Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Community outreach could help... find some bulletin boards/forums/etc. where your presence would make sense and start becoming a resource to others. The more helpful you are the more likely people will trust your brand and consider you over your competitors (Just don't be on the forums with intent to constantly try to sell or push your product because that can just be spammy, unhelpful and hurt you in the long run).

More, unique and relevant content on a consistent basis will help with potentially getting more links, shares, comments, etc. The more opportunities you give people, the more chances you have. Just make sure you're not spinning crap for the sake of having something new. Every bit of content should be as fresh and original as possible.

If the "Subscribe" box is for RSS notifications, why not just have an RSS icon leading them to the feedburner page where they can subscribe? Personally I think that would be better than having a generic subscribe box just about the flashy newsletter signup. I'd figure a lot of people wouldn't understand what the difference was when first looking at your page and either mistakenly subscribe when they meant to get the Newsletter or overlook the subscribe box completely.

I didn't mean to sound harsh or critical... so please don't take it that way. I've been in the situation of destroying my own stuff thanks to bad advice and bad links before... so I know how hard it can be.

In your case, I don't think the 301 is necessary. Like Dana said, it could just be fluctuations and over the coming weeks, months, etc. that article could wind up getting more link love and ranking better again.

Great, original content will garner new links to your site & articles. Work on creating new content and keeping things fresh so you're a resource to your customers, fans, industry, etc. and the good vibes will flow (hopefully). Anything vaguely unnatural with link building nowadays has the potential to turn around and bite you. So when you have a great article that is doing well and drawing in the readers and the rankings start to slip... give it some time, see if its just natural fluctuations, do some testing, etc. so you can do even better with the next one.

Yes, pointing from a subset to a superset of information is one of the main reasons for the canonical. So Google would not view it as improper. Just remember... Canonicals are a suggestion NOT a directive. Google will choose whether to listen to you or not.

My suggestion: Write new, great, original content... get new, great, natural links. Don't do shoddy linkbuilding that will hurt future great posts.

As Takeshi said, there really is no benefit of doing that with respects to SEO. But some people are desperate, ill-informed and willing to try anything.

This sounds like an ambiguous area. Your FAQ is your FAQ and should stand on its own. Now, technically speaking, if the article is what you want ranking for your FAQ you could consider a canonical tag telling Google that your FAQ is a subset of the Article's superset.

You could also, instead of including the 300 word FAQ copy/pasted into the article, link to the FAQ from the article where relevant and/or only include a sentence or two from the FAQ that is pertinent to the article.

If any of them are in Customer Service or deal with Clients and their questions, get them talking about those things that are a constant... do their new clients always bring up the same questions, the same concerns, etc. to the point where it feels like they're reading a script when they answer. Get them to realize that by writing about these common questions and concerns from their standpoint as an expert they can help to alleviate common problems in their field/industry... thus making their lives easier.

I don't see Google caring about fake facebook fans as it does nothing for people or their sites. 5000 fake facebook fans will make you look bigger than you are but those 5000 aren't necessarily liking and sharing your content, they won't broaden you shared stories unless what you want is more bots liking your page, and it'll increase the costs of your promoted posts without any ROI since you'd be promoting to fake people anyway.

Facebook has been known to occasionally hit pages doing this and remove fake accounts used to inflate page fans.

Have you done anything in the way of linking, social outreach, engagement with sites/forums/bloggers in the industry, etc?

Page 16 and Page 17 are not necessarily duplicates of each other but since each page is showing the entirety of the articles, instead of a snippet/preview/etc, every article would be a duplicate of the exact content showing on those pages.

So, I'd definitely agree with NoIndex on those pages.

CleverPhD pretty much hit the nail on the head with a much more concise version of what I was trying to say. +1 internets for you good sir or madam.

As for the 404... Google will not penalize you for having a page that isn't there. Too many 404s can be bad for user experience but in this case the pages you'd be 404ing are causing much more trouble.

Large amounts of spammy looking exact match keywords creating an unnatural link profile will do that nowadays. Have you received any unnatural link warnings because of them or seen anything that appears to be an algorithmic penalty?

How bad are the links? Sure exact match can hurt now but would it be better to attempt gaining some more natural links to the page. Have you attempted to get any bad links pointing at it removed?

Does the page really provide no value? Does it get any qualified traffic which then disseminates to the rest of your site? Or is the page DOA?

Personally I'd say NoIndex it for now, see if there's better content you could add, work on removing links and getting better ones, and see if that helps. You wouldn't want to 301 bad links to another place on your site because it doesn't fix anything... it just deflects the issue for a while.

Oh god, I couldn't agree more with you. Infinite Scroll pages/sites just look and feel awful to me from a user standpoint and they detract from sites from an SEO standpoint.

Like Kevin said... just because you sell blue widgets right now doesn't mean your site has to be blue-widgets.com or cheap-blue-widgets.com. But if you had a page specifically on blue widgets, it can help (to an extent) to have the url along the lines of example.com/blue-widget-info.php. Your homepage is your brand. If you work on natural linking, bookmarking and outreach which ties your brand to your most important keywords then the link equity will help you rank for those terms.

I've actually wondered this too because my SEOmoz report shows 404s that Google Webmaster Tools does not and I'd like to know how mozbot found it while googlebot didn't.

If the pages have traffic, rankings, etc. then its better to have a relevant one to one redirect instead of letting them 404. Its always better to 301 redirect directly to the relevant page instead of having a chain of redirects to redirects. Having 75 new redirects won't slow down googlebot. It can handle quite a lot.

Google Autocomplete is determined by a number of factors such as how popular certain word combinations are, their search volume, trends, etc.

http://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en

http://searchengineland.com/how-google-instant-autocomplete-suggestions-work-62592

Social bookmarking sites can be crawled and indexed by the Search Engines whereas most social media platforms likes Facebook and Twitter are not usually indexed and links are nofollowed. Starting a blog and regularly adding original content will help your site. Linking should be as natural as possible. Don't buy into any of those linking packages out there as they are likely to get you algorithmically penalized.