Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Aside from checking out the Yoast plugin, make sure your sitemap is up to date. There is a reason the bots are going to those pages, the question is why.

Without actually seeing the site I would say that if you have product pages that are identical to canonical them to one main place. If they are listed in the SERPS 301 them if you are removing them. Even having a few different words can still show up as duplicate.The last CMS option might work, but again without seeing the site it is hard to judge.

Since I do a lot of url rewriting I ran into a similar issue and did 301's and canonical to the pages I wanted to show and things are much better.

I think this is a great topic and wish I found this post sooner.

As a person new to the SEOMoz community, not SEO, I am proud that I can start giving back. I too notice that some of the questions are as Steve put, 'not the right questions', but feel that many times if you know the correct question to ask, you will know where to find an answer. Personally I have spend hours looking for and testing different things, just so I wouldn't have to ask a question, it's just my inquisitive nature.

I try to judge, based on the question, whether the person is looking for just the answer and not the means to find it, or is looking for how to find the answer (teach a man to fish), which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. I am striving towards being able to answer some things in the in-depth fashion that EGOL does.

As Dunamis pointed out, some (read most in regards to SEO) of the information on the internet is old and outdated, and the droves of new people just getting started don't know which is current and why something they tried from a 1998 webpage doesn't work. Since my focus has mostly been On-Site, technical, & server based, those are the only ones I work to answer.

I certainly appreciate that this is a paid forum and not one of the others that have people answering questions with, "I don't know", just to get their post counts up.

As for sticky items, I do see that a majority of the questions are repetitive, but that is just the nature of a Q & A forum. If everything had an answer I wouldn't have a chance to put those braincells back in to action to answer a question I found the answer to years ago. A big thumbs up for the SEOmoz Staff getting involved and adding additional thoughts to questions.

I have Rank Tracker set to fire off every morning around 4 to do my bidding, er checking. It works great if you use paid proxies, but using my own IP it just asks me to fill out captchas. I imagine I could set it to run slower to avoid that. I do have the whole suite, but only found that Rank Tracker was the only tool I had a use for.

Updates seem to be fairly regular, about every 2 weeks. As for pricing, the amount of time it saves me on a weekly basis had it paid for itself in about six weeks.

Use a rel='canonical' and use the non index.html for the href;

also don't link to the index.html from anywhere.

If you are doing it as a way of formatting the page and still offering an option or button that allows the user to see the rest of the text, then it is not the same thing that you are thinking of in regards to Google. Google states that you should not hide text on the page to purposely try and trick the search engine.

In E-Commerce situations it is very common to hide part of the text, for instance when you have 4 tabs for "description, features, specification, colors, etc." it is a good idea to use a 'display: none' so that all 3 of the tabs are not shown all the time. This is not considered Black Hat, it is considered good design.

Matt Cutts has said quite a few times, if it is good for the user it is good for Google.

It is when you intentionally hide a block of text on the page with no way for the user to view it that you are using Black Hat technique.

With rel='canonical' you want to point all existing pages that have the same content to 1 page. Having a rel='canonical' on the page with itself as the href will not hurt, can only help verify that it is the preferred page.

I would venture to say GWT for a few reasons:

1. The site command doesn't always show everything,
2. The site command is available publicly,
3. The GWT has to be verified by the owner, hence they should show you more accurate data.

Nice catch. I agree it should be:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [R=301]

Moved over to: http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/v1/overview.html

If you can't find an example that helps let me know.

Yes I am seeing things fluctuate.

Are they tweaking it daily?

I think they are always tweaking it, and now the webmasters are tweaking their sites more which is causing more fluctuations.

There are a few variables that would keep a software package from getting exact rankings, I know I use one. When in doubt I always check with a browser that I never click on anything with so that the results are not skewed.

I don't see a reason why you would stop linking building. If you have #1 #2 is going to try and get it back, or at least I would if it were me.

As a web developer myself I would have, and have, coded a blog system myself. However, about a year ago I started working with WordPress and find that it is much easier to use, and I don't have to code, or design, 98% of the things I want it to do.

I can also install and configure WordPress in under 5 minutes, I certainly can't code it that fast. And all the little nuances, like text formatting, special characters, security, etc. are already built in.

Save your time coding and use WordPress, then use all the spare time creating a great blog people want to visit.

As Google will not show you everything, even using the site command, I use Yahoo SiteExplorer:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=seomoz.org&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s

and wrote a PHP script to take the TSV it exports and create a line for each page. I could probably make that available for use one one of my sites.

I just went through it pretty quick and noticed that:

1. you don't have an xml sitemap, usually named sitemap.xml

2. You are using javascript for your drop down menu items,

The 2 above factors will keep all engines from being able to crawl your site fully.

What I would do is just create a sitemap in the footer so that there is a physical link to each page that is not javascript based.

Oh that would be evil, especial just after another update.

Would certainly keep SEO's on their toes, and cause me to pull out more hair trying to rationalize some of the things I have seen over the past week.

If it is a Fan page, and you have a FB account, you will be able to just add yourself as an admin. There shouldn't be a separate login.

Not a function, and I didn't mean to state that you had to use PhpED to see the problem, just pointing out how I did find it.

With any page loaded, on the right hand side you will see a handful of tabs, next to that is a pinkish bar that will have a Red circle, indicating that there is an issue.

phped_error.jpg

Rank Tracker has it's own built in 'Find free proxies' just like most other software that I have tried with mixed results. I treat everything as a business, so if it costs me money to save time, or headaches, that's what I do.

I do have the whole suite, but tend not to use the other items, but that is solely a personal thing and you should not base your decision on that. Download the trials.

It sounds like you are referring to this mozinar:

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/conversion-optimization-for-local-businesses

Here is one possible way to handle the situation:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tracking-traffic-from-google-places-in-google-analytics