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Open Site Explorer only updates once a month or so. You have to figure some delay in it. The last update currently was June 9th, the next is on July 21st. You also have to figure that between updates it is compiling data the whole time as well. So if you have a link that was removed July 1st, it could still show in the next update if Rogerbot crawled the link before July 1st.

Like the taco commercial says "Why not do both" seriously, that is what I would do. What cart / cms are you using? I have a trick I have done on a few sites that does a 1up to google on that one. Here is what I do (if it is possible in your cart /cms)

On an e-commerce site, there are some fairly common searches. The cart that i develop in actually saves the searches and how many times people have searched them. What I do is find the top 10 or so and use the htaccess to rewrite the url of the search. So instead of it being like http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?search=ipod have that rewritten to http://mydomain.com/products/all-products/ipod you can do the same for categories as well, which I think is what you are working with. The only thing you have to keep in mind, is most cms / carts will use the same title and meta description for the pages. So you can either write an override or a module that prints out what you want for the meta information on the search pages. Its pretty crafty, but it works well once you get it down.

All of the css needs to be included before the first line of javascript, including inline javascript. That is why you would move that css up to where you deleted the two lines from.

Generally yes it will. The cases that I have seen it not work is when people use a plugin that turns their site into a responsive theme. But people using those these days are rare.

Frankly, I believe in calling a spade a spade. I did misspeak on the issue though. Because of so many complaints about how they do their review system they are being sued in a state supreme court right now. http://investorplace.com/2014/04/yelp-stock-charts/#.U6xgBfldVHQ  But, that is beside the point to your issue.

From what I have learned they have an internal "rating" system of reviewers, something like you would imagine that Google uses for ranking and rating sites. Basically they use it to try to fight "spam" like if someone just creates an account and leaves a bad review some where and does not log back into their account the review will usually fall off. Or if a company is hit with a wave of bad reviews like an attack, they will moderate them off. One that I can think of locally that comes to mind is this story http://www.wsmv.com/story/24234919/reaction-swift-after-mortons-customer-with-cancer-told-to-remove-hat It went viral on reddit and generated hundreds of bad reviews, http://www.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/1syt3t/going_to_mortons_steakhouse_dont_wear_a_skullcap/  People even noted that Yelp started removing the reviews, http://www.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/1syt3t/going_to_mortons_steakhouse_dont_wear_a_skullcap/ce37y4z

Yelp really is controversial in our industry, here is another good post about them http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/22/local/la-me--banks-yelp-backlash-20130423 and an ama from a yelp employee on reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vni7p/i_work_for_yelp_ama/

But about your issue, one thing I have heard, I cannot confirm myself, is that multiple reviews on the same company by a person or reviews that are out of your normal review area are hit by the filter a lot. I have seen other SEO companies complain to no avail when they have a client that is a tourist destination that gets reviews from people outside the area and they get removed.

I am sorry about the issue that you are having and that it was such an expensive issue, but that is the breadth of what I know about yelp.

I could be wrong in this, but I have always thought of no index as meaning "don't display". I have never actually tested it, but I would be willing to be that google crawls and rates your site even with a no index tag. The only difference being it is not displayed in the serp.

If I were you I would leave the no index tag out and just get things squared away after launch. In my opinion what will happen is when google keeps crawling it, they will see that the content has changed. Which will help you more in the long run than a no index tag. You might rank low at first, but through the SEO changes your ranking should go up. In my mind it is better to rank low at first then not to rank.

I did not notice this before, but it looks like you have a js error on your site. Try moving this

Right under this line

rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.myfairytalebooks.com/product_images/favicon.ico?1370451016" />

Actually have recommended products on page, or other products in the same category. You could have it pop up a fancy / color/ thickbox when people add to the cart and recommend other products, something like this http://module-presta.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/i/m/imgforuserguide_popup_cart_02.jpg

There are all kinds of different things that you can do to cross sell. Look at what amazon does and how they operate, they optimize the product pages. On them they have lots of different product offers.

My best guess in that situation is that the company is paying yelp and they are burying reviews. I don't post to yelp, so I have a couple of general questions about the whole thing. Can you see the review when you are logged in at looking at the page, but not see it when you are logged out? Can you see the review in your account? Also, is there a direct link to the review that you could send someone directly to the review?

I don't think it would snowball. It should be the end of the issue, as I think google will have found all of the pages it is going to find. You might have some more popup like tags pages and thing like that, but nothing major. I don't know if your webmaster is letting you see the webmaster tools or not, but it has an error date of when it last detected the error. It should look like this, http://screencast.com/t/5a9lpC6o  then you can click on the link and pull this window up, http://screencast.com/t/boyAdXGoOLl From there you can see if the links were internal or external that were triggering the 404 pages. It could very well be that external backlinks were triggering them. If they are internal links, to be safe I would search the source of the pages for the links.

