be indexed ever. I've read in various pages (like http://www.jesterwebster.com/robots-txt-vs-meta-tag-which-has-precedence/22 ) that robots.txt always wins over meta, but I have also read that robots.txt indicates spiderability whereas meta can control indexation. I just want the site to not be indexed. Can I leave the robots.txt as is and still put NOINDEX in the robots meta?

There are a lot of reasons why a site might drop in rank. The number is higher for newer sites because a site can often rank well after launch and then become weighted down to a "real" number. Another possibility is a temporary shift in your site rank. I've seen sites inexplicably drop (i.e. no recent SEO activity) and then come right back in a weeks time.

Your site's not been de-indexed. Keep doing proper SEO and you should come back up.

Again, it depends on how bots see your page. If a bot is based in, say, San Francisco, are you going to feed it SF localized results?

Again, a thorough site map and site index (XML) should ensure that all content is spidered

You could always try using subdomains to do your geolocation (i.e. chicago.yoursite.com). The pro would be better localized rankings and your main site would still be left unaffected. The downside is that this is a lot harder to manage and the subdomains wouldn't naturally build your core site. Sub pages/directories (i.e. yoursite.com/chicago) would let you keep the PR but might not rank well for localization.

I've not seen geolocation seen as black hat (even Google does geolocation in some cases) but the caution is that the bot may not see your local content if you do that.

My $0.02... Go with a subdirectory setup and a soft bounce (i.e. 302) from your main page to your geolocated page. Build a thorough site index AND site map so it all gets indexed properly.

So you're saying you don't want the HTTPS homepage? You should be able to go a 301 redirect to the non-HTTPS version or just use a canonical to specify to only index the non-SSL version

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Back up for just a second. You've got a standalone post that sounds like a response to something. A post? A blog? What?

I agree that for custom you get what you pay for. I'm in a very custom business and we have to work hard at the "sweet spot" where people want to pay for custom. In software this gets very fuzzy. Templates can be free, cheap, expensive or custom. Every user has to assign that value and make that determination themselves. What was probably being said was that a designer could make a template and sell it at $XXX a pop. You sell a few of those and you could make the money you want. Without the original post, tho, that's just a guess

Couple of notes for you

1. There isn't any SEO impact on WHERE the data is loaded from. Look at any major website (especially one that ranks well) and they're openly using content delivery (like Akamai, Amazon S3/Cloudfront, etc) for static content. This is good business practice because it takes that load off your web server and often places the content closer to where the client is. Faster content delivery can help SEO if you have a slow server.
2. If they're using the raw S3 buckets I would HIGHLY suggest signing up for Cloudfront. There's two benefits to doing this. First, you put the content into Amazon's cloud, where it is more readily available. Second, you can use domain aliasing to help obscure the source. For instance, let's say you have an images bucket. You could add a CNAME DNS record for images.yourdomain.com and then put that into your source code. You can still see where the DNS takes you, but it's not obvious to the general public. The cost difference between raw S3 delivery and Cloudfront is negligible.

Oh, and I use Amazon Cloudfront for my delivery. Never had any SEO issues with doing so.

There was the JC Penney incident a few weeks back that made for a major shift in how Google devalues some links. All Matt Cutts would say is that they had already been working on it and the JCP thing just brought it up sooner rather than later.

Is this a new trend in SEO? Nope. Google still likes quality links and still tries their hardest to remove low quality ones that artificially drive up results.

You might want to 301 redirect the version you don't want to the version you do (i.e. redirect non-www to www)

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

Duplicate titles or duplicate content?

Duplicate titles are a small problem while duplicate content is a larger one. You should avoid both in an ideal world. Duplicate content should be removed via 301 redirect or sorted using Canonical http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Duplicate titles won't help you but Google doesn't discount pages with the same title tag, provided the content is different.

Duplicate titles can impact clickability of your result, tho. Let's say your titles are all "Blue Widgets!", but you also sell brown, black and teal widgets. Even if you get a page to rank well for "teal widgets", the page title says it's "Blue Widgets" and people might not click on it, thinking Google made a mistake. Yes, Google will highlight the content it thinks is relevant to your search, but your title tag is what they will click on.

Keyword Density is real but it's a red herring. KD is the limit that the various engines put on how often a term can appear before it's considered spam. The number is purely arbitrary and asking what it is is to invite you to run right up against it. If I were to tell you it's 15% would you tweak your page to 14%? Ignore KD and definitely avoid intentionally "loading" a page with terms.

Read your own content. Do you sound like a used car salesman or an infomercial? Would you change the channel on your own content? If so, Google will likely feel the same. Write naturally. That is the first law of SEO content.

Just an FYI, Microsoft is actively trying to kill off IE6 and most major websites have stopped supporting it http://ie6countdown.com/ Even IE7 is dying pretty quickly.

Got a debate raging here and I figured I'd ask for opinions. We have our websites structured as

site/category/product

This is fine for URL keywords, etc. We also use this for breadcrumbs. The problem is that we have multiple categories into which a category fits. So "product" could also be at

site/cat1/product
site/cat2/product
site/cat3/product

Obviously this produces duplicate content. There's no reason why it couldn't live under 1 URL  but it would take some time and effort to do so (time we don't necessarily have). As such, we're applying the canonical band-aid and calling it good. My problem is that I think this will still kill our crawl budget (this is not an insignificant number of pages we're talking about). In some cases the duplicate pages are bloating a site by 500%.

So what say you all? Do we just simply do canonical and call it good or do we need to take into account the crawl budget and actually remove the duplicate pages. Or am I totally off base and canonical solves the crawl budget issue as well?

I dunno that Google gives you a good example of why you would use it, just where. Canonical, for all intents ard purposes, lets you pick which of your duplicates gets indexed.

Here's a real world example. Newegg.com has, literally, tens of thousands of products. Their site is in site.com/?id=STRING but they do a lot of URL based tracking. As such, you have a lot of site.com/?id=STRING&ref=1234 Now, Google will see all of those extra query string pages as unique pages with duplicate content. Newegg uses canonical to ensure that Google ignores all but the core product page.

So, why use a 301 and why use canonical? A 301 removes the page from the index. Canonical leaves the page indexed but transfers PR to the "real" page and helps avoid duplicate content.

I've never been a fan of the whole PR-as-primary-SEO method. PR was intended to "get the word out" to as many sources as possible. It's paid off for us in a few instances because a local TV station has picked it up a couple of times and given us a TV story (with an accompanying website article, although not often with links). As far as SEO... it's a lot of work for little reward. Since your PR is likely identical to many sources, it would indeed be pared back in the SERPs where only one would count and the rest would be considered duplicate.

In short, I wouldn't run a mass PR solely for SEO reasons (especially not as a reliable source of links). PRs can get quality backlinks, but only as a bankshot. Instead, I would put the PRs on your sites and see if people will link to it. If it's well written and interesting, you could get some good one-way links. I am willing to bet your competitors are not doing PR for SEO.