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Technically, they are unique to a search engine bot. To a person, they are pretty much the same thing.

And like Jesse said, they are kind of lame - spammy, uninteresting, and the numbers make it look like some kind of indexing mistake.

It really depends on if your prices are lower than most - and if you are able to make sure you are the at least close to the lowest on price.

If your prices aren't low enough, click through would probably be lower. If your prices are obviously low, it could reduce the time to purchase down to just a few clicks in one visit if the customer gets to the page from the SERP, likes what they see, and all goes well in the checkout process. The downside is that a really thrifty shopper will make a note of your price and keep shopping others who may end up getting the sale if the customer gets to their site and finds a lower price, or something else that makes them want to buy - like free shipping.

In my opinion, if you can't frequently track your pricing on all products compared to all competitors who rank within the first couple of pages of results, you are better off having some enticing things in the meta description or titles. Like: "Red Widgets - Lowest Prices Guaranteed with Free Shipping" (if you do price matching).

Like you, I am still finding a ton of bad SEO, even from "reputable" companies who have been around a long time and talk the talk. It is amazing just how bad some of their work is - or how non-existent it is in some cases.

I have also worked directly with a few well-known internet marketing companies on larger projects only to find out that they are doing some pretty shady things, or not doing what they say they will.

My current pet peeve is large web design & development companies who sell SEO as an add on to their trusting dev clients. Then they do absolutely nothing, other than maybe 5 minutes of keyword suggestions.  The developer will launch a site full of severe content duplication issues, then charge a few thousand a month for an SEO package and take 3 months to fix the issues the dev team created, and call a meeting with the whole team and the client to talk about this great new discovery they have just made: rel="canonical".
That is like buying a brand new car, then paying the dealer's mechanic a hefty fee to make sure the manufacturer designed and assembled the car properly.

We can try to educate clients as much as possible, but many will still be tempted when someone comes along saying "oh we have a totally new Google-friendly thing we do called a link wheel. 100% white hat and Panda/Penguin safe. Only $129!"  I am sometimes jaded enough to think the people who fall for such scams because they want something for nothing get what they deserve... yet I still find myself trying to help them anyway. It is the high profile, seemingly legit companies who are actually not much better that really bug me.

**But I am optimistic.  **

All of Google's webspam efforts and the growth of communities like this one are helping to make it harder for scammers and just plain incompetent SEOs to keep doing what they do.

The good news is word of mouth does work. Kind of like how we tell clients to provide great content and user experience and the links and rankings will follow; when we provide awesome, effective and honest service - the referrals will come. Being truly helpful in communities like this, on social media, forums or anywhere else also works to show your knowledge and spread the truth about real SEO and dispel misconceptions. Even getting into an argument or calling BS on someone when they are spouting nonsense can actually attract new clients. There are plenty of smart website owners who are sick of all the bull and are happy to stumble upon a good rant, apparently.

There will always be scammers and cheap link building services - just like there will be some clients who never learn that you get what you pay for. But it does seem to be getting better. Fear of Pandas & Penguins seems to help some.

Replying to myself because I just noticed something I was wrong about.

I thought that the first box at the top was an excerpt of the page it links to, but it looks like it IS actually unique.

So you probably don't need to add anything, though expanding on that text in the first box might be a good idea.

Try to get a link to that page and see if that helps.

The thing is those words do appear elsewhere on the site, and Google can probably figure out that what is on this particular page is excerpts and links to the originals.

This normally isn't a huge problem, though. Lots of sites and blogs have category and tag pages that fit that description and ARE indexed (though many are not).

Before messing around with adding text which you may not really need to add, try doing a Fetch as Googlebot of the page in Google Webmaster Tools and hit the submit button when the fetch is complete. It may be that the page just got dropped by accident.  If it doesn't return to the index after a few days, try adding a little totally unique content. Just a sentence or two about what these links are should be enough. I have done this on a few sites with lots of thin tag or category pages and it doesn't take a lot of text to get them into the index.

Partner link pages are also typically thin, but they may be indexed anyway if the links are useful, or ignored if it is simply a link exchange page that doesn't really have any value other than swapping links (which isn't much value).  Like most things related to Google search, there isn't always a specific thing that will make the difference.

