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It is work having standardised endings via a url rewrite or 301 redirect. If both exist Google will flag it as duplicate content, which you will see in 'html suggestions' in webmaster tools. Since it is classed as duplicate (as if different case - upper/lower) the link juice will be split between the variartions.

Search engines will read all your parameters unless you tell google with webmaster tools what parameters to ignore. This can cause an issue with the url like domain.com/topic?keyword&somefield then pages that include the keyword and other parameters will share the link juice. So, if you have 10 options of somefield you will get ~1/10 value per page indexed.

So, it is better for you to use rewrites to include your keyword in the url and then mark parameters to not be indexed in Goggle etc.

We are seeing the same on the Australian Google and we are a start up (3 months old) by we are still climbing in rank, so it has no adverse effect on us.

Have a look at this article http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067225/Google-Does-PDF-Other-Changes it explains some of the doc library search for pdf files and Google's statement here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-words.html.

Coming from the other side of the fence as a developer and business owner and not an SEO person, I find that this is a great resource channel to discuss ideas. I will ask questions at time that will be basic, sometimes because I see different view on here or have a answer from the external SEO company we use. I like to know why something is done, not just that its is done. There are many responses I scan on here to find that information, and if I cannot find it I ask. Having spent many years on cutting edge software, I am used to asking questions in forums and just getting silence, it is refreshing in here to see prompt answers, support (thumbs up and good answer icons) and discussion on various topics.

The title of this discussion prompts me to say: 'The only wrong question is the one not asked .When you assume you know the answer to every problem then you become the problem.'

Google has done a far bit of cleaning up recently and there are severl posts on Panda and Farmer updates that caused high page ranked sites to fall in actual rank. If the site had little content or large collections of links then they probably got hit.

Just type 'Google Panda' and read some of the recent post for more details.

You should run the PR8 & 9 sites through Open Site Explorer to see where it considers them to rank now. You can also check the links to ensure they are not No-Follow.

You could but, you would be better creating a search page so 404's go to www.example.com/search.aspx so users can search for the content they were actually looking for in the first place. Ideally all your pages should have the canonical in the head to ensure trailing / or capitalization errors all pass juice to the correct page and do not get reported as duplicates.

Yes it does according to Google tech spec http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/50/admin_crawl/Introduction.html

which specifically states if follows html links in pdf 'It follows HTML links in PDF files, Word documents, and Shockwave documents'. Google's own api docs carry more weight than a comment in a forum_._ If they are licencing this out as an application it would suggest that the same technology is available in the main engine as does Dunamis's comment about a listing in a pdf document being found in search results.

You can test for youself by publishing a pdf with a link to a info page that does not show up in any other links. Include the pdf in your sitemap but not the test page and check if it shows in googles index site:yoursite.com the next time it crawls.

This also gives some insight in an interview with Matt Cutts - http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

Eric Enge:  What about PDF files?

Matt Cutts: We absolutely do process PDF files.  I am not going to talk about whether links in PDF files pass PageRank.  But, a good way to think about PDFs is that they are kind of like Flash in that they aren't a file format that's inherent and native to the web, but they can be very useful.  In the same way that we try to find useful content within a Flash file, we try to find the useful content within a PDF file.  At the same time, users don't always like being sent to a PDF. If you can make your content in a Web-Native format, such as pure HTML, that's often a little more useful to users than just a pure PDF file.

Submitting a current sitemap and help the process, at least to get the ball rolling. We tend to see a spike in crawl rate after doing this.

Are the canonicals in the old site pointing to the new site? The new site one looks fine, I cannot see any links to the olds site to check.

standarised endings \ - Ok

https: rejected - OK

url match canonical and sitemap - Ok

It seems very odd.

Have a look at this video from 'whiteboard Friday' about the schema.org markup that Bing, Yahoo & Google are now using to describe content such as Author. It will most likely be more useful in the long run as the big 3 adopt the standard and give ranking bonus to sites that use it.

