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I can only tell you about our experience...we had the same server (in house) for probably 5-6 years, then we moved in January to an off-site host. I paid close attention to the rankings because I was actually wanting to see an increase because the new server provided faster load times. With the exception of normal fluctuations, we saw no change in rankings from the switch.
Be sure to check out opensiteexplorer.com, and not just the SEOmoz site...at the moment (because the update was yesterday), opensiteexplorer.com has more fresh info...for whatever reason the SEOmoz site lags behind.
I agree with Russ. I've used many rank checkers and they're either weekly (seomoz) and work pretty well, or they're daily/hourly and are not reliable. I remember finding SEscout and was very pumped...until 2 days later when I looked at the charts...it would show us as rank1-5, for a few hours, then drop off the map, then at 300, then back to 1-5...it just wasn't reliable at all and confused the heck out of me when trying to analyze anything. So, I decided to build my own program that I was planning on releasing as a service, but I'm reconsidering...still building it, though. Anyway, it works brilliantly which is much more than I can say about...pretty well everything else. If you have the resources, build your own 
Custom = Best.
I probably phrased poorly...simpler question: If there is a page that nobody knows about, it hasn't been submitted, there are no links to it...the only way the outside world would ever know it exists is if they looked at a rel="canonical" tag...will google follow that canonical tag and index it?
Say I have 2 pages with duplicate content:
One of them is: http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage
This page is the one I want to be indexed on google (domain rank already built, etc.)
http://www.originalpage.com is more of an ease of use domain, primarily for printed material. If both of these sites are identical, will rel=canonical pointing to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage" cause it to be indexed? I do not plan on having any links on my site going to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage", they would instead go to "http://www.originalpage.com".
I've only been doing SEO for my company for the last month and I've made some headway but what is really frustrating me right now is a couple of competitors that have OBVIOUS spammy links ranking in the number 1,2,3 stops all over the board for the keywords i'm going for. One competitor in particular has anchor text links EVERYWHERE that make absolutely no sense...junk like...
"I have never been more saddened by anything in my life than when my grandfather got cancer. I told my uncle he needed to buy some auto insurance. I really like pork."
I mean, these links are the pages with the most page authority and page rank out of all of the ones they have...and I'd venture to say that almost all of their backlinks are like this...well, half of them are just random links with good anchor text on the sidebar of a bazillion spam websites (diapers, toys, fake blogs, etc.)...while i have about 3k links and most of my top competitors have about 5k links...these guys have over 33k.
Worse yet, when I look at something like Alexa rank, they have pretty high overall traffic rank but it shows traffic rank in MX (mexico) instead of the US...these guys only sell in the US! I mean, they're black hat if I've ever seen such a thing and they rank superbly on all keywords.
What can I do to compete with this junk?
Pretty sure it's due to the update...all big name sites I look for look good but when I look at my own and competitors the results are all jacked up. My guess is that things will be OK by morning. Haven't been around long so not sure if this is the way it usually goes or not.
I wish I knew...I cannot get our main site rank on bing for a particular keyword, yet we also have a site under a different domain that we have done absolutely nothing with that is ranking in the middle of the first page on that keyword on a consistent basis for months now...I guess bing just really likes that crappy site that provides next to no good content...
From my experience on a couple of sites it also looks like bing really favors wordpress, but who knows?
On page makes a HUGE impact, at least from my (limited) experience...We have gotten a few backlinks over the past month, but most of what we have done is on page optimization. We've went from page 7 to 2 for our main (very competitive) keyword and we're number 1, 2, 3, 4 (or all of them) for a lot of the long tail keywords we went for.
If you haven't yet, make a sitemap (I've been using gsite crawler), then submit that to google in webmaster tools. Granted, it's taken some time....I haven't actually done very much in the last couple of weeks but we're still slowly coming up the rankings.
Like so: Cupertino, per:
In case you're interested, for Phone numbers go with:
["tel:0845 365 0000"](<span)[>0845 365 0000](<span)
This is probably SEO 101, but I'm unsure what to do here...
Last week my weekly crawl diagnostics were off the chart because http:// was not resolving to http://www...fixed that but now it's saying I have duplicate content on:
http://www.......com
http://www.......com/index.php
How do I fix this?
Thanks in advance!