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Yes, the on-page optimization tool is up to date with Google's recent updates.  You'll notice that the tool will call out when you have over-optimized or keyword stuffed content.  Because the on-page tool doesn't look at inbound links, however, getting an A+ in the tool won't mean that you are safe from Penguin penalties - make sure to be checking your inbound link profile as well.

Hi Ken,

Thanks for looking to our blog as an example - I wish we could be the perfect example of on-page SEO that we want to be, but like a lot of big, oldish websites we've got a lot of room for improvement. Some of the things you've called out are on my wish list to fix. In general when it comes to SEOmoz.org, a "do as we say, not as we do" attitude can be useful. I'll try to answer your questions with "what we should be doing" instead of "what we are doing."

1. The only page within the blog that we might wish to self-canonical (as we do on individual post pages) would be www.seomoz.org/blog, which we probably should be doing.  I don't think there's as much point in self-canonicaling subsequent pagination, since as you say the blog pages are always changing. In general we do like to put a canonical tag on each page canonicaling it back to itself, so query parameters and other referring data don't cause problems with duplicate URLs/content.
2. Rather than noindexing paginated pages in the main blog, I would like to see us start using rel=prev and rel=next.  You can learn more about that here.http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html. The reason that we noindex category pages' pagination is that it becomes duplicate content, since all of those items are also appearing in the main blog's pagination as well.  We do want the main category pages to be indexed because we want people searching on those specific categories to be able to find them; we've had a lot of discussion in the MozPlex lately about how to give those pages some relevant unique content and make them more of a useful destination for people searching on specific topics. You may see some changes to these, although right now it's a bit low on my list of things to update.
3. We noindex the "show # of pages" pages because of duplicate content concerns, and I suggest you do the same.

Thanks for your question, and please let me know if you have any more.

Thanks for your feedback on the on-page report - I'll pass it on to our Product team.

I would say that "also important" is a more accurate characterization of my comments above regarding link building and PA than "more important." Did you know that you can customize report emails to send the information you want? You can configure them in the Reports section.

The reason we send the weekly crawl report emails is so that users can easily see if their site is kicking up a new or unexpected error. If you have suggestions for how we can improve the report, I know our Product team would be interested in hearing them - you can request a feature at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-PRO-feature-requests.

Hi Ray,

Many sites don't have As on every page - not every SEO has the budget or the authority to easily make changes and fix on-page errors. You're the owner and president of your company, but most SEOs aren't - and many SEOs are dealing with hundreds or thousands of pages - getting an A on all of those pages can be a large amount of work.  Sometimes site structure issues like (for example) old CMS mean that on-page errors are difficult, if not impossible, to completely fix without a full site redesign - an expensive and time-consuming prospect for many businesses, even large ones with lots of budget.

I'm sorry that the tool hasn't met your expectations, but again, the on-page report card is not intended to give you a full SEO evaluation or to be a one-stop indicator of your SEO success. I disagree with your assessment that working to get an A in the on-page report card isn't helping you rank - combined with a solid off-page link building and sharing plan, having your on-page factors optimized can be a very powerful tool.  But they simply aren't enough to help you rank on their own.

CleverPhD is right on the money.  On-page factors are important, and they're great to fix since they're entirely under our control, but Google looks at over 200 different factors when deciding where to rank pages, and many of those factors are off-page (links, social shares, etc).

The on-page report card isn't intended to be the be-all and end-all of your SEO activities - nor is it a checklist of things you can do to automatically rank well.  Because Google keeps its algorithm a secret, there's no way for any outside party to definitively say "yes, your page will rank for sure."  As CleverPhD pointed out, the next step after a well-optimized page is to build high-quality links.  Pages don't exist in a vacuum - your site needs to not only be well-optimized but also have enough authority to place it highly against other pages competing for the keyword.  This is very difficult to do for a phrase with any kind of competition, based on on-page factors alone.

It looks like right now the page that you provided as an example has a Page Authority score of just 16 - you've got 1 link from 1 root domain.  I would focus on increasing your PA and DA scores by building some high-authority links.  The resources CleverPhD pointed out will be a great start.  I would also recommend Mike King's terrific post on link building, found here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

Good luck!

Yes, I would say so.

The main difference between the two is that a reconsideration request is more likely to work with a link warning than with a regular Penguin hit.  Penguin is algorithmic, whereas the link warnings were usually triggered by/resulted in manual penalties.  Either way, it's a good idea to try to get as many spammy links removed/updated as possible, as well as build some new, non-spam links to increase the percentage of your links that are not spammy.

I wouldn't suggest building more spammy links to drown out the Penguin-targeted links - why not spend that time and effort building some natural links?  They will last longer and if you do have to do a reconsideration request you're not running the risk that Google will also see your brand-new spam links.

It's OK to have SOME content that's the same on every page, as long as you also have a substantial amount of unique content (otherwise we'd all get penalized for our header/footer). You may not need to do anything!

I like Gary's suggestion - having one page for the event over multiple years means that you're not creating a new page every time, so the page can continue to benefit from the links it accrues year over year (changing the slug means the post loses its link equity every time).

I can't find any statement from Google saying that changing the publish date of a piece of content isn't allowed when the content is updated. I think in this case it should be fine since your intent isn't to manipulate - it's an update page and a new post.

The other solutions would be to redirect all of your past event pages to the new one every time you make a new one - this would preserve a portion of your link equity - or not to update the publish date (I don't know how much traffic you get from RSS readers so that would be your call).