Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Have the links actually harmed your site in any way? If the sites are extremely spammy, full of spun content, and/or feature only scraped content then you may not want them pointing to you... but if they haven't hurt your traffic, rankings, etc. then why remove your page or disavow the link? Google will likely just discount the links instead of pegging you with an algorithmic penalty. In the mean time, why not work on acquiring some relevant backlinks through outreach.
As far as I know, there is no problem with doing that. Hell, look at the page titles for everything here in the Q&A forum... they all end in " | SEOmoz Q&A" and the pro pages all seem to end in " | SEOmoz PRO".
The sites I work on all do that with their blog pages. Every page gets an individual title but they all end with the stovepipe and the blog's name. It definitely cuts down on the effective space to work with for optimizing your titles but it also potentially adds in a branding signal that could help your site overall in the long run. We've never had any duplicate title warnings associated directly with that repetition.
Edit: Here's something straight from SEOmoz's Title Tag Best Practices page http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
It even lists the optimal format as Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name or Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword
Its like how a Square is a Square but also Rhombus and a Rectangle. Long tail keywords can be any and all of those definitions depending on the moment, your goals and your needs.
In most cases I wouldn't consider a Low Traffic term a "Long Tail Keyword" simply because it has low traffic. But I would argue that Long Tail Keywords are likely to have lower traffic than their short tail counterparts. People are more likely to search using shorter terms and phrases but sometimes a 4+ word combination can be popular. But I would argue that a Long Tail Keyword/term/phrase is likely to be 3, 4, 5+ words long. Can those words be all extremely product specific? Sure. Do they need to be? No. Are they more specific than a one or two word short tail phrase? Yes.
One word with low traffic is probably just a bad keyword to be using. A 4 word phrase with high traffic could just be a popular long tail search. In some cases it will depend on your industry. Some phrases can have multiple meanings. Just because a 4 word phrase has good traffic doesn't mean you need to use it if the first 3 pages in the SERPs are all sites devoted to a completely different concept that happens to have the same phrasing.
Facebook Pages can't always see every person who shared a post of theirs because of the privacy settings of the specific user.
Depending on your theme (sometimes) you can change Tag Archives and Category pages to show a post summary instead of the full article... which can help but will not fully solve your problem.
If you could convince them to self-host instead of using WordPress's hosting then you'd be able to install an SEO related plugin that might help more to fix the problem.
Tag things less. There are a number of tags that have only 1 post associated with them. Take for instance the post from February 5th that has 8 tags, 5 of which go to Tag Archives that only have that one post on it.
Also, consider getting rid of the Tag Cloud because it just adds unnecessary and irrelevant links pointing to those Tag pages that are causing your dupe content problem and probably harming the flow of link equity through the site.
That alone doesn't prove much of anything other than that they had a massive increase in links. It could be due to spammy link building... or it could actually be a legitimate increase. Personally my first assumption would be black hat but you need more data than just that. Do they do any social or blogging or something? Maybe they recently posted something that garnered a lot of attention. They may have created good linkbait for the first time ever. Maybe they were in the news for something or a popular website mentioned them in a post that lead to shares & links.
If it is all spammy, they'll get hit soon enough.
These are all off the top of my head but I know i have guideline notes somewhere in the mess of my desk that we usually follow. These will change on a regular basis as is necessary in order to keep up with best practices and algorithm changes. The things posted below could all be completely different 3 months from now if Google decides to release a Zebra Algorithm targeting websites with puppies on them.
There is no real way to find the exact actual number but, as Tymen said, the Adwords Keyword Planner tool is one of the better ways to determine search volume that can be broken down by country, state, province, county, etc. to get a better understanding of the available landscape for your pages. There are also tools like SEMRush and Spyfu that are able to pull search volume.
If you're using more than one tool, you'll notice a disparity in the numbers on many occasions. Unfortunately there's no perfect way of finding out with 100% accuracy what the actual search volume number is so some tools pull their information from one set of sources while another pulls info using some differing sources. Both are technically correct but should be taken as estimates of potential volume.
The Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool also pulls some search volume data.
Because Google has never broken its own guidelines and then penalized its own pages before.... http://searchengineland.com/google-penalizes-google-japan-16541
http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pagerank-reduced-due-to-sponsored-posts-106551
This appears to be your problem... It looks to be part of a widget and is not immediately available as a clickable link on the page but appears in your page source and is crawlable.
