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Awesome, thanks Keri!

Subdomains can be verified as their own site in GWT. Verify the subdomain in GWT, then put a robots.txt on that subdomain excluding the entire subdomain, then request removal in GWT of that entire subdomain. I've had to remove staging and dev sites a couple of times myself. A couple of things I've found useful in this situation is to make the robots.txt files for both the dev and live sites read only, so you don't accidentally overwrite one with the other when pushing a site live. You can also sign up for a free tool like Pole Position's Code Monitor that will look at the code of a page (including your robots.txt url) once a day and email you if there are any changes so you can fix the file then go hunt down whoever changed the file.

I can understand why shorteners are handy for twitter where the number of characters available is very limited. Beyond that I don't use these shorteners.  Why redirect anything unnecessarily.  It risks a drop in anchor text value and linkvalue.  Also, some people hesitate to click shortened URLs because they could be hiding a nasty destination. I am not using them.. no way.

Thank you again for your help, i did some more research and digging and found this: https://bitly.com/pages/help#i_0_1

Oh if I felt like agreeing. Understand it was a challenging day. I have one client site surpassed by two sites with PA and DA of 1. No links, on page worse than my clients and, arguably, we have better content.  On top of that I have another client site surpassed by clowns with Chinese and Australian links to no where, etc. The others are all junk - literally 40 to 60 linking root domains with maybe five even close to unpaid, non-reciprocal, and that are at least within 90 degrees of the site content (the others are somewhere beyond 180 degrees. Yes, Google occasionally has a moment and a JC Penny feels the sting. On the whole, I see too many who do not and the rankings in anything competitive are replete with BS content, from BS sites stuffed to the gills with Keywords and linked to Bangladeshi laundromats. So, why the rant.....I was getting ready to suggest PR Newswire to my clients as a counterposition after seeing so many competing sites simply run the same content as on their homepage over and over through our RSS feeds. Yes, both Ryan and Justin are correct; I just wish Mr. Google would take some uppers and get about the business of cleaning out the junkers.  Don't worry, I is still smilin' cause we are smarter than them!

Joshua - thank you for the reply, it is always helpful for me to compare stats with others in the industry. I also found it odd that the direct wasn't higher, however they domain has a great keyword in it so they benefit quite a bit from that. Other than that they have a pretty low domain authority (less than 20).

Keep in mind that Google Index's everything that it can crawl.  Even if you put a block in the robots.txt they will probably crawl it.  You can require a password to that subdomain and keep big G out.  This is easy to do if you have a site with cpanel access.  Just go to manage permissions, and password protect that director with a .htaccess pw.

Agreed, i just found it odd that they currently rank for "print and apply" but not for "print-and-apply" it leads me to believe that if we did target one way or another it could influence rankings. I would be intrigued if anyone else has seen this before.

There is a very clear line in this regard. Yahoo directory does not charge to be added to their directory. They are charging to review your website. They have specific standards. They do not accept all sites. If your site passes the review you are included in their directory. If your site does not pass, the fee is non-refundable and your site is not included. That is the line which Google permits. If a site charges and any site which pays is included, that is not acceptable. If a site charges and any site which is rejected receives a refund, that is not acceptable. Yahoo and BOTW are two examples of permitted directories where a fee is required to be added. BBB and other organizations charge a fee to be accepted into their organization then, once accepted, you receive a listing in their directory. That is accepted as well.

Hi Kyle, That does sound strange - did you set up www.automation.datalogic.com as a Subdomain (as opposed to a Root Domain - see: http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/new) within the Campaign Manager set up?

Numbers make a visual impact but there will be no interactivity or brand loyalty...

Sorry to say we're digging in the crates here... but one of the companies we acquired and took over full ownership of in May of this year had a site with no htaccess in standard html. I went meta refresh for my redirects. I'm thinking if I verify the site in WMT and then acknowledge that is has been moved to our current domain, this should probably be the most legit way to inform GOOG that we made the move. If anyone has any feedback that is more up to date, I'd love to hear it. Thanks!

Hi Kyle, Great suggestion!  I'll pass it along to the team to see if sometime down the line we can add "meta refresh" to the crawl notices section of the web app. Also, did you know we have a feature request forum? It's a great place to share your ideas. Other people can vote on them and it will help us determine priorities. You should check it out: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums

FYI - http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/372859-trifecta-is-mostly-broken

Ditto that. Domain Alias = Domain Masking. htaccess is a 301 redirect. You probably want to just use a site 301 redirect, also called site forwarding. But 301 is the correct forward as it is considered permanent.

I see, i wonder what those metrics are. I have seen some pages with a page authority of 50 with only 3 backlinks. So I'm sure their is a correlation with quality of backlinks along with the amount.

Yes, it might take time to get removed from search, but crediting the base page will start with the first crawl after implementing

Then I suppose what the query was that brought them to that landing page. If someone searches for "replace my windows" or "I need new windows" and ends up on a page offering a free consultation (and assuming the company looks credible, etc) then I can imagine a pretty high conversion rate. 15% seems believable. Maybe even higher if it's just email address in exchange for product info for products related to the initial query. But again, no one is going to share this kind of data because if it's really good it will attract new competitors and no one wants to invite competition...

Yep, if you add a robots.txt it won't redirect. But I would look to remove the 404 redirect as well. It also looks to me like a meta refresh as well which has potential SEO problems. I would much prefer a 301 if they are really keen to redirect 404s. The main reason for not redirecting 404s is that it stops you from seeing broken links on your website. Imagine you have a discreet link to a services page that is broken - you wouldn't be able to pick it up with link checkers like Xenu and it could go unnoticed for months if not years. Might be worth suggesting to them that they remove it.