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Yes, I would do so right away. DA and relatedness of a site is much more important then pagerank. You "could" use PR as a top level measure, but I would not suggest using PR as the only measure. You are definitely looking at the right information and I would change the strategy right away.

I hope this helps.

Is Google showing an old page title you used ? Something from DMOZ or Yahoo Directory maybe ?

What I think it could be is that Google is using snippets of text on your page to generate the Page Title / Meta description to make it more relevant to the keyword you are searching for.

Let me know what you see.

Fabrizo

How big is your natural link profile ? How many affiliate links are we talking ? Do you get a lot of natural links ? Is this your own affiliate program ? Can you do some sort of a link shortener of your own ? EG:

http://www.MSLink.com/whatever/?affid=[affiliate_id]

that redirects to

http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]

which then further redirects to your product page.

This way if there are future problems, you can change/remove the redirects from MSLink.com if they happen to be hurting you anytime in the future while maintaining full control.

I hope this helps.

You have gotten some great answers. What I would like to add is, reverse the process of thought a bit by thinking where your customer is. Go list with directories where your customer might be looking for a company like yours. If you are looking to register with any directory, do it for the value of the traffic or exposure that directory might be able to pass on to you and not the SEO/link value. If we do that, you'll get the best ROI and it'll be a safer approach in terms of SEO in 2013. I hope this helps.

Is it an internal blog ? What I mean to ask is if the blog is something like blog.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog or is it yourblog.com linking to yourdomain.com ? Is it hosted on the same IP as your main website ? What you are blogging, is it unique, quality/fresh content ? If yes, I wouldn't worry too much about anchor text links as long as you are not pushing for the same keyword link from each and every post.

So if article1 is talking about Red widgets and linking to the Red widgets page and then article2 is talking about Blue Widgets and linking to the Blue Widgets, it's fine.

Just make sure you have other natural links coming to your website/blog from other places as well...specially the kinds that build themselves (people loving your content and linking to you).

I hope this helps.

Now, that's a good point Keri. Does that mean it "might" be coming soon ?

"there's not a category for looking at all YouMoz posts that have been promoted to the main blog."

I'd suggest using a rel="nofollow" in the link to you.

When you get blogroll links (from a blog), you are getting a link from every page of that blog and the value of those links have reduced a lot over the years. This was a different story 6-7 years ago. Also, a blog might be talking about various topics and therefore multiple pages, multiple categories, and your link will not always be relevant.

In case of a blog post / guest post link, it's totally on-topic. I would also strong suggest to be very careful and not over-do a particular kind of link building. Diversify your link profile. Also, do not do/over-do anchor text links. Mix and match. Think like a natural link profile, it's usually very difficult to control and get anchor text links, but do your best and not always do SEO friendly links. All links are good and help build domain authority.

So build authority...as in brand building. Not SEO....link building.

Well, give it 2-4 weeks. Considering that, I would try to (I know it's difficult) to try and work on the other aspects of your business/websites. Build some more content/pages, optimize etc and see how the changes reflect in the SERPS.

I hope this helps.

Are you contributing to both the websites as an Author ? Do you have real content that is being authored/posted under your name on both the websites ? Do you have people that relate to both industries in your Circles or following you ? If yes, I wouldn't mind using the same G+ Profile. It's what's correct. That's what makes sense.

It's like if I am working for a Pet Supplies company for example and I am posting on it's blog everyday, but then at home I am also a Coin Collector and have a blog about it. They have nothing in common but it would still make sense that I am the author of both the websites since I really do contribute to both of them.

I hope this helps. Most of the times, it's a very easy answer if you try to think search engines don't exist. What would you do ? You get the answer and apply that. That's what is correct, right and the most accurate way of doing it.

Anything that is restricted to the bots, not index-able...behind user/pass / paywalls can't be indexed (normally). So if that's the case, I would not worry about optimizing it for Search. It should still be optimized for users through :).

Biance

I would add the .com in there for Branding reasons. However if your page titles and way over 66 characters, I'd leave the .com alone (not recommended). The question is, are you building your brand as Tripping or Tripping.com ? That should help answer the question pretty accurately :).

I hope this helps.

The canonical solution you have implemented is perfect. If you have decent authority and get deep crawls every couple days, you should be fine and pages from your IP should start to disappear shortly.

I would not worry about it anymore. You are on the right track. Sit back, relax and enjoy your flight

All you have to do is when you build any links, use natural variations of the anchor text.

Business Name Location

Business Name Keyword

Keyword Location Business Name

Business Abbreviation City

And so on. Too many links with the same anchor text are always unnatural to me. They scream manipulation.

If you are just doing a redesign that does not entail any URL changes, I would suggest keep them as is.

On a side note, how are you ranking compared to your competition ?

You could potentially test 1-2 pages on your site, change _ to - and see if it makes any difference. And yes, you would need to do 301 redirects and that would pass most (not all) of your link juice. It can and still work fine. So before you do something like this on a large scale, test it on a small scale if you can.

It also depends on how much authority your site has in Google ? Do your breadcrumbs show up in Google SERPS ? And so on.

I hope this helps you come to the right conclusion.

If you go to the URL where your directory listing is on dir.yahoo.com, and check the Google cache for that page, is that page cached ? When was it cached ? And do you see your URL on the cached version of that page ? If yes, you are getting the credit for it. You may or may not see it on OSE, because OSE only crawls a portion of the web.

Does that link show up in your Google Webmaster Console Links ? If yes, in either the cache or GWC or both, you are good and no need to worry.

I would suggest not to over do any one kinds of link building. Like you mentioned 100 more articles for article marketing. I woud continue to build quality content instead.

Are users interacting with your content ? Can you do a listing in some other authority websites ? Look into the possibility of some info-graphics in the Depression/Anxiety niche.

If you only have 50 or do redirects that you have a list for, I would advise a 1 to 1 redirect. Ie.

domain.com/index.php/red_widgets/ is changing to domain.com/red-widgets/

There's no point in redirecting /index.php/red_widgets/ to domain.com/red_widgets/ which you know does not exist.

It would be wiser to just setup redirects directly from /index.php/red_widgets/ to /red-widgets/ without another step in between. I know that might mean you might not be able to do regular expression, but since you are dealing with 50 redirects only, it's not a big deal.

Regarding the number of redirects, I won't worry about 50 redirects.

I agree with Nathan on the canonical tag. You could also work with your developer back end system and look into configuration issues and see if there's a way for the application to always have a consistent product level URL. It's the same product. It's being exposed in multiple categories or multiple levels of categories. Regardless, it's the same product. There's no reason for them to be unique product URLs. See if you can work with them to get rid of the root cause.

If not, canonical is definitely the way to go. Unfortunately, there's isn't another way like robots.txt exclusions etc that should be considered.

Nash

I would suggest building a very good balance of links between your homepage and the inner page(s). Do not just build links to one of your internal pages. For example, you could/should probably have some incoming links to your http://www.motorsonwheels.com/vehicles / Inventory page as well. Similar, any other pages/sub-pages that make sense.

Let's say Honda came up with a new model of a car, you could potentially do an information article on your page, maybe a press release etc with a link to your check our Honda ABC Inventory, Buy Honda Used Cars in Houston, Houston Car Finance, Houston Used Car Finance and so on.

I hope this helps and ignites some thoughts :).