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The great thing about long-tail keywords is that you don't need a page for every one, in fact you shouldn't. A well-written page can rank for a number of keywords.

What additional pages would make sense, given what people are looking for and what you have for content?

If the queries being used mainly have to do with simple variations, that is something you could probably add to your main widgets page [green widgets vs. red widgets]. If it has to do with a more basic difference [premium heavy-duty widgets vs bargain household widgets] those could probably be separate pages.

And definitely don't worry about matching ungrammatical search terms--Google can figure that part out and the last thing you would want is ugly/bad page copy!

I will be attending. (My first time.) I am looking forward to it!

Yes those tools are good and the comment about intent is right on the money too. [Apple might have a high search volume, but that's not necessarily as helpful as you might think, if you are a fruit seller.]

One thing I like to do when looking at various keywords is to put them in Moz's keyword tool and see which sites are ranking.

This tells you something about intent (the sites that rank highest for a search term are likely to be the most closely aligned with user intent) and about competition (the tools shows you some metrics about the ranking domains). It doesn't help to pick a term with a high search volume if the competition is way out of your league.

I understand your concern--sometimes you don't want to mess with things that are working. But if it is clear to you that the sites need to be separate, then they need to be separate.

When you make a change like this, you will most likely see an impact on search, as Google tries to figure out what is what. Ultimately, the pages will do best on the site that is the most relevant.

On Google Webmaster Tools or Moz?
On WMT, you can just mark things you fixed as fixed, and they will go away immediately and won't come back unless Google sees them again. For Moz, you should just have to wait till the next crawl.

The first one is more ambiguous. Is it fruit cake and bread of some type, or is it fruit cake and fruit bread [the ampersand generally being a joiner]?

If you do the searches, you will see they are all somewhat similar, with the second two being obviously more related. [collinstreet.com is going to wonder about the strange impressions data in their Adwords campaign...]

An ampersand and the word "and" are mostly the same in Google & there are some who feel that a special character in a title can attract more attention & so is a good thing.

When you say you see that on-page, do you mean when you look at the source inside the CMS, or on the actual webpage?

If it is the CMS, I agree, don't worry about it. When I first started with the CMS I am using now, I got very upset when I saw image links that looked like this: src="~/media/46166ADB93F248DDB7AF5C6CC8BD479C.ashx

I wanted easy-to-read links with appropriate keywords!

After wasting most of a day working on "fixing" them, I found out that once you get to the actual live webpage, everything looked fine. So I had to spend the better part of another day changing them back. [That is what you get for messing with objects.]

How much of your content are they using? If it is a small snippet, no need for concern. If it is a large amount, then yes, as Patrick says, a canonical tag on the distributors' sites would be good. But some people won't do that for whatever reason. And sometimes people don't like to put outside links on ecommerce pages that might take people away from a transaction.

Even in that case, you are OK though. Duplicate content doesn't cause a penalty as such, it just makes Google pick which one to show in search results and drop the others. It sounds like your client is established as the content originator, so they won't be the ones to be dropped.

If you wanted to be especially helpful to your distributors, you might tell them about this and frame it as something good they could do for themselves, rather than for you. "You know that since a lot of the content on your page is from our page, you run the risk of your page not being findable in search. Maybe you could write some special content about how you are featuring our widget in your special blue widgets collection and only use a small amount of the content from our page. That should help with your visibility."

Or something like that...

Rand did a good Whiteboard Friday about this earlier this year.

An excerpt from the talk:

So let's say you've got blog.yoursite.com or you've got www.yoursite.com/blog. Now engines may indeed consider content that's on this separate subdomain to be the same as the content that's on here, and so all of the links, all of the user and usage data signals, all of the ranking signals as an entirety that point here may benefit this site as well as benefiting this subdomain. The keyword there is "may."

Another:

Bottom line is it's really dangerous to put content on a subdomain still. I believe John and I believe Matt when they say that Google has made strides in this direction. The problem is they're not good enough or perfect enough to rely on that factor, and so I'd really urge everyone to keep your content on one single sub and root domain, preferably in subfolders. That's how you're going to maximize your potential SEO benefit. This is one of those technical SEO things that just hasn't changed for many years now.

