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But how do you individually optimize hundreds, or even thousands, of additional pages?  It MUST be template-driven with subtle changes such as "My Products - Page X", which may be even too subtle for Google to render a non-duplicate content page, no? I completely understand your point, but I have been struggling with this for a while now.  I hate the thought of my paged pages competing with the top page (page 1). What more could you possibly do to optimize H1, Title, etc., tags than to simply add the current page # (while keeping things automated over thousands of pages)? Any additional thoughts, anybody?

I have heard multiple reports recently of spammy backlinks hurting a site. Seems Google is more willing to penalize a site for bad linking practices.

Pages that should contain the canonical tag aren't nescessarily 'offending' anything. They are just pages containing the same information as another page, where usually the only difference is a (non-significant) URL parameter.

I wold like to agree with Syed, plus add a little to the video marketing side of your site. I am new to SEOMOZ, and although I have many things to work on and learn, video marketing, even within my site, has been a major factor for traffic. Using videos from the manufacturer is fine, and I believe the other three comments are correct, this should really have nothing to do with a drop in rank or traffic. I do suggest however, to continue to put your own original videos on your site...trust me, your own personal view and brand on things plays a major role for not only trust from the search engines, but what we should really be concerned with, trust from prospective clients and or purchasers of our products and services. It has amazed me at how more people preferred my own take of a particular product or service than that of the creator of the product I was promoting. I tried it both ways several times and always noticed a higher percentage in the conversion rate than that of the other...just the facts I have seen and still do. The hardest part about this whole venture is getting it down to a fine art. While the manufacturer's videos may seem more professional than your own, don't worry, practice makes perfect. Besides, when it comes to video, people really are attracted to other "real" people and how they feel about a specific product or service... Thanks-

I personally have had less of a problem with robots.txt not being followed by Google than I have had developers muck with the robots.txt file. In my particular case, they would update the development site with information from the live site (as we were adding more content to a database on the live site and they were syncing it). They'd copy over the live robots.txt as well, and suddenly the development site was being indexed. I use Code Monitor for all of my robots.txt files, live or development, so I can be notified when they change. https://www.polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/ I suggest verifying the development site in Google Webmaster Tools. From there, you can request the content to be removed (after you've blocked in robots.txt or used the meta noindex), and you can also use their robots.txt tool to see if there was possibly an error in the file.

Until MichaelC shows up Sounds reasonable, I would also put a canonical tag on it saying the / is the official page. What might also be an option is to put a parameter on like ?hm (if possible) and in Webmaster Tools - Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling you can tell them to ignore the ?hm. However I'm not sure how well that works and I would have the canonical in there as well.