It does depend on if you have similar cars to sell. If so you could create a page with links to other vehicles that a buyer may be interested in and then add a 301 redirect to the new page. Depending on what your site developers are using, they could include an optional heading to specify that 'car xyz is no longer available, but we have many others' where xyz is determined from the refering page. This would give the new page where you have similar vehicle SEO juice and keep your customers infromed of what is in stock.

<link href="http://www.funderstanding.com/content" rel="canonical"> is the only one that does not pint to the old site from those you mentioned. With links from that page it may find enough of the old site to produce the dupes.

You can fix it and then request a crawl

If you want Google etc to treat it as www.site.com then add www.site.com" /> in the head of that page. Then backlinks to www.site.com www.site.com.com/home will; all give link juice to www.site.com . The category page is a different issue in that there is no category page anymore just a reference on the home page. Your developer need to rethink why he would do this sort of layout remapping which makes it harder to get seo value from the pages.

If you only show the car image they were originally looking for and also the current ones available in 'mustang' then that would work for cross or upselling the customer. It could also give them the idea to get in quick if they like a particular vehicle, before it sells to. You could get fancy and track the click throughs on a give vehicle and show a heat map of level of interest, but that only works if you get reasonable interest on most vehicles.

Googles view is:

301 when you can and canonical when you do not have direct server access to do a 301. But, I would and do, have both to ensure both case and endings are correct for the landing page. i.e. someone might tweet http://www.funderstanding.com/V2/Coaster instead of the lowercase version and google will report dupe content if it is not dealt with.

If your design company site is ranking well you can get more value from good strong testimonials on your site than a signature line on site your customers may never find. Take the example that you do a fantastic job on a site to promote kid's books. Someone looking for a good designer for their speed boat site is more likely to read a testimonial on your site than see your tagline on the book site. You gain value by human viewers being able to read what others are saying about your work on a diverse range of sites.

If I am hiring a designer, I do not want one that has worked on a competitor's website so I would search google for designers not look at design by tag lines on competitor's sites.

It comes down to whether you want your two minutes of fame on every site you do or a valuable marketing resource such as testimonials.

We host some sites on GoDaddy but find as far as SEO goes, it is very limited. If you are looking to rank for a long tail keyphrase it may get you somewhere, but the tools of SEOMoz are far more tuned. The onpage in the campaigns here give much more detail than the seo reports on GoDaddy and they are instant. So, you can make some changes and test your onpage with out waiting for 12-24 hours for GoDaddy's email. I have found their 'website protection' is useful for detecting quirks that pose security issues.

When you look at the wording you get an idea of what they are offering 'to improve search ratings'. So if you are on page 50 and they get you to page 48, they have improved your ratings. No-one will find you, but your rating has improved. If you want good rank, work with a good SEO to get your site where you want it, and be patient.

You site looks great, quite clean and fitting the colour and mood for a dj. There are a couple of things though I notice as a web developer:

1. Your youtube links are not embeded (from a facebook feed), so someone clicking on them leaves your site - you should have these embeded so they can be played on your page with out leaving it and use links http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq6gFOXeOFk&rel=0 for the embeded videos. The rel=0 means when someone plays your video they will not see related videos when it ends. Those related videos could be from competitors.

2. Some of you anchor text text start 'Click here ...' that is really not strong key word use unless you are trying to rank for the keyword 'click here'. If you look at Google adwords you can find other keywords that Google thinks are a close match for the one you are targeting and then see how many people use that keyword. These would be more useful than the click here keywords now.

3. You are getting 2 404 errors - loader-small.gif and like.gif and most images do not have preset width and heights which means the page continually adjusts size as images are loaded on the first visit.

4. You may also want to consider HTML5 sectional markup to tell Google where the important content (section,article) is on the page and what is just navigation (nav) or sidebar (aside) content. Not sure if Google gives weight to this yet, but they will at some point.

Hope that help with the usability side of the site.

Since you will most likely have more than one form of personal injury, it would make more sense for a site architecure point of view to use category/type model ie. personal-injury/car-accidents. There probably is not any ranking difference, except that you could have a personal-injury landing page that links to the injury types and gains link juice in it's own right.