Duplicate content does not have to involve pages that are grouped together. You can even have cross-domain duplicate content.

There is not a direct penalty for duplicate content. The issue is that when Google sees pages (wherever they may be) that appear to be the same, it will choose which one to index, omitting the others.

So as Andy says, when pages are being evaluated for duplicate content, it is best to be aware of very similar pages so you can take steps to distinguish them, if you want them each to rank.

Yes, I agree with those responses. The other thing to consider is that H1 tags should be specifically descriptive of the page that they are on. If you have the same H1 on every page (company name) you are not giving search engines any extra clues to what the page is about. (Also H2 and below can be useful in structuring your page, but are not big ranking signals.)

The first thing that occurs to me is if they are serving for similar terms anyway, would it make sense to combine the sites? Or is there some business reason you cannot? A combined site would be easier to maintain and would be stronger (more links, content, traffic, etc.), which could help ranking overall.

David Mihm (Moz staff) has replied to this: "We do limit the number of searches per day to prevent abuse and comply with the terms of service of our API partners. It might be an issue with your IP address.  If you email the help team they can hopefully help sort things out for you."

Did you look specifically at the sites Patrick mentioned for link assessment? You can use Majestic for free for sites you control, which is great.

However, if we are talking about "designed by" footer links, those are not going to be very valuable in any case, and should probably be nofollowed, anyway.

The number of indexed pages is going down by 20,000+ pages a month? That is a lot of pages. How big is your site?

The URLs indexed is the number of URLs in Google's index. Google will not index pages that it finds to be very similar to other pages on the site (ie duplicate content), could this be the case for you?

I am also not clear on what you mean by the index status being straight when the number of URLs indexed is going down by 20,000 a month. Could you post a screenshot of what you are looking at?

You can try using Google Adwords Keyword Planner to help you with this. [Keyword Planner > Find New Keywords > Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category]

Click on that, fill out the form using (for example) "selling cars" for your product or service and drilling down to cars and trucks for product category [you can skip the landing page part] and you will get a lovely list, by relevance, of Ad groups each of which contains closely related keywords. See which ones seem appropriate to you--refine your seed term as needed and repeat.

[You need to have an Adwords account for this, but there is no cost to set one up.]

You describe yourself as an SEO/SEO in training. So perhaps either SEO is something your organization is just starting to look into, or perhaps you are just being given the more basic assignments. That is perfectly OK. In fact good on-page SEO is one of the main building blocks for everything more advanced.

Moz has lots of articles on basic SEO (like this one on easy wins), so read some of those (even if you know a lot, this can help fill in any gaps) and go through your site making sure all the basics are covered (are canonicals being correctly implemented?). Moz's page grader can help with this.

Looking at successful sites is a good way to get ideas, but keep in mind they may be doing things that may work for them, but might not be a good fit for you. Don't go making large-scale changes till you have tested them.

As you go along, keep track of what else you would change if you could and why, and keep others informed. As your SEO efforts start to pay off, people will be more willing to listen.

Often in a cookbook, there are different sections like breads, cakes, and cookies. Each might start out with a page or two explaining general rules about choosing and preparing that type of food and also contain a listing of recipes specific to the sections, with brief descriptions, so the reader can get an idea of what each recipe is for.

If that is what you are doing with your website, I wouldn't worry about duplicate content. If there is a good amount of original content at the top, and then short excerpts to explain what the links are about, you should be fine. As Andy said, just be sure the pages themselves are good pages and the amount of text you duplicate in your recipe descriptions is fairly short. [You could even write custom descriptions for the links, rather than using excerpts. Something to tempt the readers to read more...]

Yes, the videos have a common theme and we rank pretty well on long-tail variants of the main keyword. The bounce rate for that page is well under average for the site and we get a handful of new users every day.

A webpage can rank for more than one keyword and that's a good thing. Having the low volume keyword ranking well wouldn't hurt the main keyword's ranking. However it could be that Google's algorithm decided that the page is better suited for the lower-volume query. I would take another look at the page, including links and citations and see if you see something there.

For the homepage issue, it still sounds like a subdomain issue, especially because you see it when you search the root domain, but not the www subdomain.