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Could be, if user's expects one thing and gets another bounces will increase (as you know). So did Google switch the page title as well? If so here's a good post on why.

Generally, if someone queries a keyword and if that kw is not in the meta description and the page is relevant, Google may return a snippet or two of a site's content that contains that kw.  They believe it to be more useful to the user. So you could try to optimize phrases that contain that keyword to increase clicks.

As you probably know, all meta descriptions should be unique. Will a couple hurt? probably not but I advise against it as a display factor. Furthermore, some people will actually eliminate any duplicates meta descriptions and let Google auto-create one. Please see Matt Cutt's video on the topic.

Google will show what they believe will help the searcher the most. So based on the query, the meta description may or may not show.

If you prospects are querying Google for a certain term, Google wants to display relevant information to the best of their ability. If these terms are longtails, finding a relevant page may be difficult for them. So creating optimized & valuable landing pages that focus on the user experience is GOOD.

Creating this type of content can be difficult and resource intensive. So, I was pointing out, you can look for clusters of contextually related keywords and create landing page for those clusters.

A content farm (is usually defined) as sites that focus on content that they can monetize and typically written strictly for search engines and not visitors. Also, many of them "repurpose" content is from other sources. Since much of the content is not unique/valuable, typically will get dinged.

Remember landing page entries can be from multiple kw's. If the long-tail kw's are rather similar, and are truly long-tail, one page could be sufficient as those long-tails exact kw's do not need to be on the page. I also strongly encourage having unique content on all landing pages.

So, if you create a landing page for Polka Dotted Blu-Ray Players, your landing page will have high organic rankings for all of these queries:

Green Polka Dotted Blu-Ray player
Polka-dotted Blu-Ray Player that Silver
Blu-Ray Player with Polka Dots

No need to create landing pages for all of these since they are relevant.

Will you get "penalized" for create all separate landing pages for these and use same content? Probably not, but Google LOVES unique content.

Yes, it's a huge struggle. Are you signed up with Google Webmaster Tools? It provide some additional data.

Has the content change? Did you check crawl frequency in webmaster tools? Many issues can get this number up.

If the comments are useful (contextual relevant) and don't look spammy, leave them as is.

Will fixing the misspellings hurt you? Most likely no. A Google patent states:  "content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as...comments...may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA"

However, I would probably leave as is.

We use some industrial directories such as ThomasNet, MacRAE's and GlobalSpec. These directories do provide some, but decreasing value over the years. Google (according to Matt Cutts) looks at a few items when assessing these directories:

• Editorial discretion (who can and can't get in)
• Value (original and informative content)
• How much work they do on the site
• Usability

A good rule of thumb-if the directory looks outdated, lacks original content, has broad content (not in all cases but niche is better), looks spammy, has poor usability and anyone can get in don't use.

Agree with Cole. I always do a site:mydomain.com and manually click through all the pages to make sure everything matches. Also, monitor your Google Webmaster Tool to see any issues. Even if you launch and have some issues, as long as you fix them quickly, you won't see much loss if any. Good luck!

With the JavaScript option, people who bookmarked the page will get redirected.

I may be wrong, but I don't believe you can do this via a 301 redirect. How did you know the examples used a 301 redirect? The examples provided may have used JavaScript to do it (may not be the best, but can't think of any other option).

You cut-off load sample size on your screenshot. If the sample size is low, the data is not that accurate and more measurement may be needed.

You are right though, one of the key factors in migration to a dedicated server is your page load times.

Remember to focus on your meta descriptions as well. They have a huge impact on ctr and can work with your page titles to drive ctr.

We don't necessarily know what Google is "rewarding" them for. Organic rankings are sometimes not fair, but we just need to work at what believe will benefit us in the long-term.  It's frustrating, labor-intensive and difficult. However, that is why it is also rewarding.

I see where Chris is coming from though, in the respect that (I believe) in focusing attention on creating sites with value as opposed to spending efforts elsewhere (he knows his stuff).

Good luck!

The links may have just been removed. Also, there rankings may/may not been influence by these tactics (they been around since 1998). As you know, many factors matter in organic ranking. You can make a report of webspam at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.

Do you have the plugin Wordpress SEO installed? Possible explanation from a user at stackoverflow:

"You have the plugin Wordpress SEO installed which has breadcrumbs included. It looks like you cannot install the breadcrumb plugin also. Use the breadcrumb feature included in Wordpress SEO plugin."

Take a look at this article by Rand: Testing the Accuracy of Visitor Data from Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Doubleclick & Quantcast

I don't believe there is a SEO friendly way of doing this. It's possible to redirect using some JavaScript. However, not SEO friendly (as Matt Cutts puts it):

"For a while, we were scanning within JavaScript, and we were looking for links. Google has gotten smarter about JavaScript and can execute some JavaScript. I wouldn't say that we execute all JavaScript, so there are some conditions in which we don't execute JavaScript. Certainly there are some common, well-known JavaScript things like Google Analytics, which you wouldn't even want to execute because you wouldn't want to try to generate phantom visits from Googlebot into your Google Analytics".