ul><ul id="<a class="attribute-value">footer-col-4</a>" class="<a class="attribute-value">footer-col footer-non-spanning-col</a>"><li id="<a class="attribute-value">pp-custom-icon-14</a>" class="<a class="attribute-value">widget sc widget_pp-custom-icon</a>"><a id="<a class="attribute-value">pp-custom-icon-14</a>" href="[109,97,105,108,116,111,58,104,116,116,112,58,47,47,109,97,105,108,116,111,58,105,110,102,111,64,114,111,98,101,114,116,115,119,97,110,105,103,97,110,46,99,111,109](view-source:http://www.robertswanigan.com/happy-birthday-sara/109,97,105,108,116,111,58,104,116,116,112,58,47,47,109,97,105,108,116,111,58,105,110,102,111,64,114,111,98,101,114,116,115,119,97,110,105,103,97,110,46,99,111,109)" class="<a class="attribute-value">icon-link</a>"><span class="<a class="attribute-value">jsobf img</a>"><img src="[http://www.robertswanigan.com/wp-content/uploads/p4/images/widget_custom_image_1_1321921371.jpg](view-source:http://www.robertswanigan.com/wp-content/uploads/p4/images/widget_custom_image_1_1321921371.jpg)" class="<a class="attribute-value">pp-custom-icon</a>" width="<a class="attribute-value">170</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">70</a>" />span>a>li>
Link Juice isn't a real thing exactly... its an expression of a concept. (Personally I prefer the term Link Equity... sounds more professional to my ears.) Closer thing to a "link juice viewer" that I know of is Google Analytics.
Best way to see how it could be flowing through your site is to figure out which are your biggest landing pages and have the largest number of backlinks. You may want to give different sites different weight to their incoming links based on relevancy but since we don't know the numbers Google uses you may as well just use arbitrary numbers for an approximation. See how many links are on your heavily linked to pages and divide. Every page linked to from that page gains that percentage of the total. Keep going further down the path and eventually you'll see which pages are too many steps away from pages with good, relevant backlinks. Those pages aren't getting much love and could use some good, natural links to them or to the close by pages that link to them.
Mostly I just approximate in my head instead of doing any "real" fake math.
And to expand on Kevin's answer.... results in whitehat SEO (i.e. following best practices) can sometimes take months before it really kicks in. We're working towards the long haul not the short game. Once you have all of your on-page/on-site stuff done, now's the time to start looking at relevant links, guest post opportunities, outreach, social media, etc. And then you can come back to the on-page/on-site stuff, see how its been working, determine what else can be tweaked/fixed/changed, etc. and continually update your site(s) with new, fresh content on a regular basis. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Try plugging the URL into Open Site Explorer. There's a good chance that if Mozbot crawled it and found the 404 that it would also list the inbound links for it in OSE.
There is no definitive benefit of having WWW vs. not having WWW... best to choose one and stick to it. If you're switching from one to the other, make sure that all of the necessary redirects are correct and change your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. My personal opinion would be to stick with the way they had it originally when it was first set up.
Strange that you can't update the header to add canonicals. Personally I'd say you should then add some written content about the products to differentiate them. Otherwise that's a pretty bare looking page to me except for all the links. Or, if you don't care about them ranking & don't want to invest in copy, NoIndex them and just let people find them through site navigation instead of search. But i'd go with the expanded copy.
Your Robots.txt (which can be found at http://www2.learningtree.com/robots.txt) does in fact have Disallow: /htfu/ which would be blocking http://www2.learningtree.com**/htfu/**uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training from being crawled. While your old page is also technically blocked, it has been around longer and would already have been cached so will still appear in the SERPs.... the bots just won't be able to see changes made to it because they can't crawl it.
You need to fix the disallow so the bots can crawl your site correctly and you should 301 your old page to the new one.
Mike Davis's answer pretty much hits it on the head. If every page is marked NoIndex,NoFollow then no one will ever find your site unless you specifically direct them to it or they know it exists already... which means you're missing out on a large potential customer base from organic traffic that won't ever be able to find you.
Hell, even those content updates won't matter because the search engines aren't going to care about it (since you told them not to index it) and won't be able to see newer content deeper into the site (since you told it not to follow anything on the page).
I've never had the opportunity to see Roger in person... but when I do I expect a hug from him.
Yoast is good though one of the blogs I manage ran into a compatibility error with Yoast recently after the update to WordPress 3.6 (which was not fixed in 3.6.1) that lead to all of our pages serving a 500 status code to bots even though it showed everything correctly to users. We couldn't get it fixed and weren't sure what the exact cause of the issue was... so we're now using the All-In-One SEO plugin for one site to handle certain meta data for posts. We also use Headspace on another blog (which was because of a compatibility issue with AIO a while back). Honestly we're running pretty much 99% of the same plugins on every blog yet with every update there's always one that has a crazy compatibility error the rest won't and then we cycle through "seo" plugins until something works.
Overall though I don't mind WordPress... I've learned to live with its myriad quirks.
This sounds to me more like a NoIndex situation. Really you should be adding content to them but I can understand if its a lot of work and very tedious. A canonical wouldn't really make sense here... its thin content and the canonical would likely be ignored by Google. So instead I'd say NoIndex the pages for now.