What you may want to consider is whether or not you want or need that page to appear in search, and if you think it could or should actually rank well for anything. If it doesn't matter, I wouldn't be too concerned unless there are many pages on the site that are not indexed.

It may have been dropped because it was seen as "thin" content. Since most of the page is excerpts from and links to other pages, it is likely being ignored - especially if there are other pages that have the same excerpts and links. If you can add unique, some descriptive text to the page, it may do better.

And about the PageRank: The PR you can see in the Toolbar or other PR checks is usually very out of date. It could be that prior to your page's disappearance, it had a high PR and really does not now. While the visible PR can be used to get a pretty good idea of how Google ranks a page, I wouldn't give it much thought. Plenty of low PR pages rank very well for whatever search terms they are targeting, and lots of high PR pages don't rank very well.

Check this out: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html

It seems that Google is moving the site or company name to the front with a colon in some situations. I don't know if anyone has done a thorough study of it, but from what I have seen it seems to happen with sites that have a fairly solid brand established, but have page titles that are too long, keyword stuffed or for whatever other reason Google decides to alter what appears in the SERPs.

Google has been shortening or altering such longer and spammier titles for a while, but about a month ago these "Brand: xxxxx" titles started appearing.  To me it seemed funny because I have used that format on the home page of my own site and many others for a while because it just made sense to me. I guess Google thinks so too.

If you are looking for a way to update common info on all of them at one time, I don't think that is available.  If you are hoping to simplify it so you only need to login to one account to manage them all, that can be done by transferring ownership to one Profile.

Pick one G+ Profile (not Page) to be the Owner of all of them.
In the settings for each Google+ Local Page, make that Profile a Manager if it is not already.
Then you will be able to make that Manager the Owner.  
If the Profile was not previously a Manager of the Page, you will need to wait about 2 weeks  after making the Profile a Manager before you can do this.

The Places dashboard is not transferable, as far as I know.

Google Local / Places has been very screwy lately. Changing Places to Local is often resulting in the listing disappearing into Limbo for weeks, months or indefinitely - especially if there are any issues that may seem fishy to Google's moderators. Like service area businesses with no walk-in storefront, for example.

One very confusing thing is that the old Google Places dashboard is still active, but it isn't really clear what info is used from there, and what is used from Google+ Local. The Places dashboard does have the ability to upload bulk locations, but I am unsure how that would work with existing listings. http://www.google.com/local/add/

Really, if the listings are showing up OK and there isn't something very wrong with some of them, it may be safest to just tolerate having to update them from multiple owner profiles for the time being. It seems as though central management for businesses with multiple locations, like your client, SHOULD be something coming to Google+ Local in the future.

If you do decide to try to consolidate them under one Owner, make sure that everything in each listing is 100% legitimate.
You have probably already seen this, but here are Google's Places guidelines. http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

I was seeing a date of 8/1/2012 until maybe yesterday.  Seems to have rolled back to July 6.

I was looking for the same and found this: http://www.seomoz.org/q/company-nsphere-www-nsphereinc-com

The lack of pricing info and the sort of confusing interface with no direct upgrade options on the free version was enough for me to assume that it is probably a little shady. The sample directory in the above mentioned discussion confirms that suspicion.

If the other site is outranking yours, it would mean that for whatever reason, Google has decided it is better quality, but not necessarily determined one or the other to be a scraper. That could be based on any combination of the hundreds of factors Google uses to determine position in search results.  It may just be that it has more/better inbound links.

If you focus on keeping only quality original content on your site, getting good links and mall of your on-page SEO is in good shape then you shouldn't have to worry about scrapers. Google will find and devalue the duplicates eventually.

If this is one of those cases where yours is clearly the original and the scraper is outranking yours for whatever reason, you may want to consider filing a DMCA report with the site's hosting company.  You can usually find that info with a whois search.

You can also try submitting a spam report to Google here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

I haven't done it in a while, but I am pretty sure you have to add a note in Google Reader if you are using that to create the feed unless something has changed.

Since some of the unwanted URLs are linked from other sites, use 301 redirects.

