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Hi Larry, that was a great question. This is why I love SEOMoz.org, there is always something to learn. I had never thought seriously about this question before, as I web developer I just figured it if I commented out html I didn't have to worry about it being crawled. After reviewing the responses I can see there may be a tad more to it then that. Good question, good responses.

Matt Cutts says it's not something they're using right now -- it's in the patent, but they're not doing anything about it right now. Here's the video where he says it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnfM_szmDh0

Usually the fastest way to do this would be to first block that url off with either a robots.txt or robots meta tag, but as the page no longer exists i'd recommend going to Google Webmaster Tools and submitting a remove URL request (image below). That's all there is to it! removeurl.png

I'm guessing that in ShopSite 11, that's your affiliate tracking code? http://shopsite.com/popups/associate.html I found another site using ShopSite that uses this Robots.txt to block it: Robots.txt:  User-agent: *  Disallow: /dev/  Disallow: /dev18/  Disallow: /devupgraded/  Disallow: /staging/  Disallow: /rss/catalog/  Disallow: /skin  Disallow: /shopsite  Disallow: /?dir  Disallow: /?order  Disallow: /?mode  Disallow: /?limit  Disallow: /?price  Disallow: /?utm  Disallow: /?gdftrk  Disallow: /?gclid  Disallow: /*?SID

We has the same problem, after a lot of research we figured it it was scripts. If we had a script on a page it counted the page twice most of the time. The Seomoz crawler isn't as advanced as the Googlebot so it can't do quite as much.

No worries. And, I agree with you on the drawbacks. I know I've made changes like this before and caused more problems than I think I had in the first place

The On Page Report is probably what you are looking for: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new I would suggest creating a SEOmoz Campaign for your site and including your competitors.

First of all - no, this is not good for SEO. not sure that at the moment it is hurting your website but it is far from begin best practice and might cause problems in the future. I think that EGOL's solution is the best for this issue, Combining all the 3 versions into one page with "select your format" is the best solution for users and search engines. if you take this approach (although it means that you need to develop it into your website) the best thing will be to 301 redirect all the URL's into one for every product. If you rather leave the pages as they are and only deal with the duplication then Canonical tag, as Justin suggested, will be good practice. I would go with solution NO. 1 Good luck!

Hey Larry! Sometimes larger sites will spin for a while. Sorry about the delay on the starter crawl. I just checked your campaigns out and it looks like you have full crawls for each of them. Not sure what happened there.

Stephanie Chang wrote a post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content that talks about handling expired content, that may help with some ideas for you.

To answer your question specifically, the 70 characters limit for page title recommendations is not important at all for "getting excellent search positions", it's a guideline because search engines won't pay much attention to anything after70 characters. It's not a ranking factor. As Zeph points out, search results will only display the first 70 characters so anything longer than this won't be seen by your intended audience anyhow. Much more focus is giving for the beginning of page titles, and then it fades, the longer it gets - hence why it is recommended to structure your page titles in order of relevance and importance. So page titles longer than 70 characters will not hurt search engine positions directly, but will prove more likely that their is wasted opportunity and contain stop words unnecessarily.

Hi Larry, To get a report of all of your competitors backlinks you'll need to use Open Site Explorer (opensiteexplorer.org). Just input the domain that you want links for and you can access all of the data you need. If you want to compare your links with their links I recommend going to the "Linking Domains" tab, selecting "Show domains with links to all pages on this root domain" and then downloading that report. Do the same for your domain and then compare the two reports in Excel. SEOMoz is full of advice on how to get more backlinks. Two places I'd recommend are today's blog post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building) and the beginner's guide (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo).