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How many products are you showing in a category page? You might should consider reducing the amount of products show to around 10 -20. That would give you about 20-40 instances of the word if you have one instance in the name and one in the description.

Is it possible to leave the products and just disable the buying function for them? That is the best bet SEO wise. Then your pages keep their authority.

Why would you think a page would not need one? It is hard to tell from the example you gave what you meant, but I take the stance that every page needs one.

I am guessing that you are using a system that templates pages and maybe adds a query string after the search, something like search.php?caws+cars. I would set in the header of all of the pages that use the search template a noindex, nofollow. Then I would also add it to the robots text as well to disregard the search pages. They will start dropping out of the results pages in about a week or so.

I read a couple articles about the issue a while back. Search engines do not actually use a hard number of characters in both the title and the descriptions. They actually use a pixel width. You can read more about it here http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page-title-meta-description-lengths-by-pixel-width/  and here http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

I always take notes from giants on how to handle things like this. Amazon is the giant in this arena, what do they do? They do not disable the product, they leave it on the site as unavailable. I would do the same thing personally. What platform are you using, does it have a suggested products module / plugin? If so, it can be modified to be more promient on pages that are disabled from selling. But I would keep the page and keep the authority of the page.

If you 301 it to another product, the search satisfaction level goes down and your bounce rate will rise. I would be careful with this, because Google wants to serve results that are relevant and what people are looking for.

The other option I would give is to return a 410 status code to get them de-indexed.

Oh ok, I see what you mean. What it is actually saying is "this page you are looking at is the one true source". It basically makes a correlation with the search engines between the content on the page and what page that content should be on, in a lesser sense if it is found on another page.

Categorization is a difficult issue for ecommerce sites. You want to have enough categories so people can easily find products, but at the same time you do not want to risk a duplicate content penalty or a then content penalty, by being over categorized.

I think with the canonical url pointing to the no filtered page it will be next to impossible to rank the page. If you are looking for click throughs from organic sources, it should work, but from search engines I don't think it will.

The way I handled the issue with one of my clients might be something you could do and it would provide better results. In the ecommerce platform I use it has searches and filters as well. What I did with their shop was I created a module that would handle some searches and filters differently. Basically they could enter a term in the module, say christmas, and any searches or filters on the site for the exact match word would rewrite the term as a psuedo category. It is kind of hard to explain the logic, but it created a stub page, like in your case would be something like /drivetrain/road-cassettes where the cannocial url could be set to the page, the meta description, title, and on page category description could be different. But the page was not accessible through any category structure or any other way, just through the search and filters. Basically what you are creating is a landing page catered to search terms.

If this is done sparingly, there is no issue with it, if you go through and make 10k pages like this, you might get a penalty. What I did was take the top terms that had been searched in the site and used them as a list of what landing pages to make.

Interesting point. I get traffic from my site link in my Moz profile, but at the same time a link to my root domain does not show up in GWT.

If you use the sll certificate, I would add a canonical url to the site and just direct everything to the ssl site, then you will be ahead of the game when google starts promoting ssl results.

From an SEO perspective I have no data. But from a user perspective I would stay away from them. It is going to take a lot of time and marketing money for companies to train people about the new extensions. It is not personally something I would want to pay for.

Can you verify if the file is actually on the server? It sounds like the sitemap generator you are using might have a problem. How many products are in the shop? How long does it run when you generate one?

I have not had any issues with my clients. We send the product through with hashes like http://neat42.com/tshirts/1-faded-short-sleeve-tshirts.html#/color-blue and canonical all of the pages without the hash. If you can control the quantty through a url string you will not have any issues.

I would say it is not good practice. I think of the heading system as a structure system. Like a book or an outline. The h1 tag should be the title that encompasses the whole page. The h2 tags are like the chapters, h3 are sub chapters or strong points inside the chapters and so on.

Is this not spam? It has contextual links that have nothing to do with the topic. We get these all the time on the forum I help manage.

It very well could. It seems like the generation time is too short for that many products. One thing I would try (I am not an expert with Magento) is to check what your php execution time limit is. If it is 30 seconds or 1 minute, I would try to increase it to something like 5 or 10 minutes and see if the regeneration works then. The script could be timing out.

A web developer usually. What problems did it find? Some of those services make a big deal out of things that are not actually problems.

opps, I had a total misunderstanding about it, sorry about that.

If you click on insights right here http://screencast.com/t/d1KboeRyIuQV , you get this view http://screencast.com/t/2p3KbTNpP which shows all of your posts if you keep click show older.

In a situation like that my first guess would be someone changed the document root in apache but did not restart the server. I am not a Magento person, so you might have what I am saying checked out, because I don't know where things are located. What I would do is look in the databases on the server and see if there is one that holds the most recent customer information. Then I would look at the settings file that Magento uses to specify what database the application uses, see if they are the same. If not, then look around on the server for another directory that holds the most recent version.

If someone changed the document root and did not reboot, it would not take effect until the server was rebooted, thus changing the whole configuration of the site. One place you can have someone look to be sure is the apache logs. In the log it will have the complete system path of the resources accessed, see if there was a change at the time of the reboot.