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Great point - the entire domain has influence. It's not just a page to page comparison.

Ask SEOMoz. Their help team is great and really responsive. If (and I don't know if you can) there's a way, they'd be the best to confirm and/or walk you through the steps.

It could be a whole slew of things, as you know, and if you'd share actual domains, it could help uncover reasons. Better on page optimization? Fewer 404 errors or technical hiccups? They may have fewer inbound links but do they have more .edu or .gov which have more credibility? Do they freshen their content more?

Less words in the title tag is a moot point - do they have better keywords? You say "lower inbound links to that page" when if, as a whole, they have a better domain rank (vs just page rank), that can influence.

There's a lot of ways that this can be sliced.

You cannot underestimate the importance of food selection!

I've had mine take several days and Moz has told me that's not unexpected (even if it hasn't happened to you before).

If it goes longer than let's say today, contact their help desk. It's possible something got stuck (it's happened to me) and they have a great help team who will get you taken care of. They are very responsible and approachable.

I went to SMX West last February and I found it to be very valuable. I'd consider myself a middle-experienced SEO; I say that because I am constantly impressed with the technical proficiency of many of the posters in this forum and their depth of knowledge. That said, I felt like there was a good balance of presentations for the different levels of knowledge and it was a great way for me to immerse myself into some more technical and advanced learning opportunities.

I liked the variety of presentations SMX offered as well as the access to experts and general networking. I was able to balance my interests of SEO, PPC and social media and come back with some actionable (key word there) insight to help our performance. I'd attend again, no question.

Although not on the East Coast, this year I want to look at MozCon in Seattle. The SEOMoz team was in Milwaukee this October for a Mozcation and if that's a taste of what their annual, bigger conference is like then I think it'd be a worthwhile investment.

Good luck!

It's harder to get stuff out of index once it's there - sorry to hear this happened. You can submit URLs to Google Webmaster to remove. (Google Webmaster Tools>Optimization>Remove URLs.) I'm not sure if you can do them in bulk or if it has to be one by one.

Do you have an updated sitmap (with the URLs you want indexed) uploaded to your Webmaster account? resubmit it to help tell Google to come back to your site to crawl.

(Adding the appropriate robots.txt and tags can help prevent this from happening again: http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/69244.aspx, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/logic-meet-google-crawling-to-deindex)

For whatever reason, the URL you posted isn't formatting correctly for me to be able to see it all (it gets cut off), so I apologize if I can't speak directly to your example.

I will tell you from my personal experience that the way our place uses tracking codes has indeed created duplicate content.

Example: www.domain.com?cid=102is the same content as www.domain.com - so unless you prevent it before these URLs get indexed, you can have a mess to clean up. It comes up in Moz, Screaming Frog, etc.

I suggest contacting SEOMoz directly; they are the ones who can look into your settings to tell you if something isn't configured correctly, or if their system may be having a hiccup. They are super nice and quick to respond: help@seomoz.org

This was a common practice for some a few years ago and many still do it. My understanding is that search engines started to figure out the interrelation and there's some SEOs I know who consolidated rather than risk being penalized because if it's not done well, it seems spammy.

Part of it also had to do with managing multiple sites, plus the user experience (why are there so many sites for what seems to be one company?) can be compromised.

I've noticed the trend of even major sites, with different business niches, moving under one domain - like Honda or Ford - rather than keep them separate.

You were smart enough to know to question this and I hope your client is smart enough to listen to your feedback. Good luck!

Agreed. The programming and technical education alone could occupy many for a long time.

Syed, oh, I like that photo session idea. See, you are well on your way. Good luck, this sounds like a terrific project!

I agree with Jason and will raise one other consideration: give them a reason to care about the page beyond it being a good cause. Donating is nice, seeing some content is nice, but neither necessarily will catch someone's attention. Can you set up something where people can post to win a chance to have a chat with one of the celebrities? Is there some sort of contest or something you can promote? Think of something unique that will drive the conversations and want people to check the page and engage.

I, personally, have stopped liking most pages because I don't get much reason to actually engage, unless I have a situation I need to address (like, customer service). I want to see a unique opportunity, just because I donated to  a cause doesn't mean I want to read their status updates because sharing news doesn't equal engagement.

Just something to think about to get some "hooks" for the audience.

Great points; we have top nav and it's never proved to be an issue. I'm working on a project where we've migrating from left to top nav and I anticipate issues because its a change for the user experience and we've already trained them on a different nav.

I agree; it's a little unclear. You need to redirect but you said you don't want to redirect, so maybe if you shared some strategy? Like, why wouldn't you want to redirect, it could help?

How this is done will determine if Google is OK with it and it's debatable because there is opportunity to get yourself into a pinch.  To get to your primary question, yes, most likely, assuming you are covering some of the same keywords and industries, you will be competing against yourself for rankings (and possibly confuse your audience).

Multiple sites for one company or brand work best when there's better differentiation between them; for example, Honda has a site for cars and powersports, but a different one for financing. However, Ford pretty much rolls everything under one. So, again, the outcomes will be based on how you do it and what it means for the customer experience.

As for registration, we own a lot of domains and it's never been a problem.

While this is a direction I'd never advocate for, in your case, you don't mention why you want to go down this route, so I don't want to guess at your strategy and goals.

This article has some good details on risks especially in the comments ("Is Google OK with this?": http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/uncover-competitors-using-multiple-sites-for-multiple-first-page-rankings).

At least you are going into this with your eyes wide open. Good luck!

I think this is a good article on the benefit of social sharing: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-data-the-correlations-between-social-sharing-and-inbound-links at least from an academic POV.

Something I try to keep in mind is that it's kind of all relative. Social matters if it's where your audience is, since even though there is some SEO benefit, it's still about the end user and finding where they are.That's why you'd have a fan page, for them.  I wouldn't set up a FB page if your goal is to try to impact your main site - you may not get enough traffic to make it worthwhile and suddenly you have to manage the page, too.

I think a challenge you have is the user being comfortable having an association with adult/dating content visible or tied to their own personal social network connections. This could be a significant barrier (I am speculating; personally, this happens to be an area I wouldn't want my social network to see so I wouldn't like a dating or adult page or share any of its content). G+ isn't too different. So you'd have to look at how to position your site and content in away to overcome that.

My suggestion would be to read up more on social and the benefits to see if it fits with your audience, strategy and long term objectives. Link building is still also a good part of a SEO plan, but like anything how you go about it matters (using best practices, avoiding black hat, etc.).

Agreed. You need to look at individual pages and associate those with those keywords. It's not surprising you're getting "jack of all trades, master of none" type data back.

You can also enter all your keywords into a tool like Rank Tracker and have it pull data so you can see which page on your site ranks for which of those keywords.