Usually, people want to remove the file extensions like .aspx for cleaner looking, shorter URLs.

You can remove the .aspx extension from all pages with a rewrite like this in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.aspx -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.aspx

If you want to keep the URLs with .aspx, rather than without, I think you will have to use individual 301 redirects.

You could try using https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?continue=http://www.google.com/addurl/ to submit the URL to google, but if the page can only be found by using their locator, it may not get indexed since it is not linked within their site.  Worth a try though.

Unfortunately there is no exact answer to this. Say you get a bunch of links from a variety of sites. The "better" quality sites like blogs that get a lot of traffic, are updated frequently and maybe have a higher pagerank, among other things, will see their pages indexed sooner than lower quality sites like directories. IN some cases, the site may be decent quality but is really huge so indexing new content on it may take longer too. So a link from a high profile site may get indexed almost immediately, but your links from crappyseolinks4salenow.com may take a few weeks.  Then, once Google finds the new links, it will also take some time until they are factored in to Google's ranking of your site. And that can also depend on how often your own site is crawled and re-calculated.

So it could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.  I have seen the effects of even a good link take anywhere from a day to a month to show up.

Backlinks from adult sites?  Just kidding. That probably refers to a raw URL like http://yoursite.com rather than one with anchor text.

Not sure if it was a connection issue on my end or what, but that page takes a very long time to load, which could explain the lack of indexing of the pages linked from it.  
Also, Google states that pages submitted witht the Fetch as Googlebot tool are not guaranteed to be indexed, so there may be quite a delay on that. Are all pages included in your XML sitemap? An XML sitemap is the preferred way to notify Google of pages it may not normally find.  Here is a link to more about XML sitemaps https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184&hl=en
Even with an XML sitemap, Google may not immediately crawl many pages. Actually, indexing is rarely immediate. The frequency of crawling and speed of indexing has to do with many of the same factors as your ranking - quality, number of inbound links and pagerank, site performance, etc. If all your pages load quickly and you are in pretty good shape as far as links, etc, you could also try something to draw Google's attention to the new pages - like Tweeting a link or posting to Google+. That seems to "force" faster indexing in some cases.
I just checked your site with webpagetest.org and it is showing a load time of about 14 seconds. Tools.pingdom.com seemed to get hung up on some of the javascripts and couldn't complete its test. Doing what you can to speed up the site and address any other "quality" issues will help with indexing, and your performance in search engine results in general.

A 30 or more place drop does seem like a penalty might be in place. If you are only seeing the drop for some keywords and not everything, a 30 or 50 position drop could be an "over promotion" penalty.  I have to admit I haven't done thorough research on the so called 30 or 50 penalties, but the belief is that if you have too many of the same anchor texts in your inbound links as is often the case with bulk directory submissions, you will lose 30 places with this penalty. In extreme cases it can be 50. I guess that could happen if your page is keyword stuffed too.

Again, I have no proof other than some anecdotal evidence - I had a client who prior to working with me hired a "1000s of back links" scammer who did indeed submit to about 1000 junky directories with the exact same keyword anchor text for each. Once those links started showing up, the site's position for that keyword went off a cliff.

If that sounds like your situation, you could try sending a Reconsideration Request through Google's Webmaster Central. They will usually get back to you within a few weeks with a message that either no manual penalty has been imposed, or if there is one, hopefully they will tell you why.

In Webmaster Tools, go to URL Parameters under Site Settings.  You will probably see some of the parameters you want to block in the list.  Click on Edit next to a parameter you want to block like "?app=members" and then choose the appropriate settings to prevent Googlebot crawling.

I don't know if that is the preferred way of doing it, but that should block those dynamic pages.

Noindex/nofollow should be good enough, but if you want to be sure it doesn't get indexed, you could can also include <meta name="robots" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> in the head section of the page to be blocked. You can also exclude the page in your robots.txt file. </meta name="robots">

You can find a simple robots.txt generator in Google Webmaster Tools if you need to block particular pages or directories. The robots.txt file should be in the root directory of your site and look something like this:

User-agent: * Disallow: /file-you-want-to-hide.html

You can also request removal of specific URLs in Webmaster Tools if it has already been indexed.