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Do you mean that your Moz Analytics Crawl Diagnostics Report is showing duplicate titles for pages that have rel=canonical? If so, this is something I noticed a few months ago & brought up to the Moz team. I believe it's something they're working to implement/somehow allow us to 'check off' pages in the report that we've already implemented a solution for. Also, if this is your situation, I think you should add your experience / request to Moz's feature request forum.

I hope this helps!

I usually encounter this when I'm logged in to my work email/Google account. Try opening your browser in a "new incognito window" and make sure you're logged in to the Google account used for the site's GA account.

There probably isn't much harm in deleting them, but I'd also see if there's any way to repurpose some of the pieces or maybe some of the topics are still relevant & can be rewritten/updated to not be "crap." Even if you don't do any updating to those old posts, I would consider archiving the pages (making sure you don't create any duplicate content!) rather than deleting them as they're likely influencing how Google understands the overall context of your site. I would review the content relevancy report in Webmaster Tools to see how Google understands your site... Click on any of the listed terms to see if those old posts are where your top KWs are occurring - should help you decide on keeping or nixing some pages.

Hope this helps!

Not the easiest question to answer, but I'll share my thoughts:

• Keyword density - for me, a red flag is raised anytime this phrase is used even if it's checked only to 'make sure we're not keyword stuffing.' Content should be created to be as helpful as possible to the human visitor; if that's done, search bots should pick up on what your site is about '_organically.' _ Pun intended.
• A quick control-find for "office" shows 36 instances of the word just on your homepage, which is spammy in my opinion. Try using some pronouns to help the content read more naturally.
• Yes, href and alt tags do help search engines understand what your site is about. So if (for example) "office space" is used throughout the page's copy at such a high frequency AND in the link & image tags, then I would consider this kw stuffing / spammy. I'm not familiar with SRE tags, sorry!
• In general, your site seems to offer a lot of valuable content that's just over "optimized," especially on the homepage. I would even suggest redesigning the homepage to be a little more brand and user focused - or at least a refresh of the "What's your search scenario?" section, which is pretty busy/overwhelming & was probably created mostly for SEO.

I hope this helps!

I'm working on a very similar scenario, where .com.au pages are ranking in Google US and .com pages are ranking in Google AU (above .com.au pages).

We are moving forward with the hreflang attribute since it was specifically introduced to help search engines serve the correct language or regional URL to searchers. In helping search engines index and serve the localized version of your content, “hreflang” also prevents duplicate content penalties by telling Google that each potential “duplicate” is actually an alternative for users who require an alternate language version. * We see this as a short-term goal, as we plan to eventually consolidate the ccTLDs to the .com site.

Here are some international SEO / hreflang resources that might help:

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
• http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights
• http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
• Anything from Aleyda Solis &/or Gianluca Fiorelli
• http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool
• http://www.themediaflow.com/tool_hreflang.php

Also, since the AU subdomain pages were ranking well, I probably would have left the redirect in place rather than let it go to a 404. Then focus on mapping out the equivalents between the .com and .com.au sites. This is a very tedious project, but the last 2 links I shared above really help move things along once you have all the URL equivalents mapped out.

I hope this helps!

The other thing is that creating unique, high quality, share-worthy content requires creative planning & resources that would be better spent towards your main site than on various microsites.

What you described is a link scheme that I highly recommend avoiding.  Google's advanced algorithm will very likely identify the footprint you're leaving & could lead to a link penalty.

It's good that you understand that links are valuable for SEO, but this is not the way to go about getting them. Instead, focus on building relationships with other non-competing brands or people with large followings that will broadcast your content within your industry. This WBF has some good, safe link building ideas: http://moz.com/blog/anchor-text-rich-links-without-spam-or-manipulation-whiteboard-fridayIn general, tactics that you have to question are usually ones to stay away from.

Did you notice this before or after Oct 17th

Oh the woes of exact match domains...

If I were you, I'd try to work in the actual brand name, even if it's just a logo or branded tagline somewhere in the header. As you explained, it wouldn't be very good for visitors to arrive at a site that has almost no reference to the brand they thought they were visiting the website for. I would also look into a possible rebrand that works the primary KW (tattoo removal) into the brand name - "[Brand Name] Tattoo Removal." With that, you could build out a location page that reinforces the target city with local SEO.

What you're dealing with is duplicate content caused by URL inconsistencies. My first move would be to implement rel="canonical" tags to tell search bots which is the preferred URL (lower-case, then either with or without the trailing-slash). You can read more about it here: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

I always use the Moz bar on the actual Moz site to see how things should be implemented - that's allowed, right? & I noticed that they have added rel=canonical site-wide (to prevent any unforeseen dup content issues). You can see an example of how it's used by viewing the source code here: moz.com/rand/category/archives/events/ and http://moz.com/rand/category/events/

Before you take any action, though, **you need to determine the preferred structure for all URLs on the site. **

What you're seeing is the page's meta robots tag, which instructs the search engine bots to (in this case) index a specific page and follow links on the page. The opposite, "noindex,nofollow" instructs the search bots to not include this page in its index or follow links on the page. You can also use "noindex, follow" so the search engine keeps the page out of its index, but still follows the links on the page. I personally have never come across an example of "index, nofollow" but I imagine that it's possible - probably more of an outdated practice though related to hoarding links.

If you've never seen this attribute before, it may be because the page doesn't include the tag (in which case the bots, by default, assume "index, follow"). And as for whether or not having it is a bad thing - probably not, unless it's a page you really don't want visible in search results.