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Our IT guys do the same with our sites and they have no good reason for doing it.

Because Google still has a long way to go at determining high quality content vs. low quality content, determining good backlink profiles vs. bad backlink profiles, etc. It's like people who write viruses - whatever the antivirus companies are doing, the writers are a few steps ahead. Same with Google. They're reactive, not proactive

The kind of SEO your competitor is practicing works and it always will. You don't have to follow in their footsteps, but obeying the mantra 'build great content and they will come' will take you a long time to get where they are, if it ever does get you there. Think of SEO like investing - it's all about your risk tolerance. Figure out how much you're willing to risk to get the rankings/sales/etc. that you want and go for it.

Duplicate product descriptions alone are probably not why you got hit by Panda 4.0. Matt Cutts is on record saying that duplicate product descriptions are not a big deal for ecommerce sites.

Yes, delete it. Sounds like you're using something to automatically generate meta descriptions which is prepending this item count. Either change the way that program is running or do your meta descriptions manually.

I'd be surprise if you were hit by Panda for duplicate content on product descriptions. Matt Cutts is on record saying it's not a big deal for ecommerce sites.

Do you want someone to do it all for you? Do you just need someone to review the links? Just need someone to do outreach? Be more specific.

It certainly could be algorithm related, but I've seen it report every single one of my keywords drop out of the top 50 for Bing and Yahoo when none of them changed position. It's just weird like that sometimes.

They don't do it continuously like Panda. Based on previous Penguin dates, we're due for one at any time now - like this weekend!

I don't think it would directly have a negative impact on your SEO. Could it be seen as spammy, like it's just there for robots and not users, if a manual reviewer checked it out? It's possible. My personal preference is text at the top of the page, and a few sentences should be enough.

Syed is correct, that's the markup I'm talking about.

jStrong, product pages are submitted with the XML sitemap every week. They're correctly implemented as the rich snippet testing tool shows them the right way. I see no pattern with reviews. Now I'm seeing even less of our pages displaying with rich snippets, so I'm chalking this up to Google just getting more stringent with when they display them.

It resolved itself in the next week with no further action taken. Site verification wasn't a problem - in fact, I couldn't find anything that was causing it. Normally it's less than 24 hours for our sitemaps to be processed and indexed, this one just took a few days.

An even easier way is to check their rankings - if they're top 3 for big money terms in their niche, they're probably using some blackhat tactics. Even the whitest of whitehats are still using some blackhat tactics in the background, despite people not wanting to admit it.

We run 2 sites on Magento and I've seen these problems before.

Problem 1 - this looks like a link to the privacy page (maybe in the footer?) is missing an initial /. Hence it's not being treated as relative and trying to build it onto the existing URL.

Problem 2  - shouldn't be an issue as long page has a canonical tag pointing to itself. I tried one of our pages with index.php/XXXX and it resolved and has a canonical tag pointing to it without index.php.

Keep in mind that bots don't have to obey canonicals - they're just a suggestion.

Old fashioned SEO text would be loads of copy per page. A short paragraph explaining things for the user should be sufficient in most cases.

A lot of people have been having this problem. I emailed Moz and was told to completely disconnect then reconnect to fix it, though I explained originally that I had been doing that and it didn't fix it. Still getting this error message.

Black hat still works and always will. You can wait and hope they lose rankings or decide how much risk you're willing to take and try to beat them at their own game.

Probably won't hurt, but won't help either. Could be seen as spammy if you ever had a manual reviewer from Google go over your site. 500+ words per page is overkill.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-brewing-18447.html

Specifically for Googlebot. I'm pretty surprised people would disagree - Stephan Spencer recommended this in a personal conversation with me.