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Just use a directory instead of a sub-domain and then block that directory... that's the easiest way.

Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal. Just don't get a bespoke one made, pick the wrong company to do it and you'll be stuck in an eternal nightmare.

They use different algorithms so you would always get different rankings. The reason they'd be higher in Google just means that you've got more stuff that Google gives weighting to for the keywords than in the others... i.e. backlinks. And then of course some of your competition may have the opposite, they might be more highly tuned in ways that Bing & Yahoo factors in as important.

Your best solution is to look at what the perceived differences are in the algorithms and then maybe do a bit more of the stuff that you might be missing for Yahoo & Bing

If you're going to have better rankings in any of the search engines though, Google is by far the best!!

I respectfully disagree. I know they don't necessarily pass loads of link juice but some of the paid directories don't have all the millions of spammy links to spammy sites in... because they're paid. Some are very, very cheap too. I know most are rubbish and not worth squat but there's still lots which are cheap and do pass link juice which far outweighs the cost.

Also the paid ones add you much faster... and if you want a diverse backlink profile it's worth getting a bunch of directories in there as well as your other link types... rely on the free ones and you could be waiting forever for that.

It will come out of the index once G realises you've told it that both pages are one and the same. So yeah it will come out.

301 Redirect then wait

Yes! Look at how items can be sorted (i.e. by price, etc... so people can see the cheapest items first). Then think how the products you're feeding in might be sorted by your target audience and adjust accordingly so your stuff comes up first in the sorted results

I have seen stuff like that in the SERP's but the only experience I have of getting hacked is a bit different. I worked in-house for a large travel corporation a couple of years ago and whilst the company's site was fine, their very popular blog wasn't. I just started there and looked at the source code of the blog (for some reason nobody was ever checking that) and found that there were hundreds of links to porn and poker sites hidden by CSS. It was all down to the fact that the blog was on Wordpress and hadn't been updated for a while.

Other than that, we've had sites we host hacked a few times, from hidden links to malware on the sites which of course produced warnings in the browsers. Again, all down to not keeping up with security patches and other updates. I learnt some lessons there.

There are brokerage services yes, but you'll find you have to sign up to them and then you'll start getting a lot of spam emails (at least that's what happened to me). Your ISP should have some kind of a domain watcher service to let you know when domains become available. But you should know that domains don't necessarily keep their value when they switch ownership... if the whois info changes along with the content then it might lose any age based benefit that it did have in the eyes of Google. You might be better of just going with a whole brand new domain, just including a hyphen in there or something... will be a lot cheaper to purchase too!

I do... and I think most people do it it's something really great. Here you go though... haha

Yeah that's pretty odd then. I assumed it was your rank trackers since we had a similar issue once with ours and it was just an option un-ticked. I have been looking at some of our clients sites rankings today and we're not having the same thing, plus I would assume that it's not something happening to many people, such a change would mean all forums, blogs, etc... with be filled with people asking the same question and wondering what's going on. If that's the case, it means it's just this particular site.

What browser did you use to check manually? It's just that with Chrome it doesn't matter if you're logged in or not, it will still give you some level of personalized results some of the time (which is stupid I know), and to make matters worse, I found FF to be returning completely different results to both Chrome and IE for a few searches yesterday. Maybe it would be worth checking in a couple of different browsers. If it's still the same then I hate to say it but you've got two options... 1) Wait it out for a couple of days in case it's just one of those weird things that do seem to happen, and/or... 2) Start thinking about what changes were made with the site recently to have caused it. I doubt that's at all helpful as I'm sure you already thought of that but like you said, it is bizarre... bizarre Google stuff seems to be happening a lot lately!

Have you got points left to ask in private Q&A? That's probably your best bet since then you'll get one of the SEOmoz staff answering and if they don't know, no-one will.

What tracking software are you using, and have you checked any of them manually?

And vice versa though? Could you end up with more traffic mistaking you for your larger competitor?

No worries... you can give me a thumbs up and a "this answered my question" if you like... I want that SEOmoz t-shirt lol.

Lists which you can find yourself easily enough with a Google blog search and Omgili for forums

Yeah you can do that with the search listings page, but make sure that's not the only links in to the content that you do want spidered. Alternatively if you do go with the CSS menu then you'd need to reduce the number of links by linking to the categories first, then from the categories to the pages. It's not ideal as the architecture wouldn't be as flat but it would still be better then having too many links I think.

Have a look at www.martinco.com as one example of how you could do the stuff with the search listings. The search listings page returns results as queries and that page is noindex, nofollow... but at the bottom of the page there are also links to different regions which then go on to link to the offices within those regions. That was done as a solution for the same problems you're having... plus of course you will need to make sure you get lots of in-content text links from relevant pages to the pages you want indexed where you can.

Hehe, I think you might be right

Try "Smashing Magazine" for CSS menus, or there's "CSSplay.co.uk" but they charge

You should definitely just give up the Javascript menu, if the reason you don't want to is due to design, etc... then look into CSS as an alternative, you'll find you can probably replicate the current Javascript nav to appear exactly the same with CSS instead.

With regards to the nofollows, it depends... do you want those pages to get indexed and gain any position in the SERP's? For long-tail terms perhaps? If so then you don't want to nofollow them.

Can you not break them down somehow into better categories, because what you have heard is correct... that is too many links on a page.

Look at "siloing" I only recently came across siloing myself and asked about it on here, where I was referred to this article  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo

You could get around that easily by having the homepage's content (the content that is duplicated) show up in the same place by using an iframe which displays the content on the actual page, on the homepage. Search engines don't treat iframe content as dupe content, they know it comes from a separate source. However, are you using keywords from that content for your homepage's SEO? Because you would effectively lose that as homepage content.

If you're using that content for the SEO on your homepage and not the other page, you could just use the robots.txt file to noindex, nofollow the other page... then problem solved

Yeah your first solution, that's what always gets recommended, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do (on here especially) if it wasn't above board... there's been a whole bunch of articles that I've seen on here though saying to go for it, which I do... and stuff on SEMPO, and a loads of other places all saying the same. I'm sure it would be all over the SEO blogs and forums by now if there were any change to that