Also, Moz's crawler should pick up the 404 errors and let you know if it is still because of links on the site. The 301 redirects will handle the issue if the links were from the old site, but if the links are because of internal links on the new site that are broken, I would find them and fix them with Moz's crawler or Ravens Crawler.

Check it now, the editor bugged out.

Do I think that Google will see anything wrong with the no-index'd pages? No, that is pretty much what they are asking for. Would I handle it that way? No, not really.

Listings and buildings seem to be the areas that need to be worked on from what you listed above. This is what I would do. I would have someone write text for each listing. It might seem like a big cost up front, but in the end it evens out. Depending on the current on page non duplicate content (by duplicate content I mean items that are global on the site such as navigation, footer text, links in the footer, side bar, and other things that are on every page) I would put at least 500 words of original content on every page.

This will serve two purposes in my mind, real estate is high in NY, I am not really going to check out a site that does not have enough information on it. The second is to help in the search engines. I do a lot of ecommerce work and one thing I tell my clients is that their current revenues can be increased without doing any SEO at all. Turn the bounces into buyers. Traffic does nothing for a site, conversions mean everything.

I am just shooting off the hip and I could be totally wrong, but I am guessing you are using Wordpress since it is so common. I would get someone to make a plugin so that you can "emulate" content. Sounds pretty shady, but at the same time it adds value.

Think of it this way, you can have a plugin developed where (if you are using Wordpress, or whatever CMS) that on the listing you enter the address. Once that is entered, you load content from Zillow. Content like sale dates on the location, school information, neighborhood info, ect. (you can see a complete list here http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/APIBenefits.htm ) That content will help thicken up your content and enrich the site to your viewers. At the same time I would also have someone rewrite and wordify the 100 word descriptions on the pages too.

The same thing basically for the buildings pages. If the buildings pages are like a landing page and on the page you have linked all of the different suites or condos in the building, I would handle it differently. I would have building descriptions written and if needed spin them, not using a program, but spin them by hand. Hire someone that writes to do it. You could even do it as broad as per borough.  Like write one description per borough then hire someone (US native english speaker, college students work for cheap) to rewrite the same couple paragraphs with different wording, adding and taking away from it several dozen times.

That is what I would recommend. The loading cost at this point might be high, but the maintenance cost in the end will be low, you might only be sending out 10 listings a month for like $50 to be rewritten.

In my mind the answer is complicated and depends a lot on your site structure and how your cms or website handles https.

Case in point, if you go to a https page on your site and all of the links pointing out from that page are to https pages, but the pages are redirected to http pages I would consider that bad. The way some sites are written, they just use the same protocol that the current page uses no matter what, so you would have to redirect the links on the page to the non secure pages, I would use a 302 in that instance. At the same time if it is possible I would see if this can be corrected, because it is not proper. The same happens a lot going from non-secure to secure with some platforms as well.

This site has an example  of what I mean. http://junglejumparoo.com/product/jungle-jumparoo/  If you add the product to the cart, then hover over the checkout button, it is http, but clicking it redirects you to https. Then on the next page, if you mouse over the menu, you will notice that all of the links are https now. That is handling ssl incorrectly, but in that case I would use a 302 redirect I guess.

Doing the redirect is a quick fix, but as a long game I would try to fix the issue itself and not do a redirect.

It seems fixed on my end, also the javascript problem is fixed too. Clear your cache and try, see this screenshot http://screencast.com/t/y93SDZScAR

I personally do not like cloudflare. All is fine and well until a site on your DNS starts getting DDOS'd. Then it will affect your site as well. I tend to optimize a site how I want it and then use MaxCDN as a CDN network. Then you do not have to worry about compatibility issues either, like mentioned above. I do keep a cloudflare account however, I use it to move in front of sites that are actively being attacked.

One thing I don't care for is that cloudflare tracks your users and is basically building up a tracking database. If you look on your served resources there are a couple of cloudflare cookies for this purpose.

I agree zenstorageunits about using rel=canonical but one thing I would like to point out is that Moz does not create false errors. It is a simple crawler, not like google. Google will actually try to follow links that people have used before and that show up in your analytics files. moz uses no logic like that, it just jumps from page to page. If it is picking up a page with a query string like that then it is a link on your site. I would find the links and take them off.

It is seen as duplicate content because of the ratio of text between the two pages is very high. You only have 10 -20 words for your product descriptions, but you have a couple hundred words of on page text that is the same on each page.

Just a note on Magento, there are a lot of rumors that the CE is going to be discontinued soon. They already announced they are dropping 2Go and another business product. They closed the community forums a couple months ago, I have heard several rumors at events in the industry that they are going to a paid only model.

Because you are sending a 404 header with the request, that is how google determines if a page is found or not found.

You are going  to have a hard time getting your pages indexed with a feed, there is no telling how many other companies use the feed with the same descriptions. The best solution is to write your own custom content. Or at least try to add some to it.