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I agree with Martin - I don't think it would be an issue.  To make sure you don't get duplicate content problems, make sure your images have different names and descriptions on your .net site than they do on your .com site, and you should be fine.

Neither access denied nor not found crawl errors are dealbreakers as far as Google is concerned. A not found error usually just means you have links pointing to pages that don't exist (this is how you can be receiving more errors than pages crawled - a not found error means that a link to that page was crawled, but since there's no page there, no page was crawled).  Access denied is usually caused by either requiring a login or blocking the search bots with robots.txt.

If the links causing 404 errors aren't on your site it's certainly possible that errors would still be appearing.  One thing you can do is double-check your 404 page to make sure it really is returning an error of 404: not found at the URL level.  One common thing I've seen all over the place is that sites will institute a 302 redirect to one 404 page (like www.example.com/notfound).  Because the actual URL isn't returning a 404, bots will sometimes just keep crawling those links over and over again.

Google doesn't necessarily crawl everything every day or update everything every day.  If your traffic isn't being affected by these errors I would just try as best you can to minimize them, and otherwise not worry too much ab out it.

50 redirects is a lot of redirects for one week! Sometimes when that much change has happened on a site it can longer than a few days for the site to be fully re-crawled/indexed and your rankings to normalize.  Have you updated your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools?

I always like to put a self-canonical tag in where it makes sense, just because there are a lot of URL parameters (session IDs, tracking code, etc) that can cause duplicate URLs and it's nice to have the stripped-down plain URL be the canonical version.

Can you clarify what you mean by "the old pages are still visible to Google's bot"?  Do you mean they're still showing up in the index after the redirect is in place? If so it could just be that your site hasn't been re-crawled yet.  Some other things to check: Have you updated your internal links that pointed to the old pages so that they point to the new page?  Have you done a link building push to try to get some external link love to the new page?  Basically I would say don't rely on the redirects alone to help the bot find the new page.

Kristinn's suggestion would be another way to go: don't redirect the other pages, instead post a link at the top saying "for updated info go over here" and then canonical the old pages to the new page.  Over time though a 301 is going to be the best long-term solution. If the URL is redirecting you shouldn't need to keep the content up on the page.

One nice thing about the Penguin update is that we don't need to be quite so concerned with anchor text.  I would say focus more on getting links from high-authority, trusted websites and less on the anchor text.  Getting keyword-rich anchor text links from time to time won't hurt - and if you're using natural link building methods, you'll probably be fine having them - the important thing is that your ratio of keyword-rich anchor text links to regular anchor text likes (like "click here") is similar to that of other sites in your niche.  It's when it's ALL your links or a vast majority of your links that it starts to look suspicious.

Hi Nightwing,

The screenshot you post at http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/ranking-25-may-12copy.jpg appears to be from a tool called Web CEO, which is not an SEOMoz tool.  I can't speak to the accuracy of their tool.

It looks like the screenshot you have from our tool at http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/rank-checker.jpg puts you at ranking number 5.  When I checked "york wedding photographer" just now on Google.co.uk, I saw the same thing that Riplash saw.  There are 3 paid ads at the top of the page (in a yellow box), then 3 organic listings under those.  After those first 3 organic listings, there is a 7-pack of Google Places results with address info - that is where Davidclick.com is currently showing up.

Since Google Places uses an entirely different algorithm than the rest of Google's organic results, rank tracking tools will often not pick up that ranking - that appears to be what's happening the Web CEO tool - again, that is NOT an SEOMoz tool so I can't speak to its accuracy.  As you can see, the SEOMoz rank tracking tool places you at position 5 (because we do pull in Google Places, video, image, etc. rankings where we can) - and that's where I see Davidclick.com in my SERP page.  3 regular organic listings, then 1 Google Places listing, then Davidclick.com as the 2nd Google Places listing, or 5th overall.  Hope that helps!

At the most basic level, your competitors for any given keyword are the sites that rank for that keyword - but if you Google not only your keyword, but also related keywords (not just SEO but SEO services, SEO consulting, etc.) you will start to see a few sites that come up for a variety of semantically related searches.  I'd start by mining their backlinks.

There are lots of ways to find link targets beyond mining your competitors' backlinks, though. Try searching "(your keyword) blog" to find relevant blogs on your topic/in your industry.  Use a service like FriendOrFollow to look at your competitors' followers and the people they follow on Twitter - some of them will have useful sites as well.  Once you find a site that you'd like to target for a link, look at that site's backlinks to find more related sites to target.

Don't forget that you can use the "pages on this root domain" option in Open Site Explorer and pull out all of the links to a domain, whether to the home page or internal pages.

As long as the search engines can crawl it, I doubt that one format would cause your content to be considered "more unique" than the other - it either is unique or it isn't, and the content itself is the same either way.  Since it seems like the drop-down is a more user-friendly solution, that's what I'd do.

If you're concerned that your content won't be robust enough to rank for a term, I'd consider adding some additional, relevant text that contains the keywords you're targeting rather than trying to tweak the format of the same text - maybe via a blog post?  But if you are finding your content to be unique enough now, in the tables, without adding extra text then I don't think switching it to be in a drop-down is going to wreck that.

From everything you're saying, it looks like search engines will be able to crawl the content either way (as long as you make sure the dropdowns are using search-engine-friendly code like HTML or CSS and not JavaScript or Ajax # tags).

Once the site launches, you can double-check that the content's being indexed by doing a site: query in Google that contains a large chunk of the text contained in the dropdown.

Ennovation and Malcolm are right - search engines will see the entire text, as long as the JS is just being used for show/hide (users without JS enabled will see the same thing).

As long as there is an option to show the text (i.e. it's not completely hidden from users), and the text itself isn't keyword-stuffed or spammy, I can't see a reason why search engines would consider it spam.

I'm having a hard time picturing what you're describing - do you have an example URL I could take a look at?

Hi David,

Google's semantic processing has gotten pretty sophisticated - If the name of the website is on every page and is the URL, and also makes up a significant portion of the anchor text, those are all pretty clear signals that "this is the name of the site."

With an exact match domain you want to make it clear that you're not a fly-by-night site just set up to quickly take advantage of a single keyword.  Some ways to do this are:

• Make sure you have deep content on every page - Panda can be particularly brutal to EMDs.
• REALLY watch your usage of your brand name - give it the "read out loud" test to see if you're using it too much and giving the appearance of keyword stuffing.
• Optimize non-home-page pages for other, related keywords and create content accordingly
• Build a history of social mentions - search engines look to social mentions and interactions as proof that "this is a real company."
• Focus less on anchor text when building links, and more on creating sharable content that people want to link to. People will be more likely to use your keyword as anchor text than would be typical, since it's already the name of the site, so I would focus link building efforts on other keywords and just on general link volume, even if the anchor text is "click here."

Basically, do everything you can to show Google that you're a legit site that deserves to rank, and not a keyword spammer.