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If you've deleted the links then you're fine. All the tools - OSE, WMT, etc. - are just slow at catching up.

Check AHREFs, they have the most complete set of data.

Basing it on just these 2 factors is an oversimplification - a lot more goes into it. But of the 2 you listed, it's more likely A than B.

Regardless of what these long-time employees say, try to get in touch with whoever was in this position before you and find out for sure if link building was done. If the company's that big, it wouldn't be surprising if link building was going on and most people had no clue.

We implemented rich snippets for products some time ago. When viewing our site through a site:xxxx.com on Google, they don't show for every product, despite the fact that they should.

I've taken some of the URLs that don't show rich snippets in the SERPs, ran them through Google's testing tool, and they display fine. Not sure what's going wrong here. Any thoughts?

Link Detox is good for finding toxic links, but you still need to manually review them all. It will give you false positives - no tool is 100% on that stuff.

Rmoov and Pitchbox are good for outreach, though I favor Rmoov since it was specifically built for link removal. Pitchbox is more for prospecting, finding new opportunities, etc.

This is a book they're presenting on their site, of course it's not unique content. I'm sure they're aware of that.

OP, to your questions:

1. Generally you won't be penalized for having too many links on a page, but Google will only crawl so many of them. The higher authority your site is, you can have tons of links on a page and get more of them crawled.

2. What makes you think you're being penalized? Significant drop in traffic?

Apparently I'm the only one who's ever had this problem. Interesting.

Moz is going by a percentage threshold - if more than a certain percent is the same, it's duplicate. Revise your meta descriptions or just accept having it marked as duplicate. Duplicate meta descriptions aren't that big of an issue.

Like it says above, Google is processing but not indexing our latest XML sitemap. I noticed this Monday afternoon - Indexed status was still Pending - and didn't think anything of it. But when it still said Pending on Tuesday, it seemed strange.

I deleted and resubmitted our XML sitemap on Tuesday. It now shows that it was processed on Tuesday, but the Indexed status is still Pending. I've never seen this much of a lag, hence the concern.

Our site IS indexed in Google - it shows up with a site:xxxx.com search with the same number of pages as it always has.

The only thing I can see that triggered this is Sunday the site failed verification via Google, but we quickly fixed that and re-verified via WMT Monday morning.

Anyone know what's going on?

Why do you say it's not possible? A good copywriter can knock out titles and meta descriptions for a few hundred pages in a day. It's worth paying for.

I was under the impression that dynamic pages where you go through a lookup would be harder to index.

Ex. - one of our sites uses a lookup to get customers to page that lists all the products we carry for their vehicle. The main landing page has a dropdown lookup with 3 to 8 fields depending on the vehicle type, and all fields must be filled in to get to the product listing page.

You're saying Google should be able to go through that and index the dynamic content with no problem?

http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/search/Wiper+Blade/03300/C0047.oap?make=Honda&model=Accord&year=2005&vi=1430764

How is O'Reilly getting this page indexed? It shows up in organic results for [2005 honda accord windshield wiper size].

Unless you got a manual action and did a reconsideration request, you won't hear back from Google. Based on the OP's statements, sounds like his is an algorithmic problem.

OP, wait and pray that things turn around with the next Penguin update.

A meganav is not considered duplicate content. Duplicate content means product description pages that are identical, having the same articles multiple places on your site, etc.

To the main parts of your question - Google does not want it to be easy for people in the SEO world. They give guidelines, but following them means nothing. What Google considers an ok tactic one years becomes an unacceptable tactic the next (see guest blogging). There are many ways to succeed in ranking. Some follow Google's rules and wait for rankings to come, others use tons of spammy tactics and rank instantly (though they always risk losing it overnight if Google catches on).

The idea that an easy to use site and relevant content will make Google rank you fairly is a joke. And though only 1 has said it publicly, there are many top minds in the SEO world who will tell you that in private.

Regardless of what Google says or does, links are still a huge factor in search rankings. You need to some quality links to your site to see improvement in your SERP positions. The Moz blog is full of tips on it.

On top of the site move issues, I just put your site in Open Site Explorer and you have no backlinks from anyone. That's a big part of your ranking problem. Did you get rid of a bunch or have you never had any?

I won't be changing what we do with out of stock items. A 404 is a bad user experience. One of our sites sells tons of products that all come in a variety of colors. 5 of them are core colors that we always have, the rest come and go. So when one of the colors that comes and goes runs out of stock and the page 404s, we 301 it to a core color that shouldn't go out of stock. And for the rare times that we're out of stock on a core color, we use out of stock messaging on the page instead of letting it 404. I was surprised he didn't mention redirects in the video.

1. Why can't you 301 them?

2. If you want them out of the index, try a manual URL removal via Webmaster Tools.

I always get this issue in IE11 after I've been logged in but idle for a few hours. I switch to Chrome and it's fine.