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Keyword cannibalization in a nutshell: Google only shows 1 result from your site for any given query (unless it thinks you're REALLY relevant).  That means you want the page that shows up to be the one with the greatest relevance and conversion potential.  If you have multiple pages that target the same keyword, Google could end up confused and display the non-optimal page over your desired landing page.

Title tag, url, and on-page content all play a role in keyword cannibalization.

It's only a problem if you're finding that the non-optimal page is ranking over your optimal one.  For example, if your category page ('wool sweaters') is outranking your product page ('knit wool turtleneck sweater') for the search team "knit wool turtleneck sweater", then you have a problem.  In that case, make sure you improve your internal & external linking to the product page, and make sure it has higher quality, targeted content than the category page.

Hey Scott,

3 things you should do:

1. Determine whether you want to include the index.htm or not. It doesn't really matter which one you choose as long as you're consistent, but pick one and stick to that linking structure from now on. If your site has a lot of backlinks to the homepage, see which variation has the most backlinks (usually it's the one without the index).

2. Include a canonical tag in the section of your homepage, if you go with the sans-index version, use the following code:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.suncoastlaw.com/" />

3. If you are familiar with the htaccess file, add the following code to it.  This will redirect all index.htm files to the root directory:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^index.htm$ / [NC,R,L]

Hope that helps!

I have not heard of personalized subject lines tripping spam filters (not saying it's not possible), but it is a good way to increase open rates.  A person's name is their favorite word, and they will respond well to it (unless you're being spammy).

Look through your inbox, and you'll see that practically every major company uses personalized subject lines, from Google & Facebook to your bank and phone company.  It's an effective tactic as long as you don't overuse it.

Social signals are not strong ranking factors, at least not yet.  The only social network that has direct impact on rankings is Google+.  Twitter activity has been correlated with rankings, but the results are debatable (although Twitter is great for getting new content indexed).

It is impossible to get followed backlinks from Instagram, so it has no direct impact for SEO per se.  However, it can still be a great way to build up your brand, build an audience, and gain free organic traffic.

If visitors need to be logged in to view the content, then Google won't be able to see it either.  If you show Google different content than what users would see, that would be considered cloaking, which could lead to a penalty. So you need to find some kind of balance between having enough content on the page to give it a chance to rank vs incentivizing people to sign up for your service.

All links cause the on-page pagerank to be diluted, regardless of whether they are followed or nofollowed.  So if you are worried about link juice evaporation, nofollowing links won't solve the problem, only removing them will.

Like others have said, you have to wade through a lot of noise to find the nuggets of good content on the Warrior Forum.  However, the paid forum has a better S/N ratio than the free forum, and it's a fairly inexpensive one-time fee to join, so I think it's a pretty good deal.  I am personally a member.

Why are you trying to increase your DA & PA?  DA & PA are just metrics created by SEOMoz to help you get a rough idea of what a page/site's authority is.  Raising these numbers should never be an end goal in and of themselves.

Getting good follow links all depends on your niche.  Are there any blogs in your niche or related niches which you can guest post for?  Any niche specific portals or directories?  Do you have any friends or business partners that might link to you?

If you're looking for link building strategies in general, check this article out, it's VERY comprehensive:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Pinterest links used to be followed, but they changed it a month back to nofollow to combat spammers.   Like others have said, it's still a good traffic source.

Try Xenu's Link Sleuth, it's a free program that crawls your entire site and shows you all your links.  You can then export the results to Excel and sort out all the PDF links.

Ok, I can see how something like that might work... it all depends how Google's crawlers look at links when it comes to penalties like this.  I haven't heard of anyone who has tried this, so you might just have to test it to see if it works.  It would make a very interesting case study.

If you're trying to get your own content to rank, then don't host on YouTube.  Host is on your own site or on a CDN, and embed it on your site with Schema markup so that you have a chance of showing rich snippets in the SERPs.  This helpful article shows you how:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/video-seo-tactics-to-get-ranked/

I don't think it will work, Google isn't looking at whether traffic from the spam sites is blocked or not.  Just the fact that the spammy links exist is enough for Google to penalize you for link manipulation.

Matt Cutt's did say yesterday that they are considering adding a "disavow link" feature in Webmaster Tools, but you won't see it for another few months, if at all:

http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-you-a-with-matt-cutts-at-smx-advanced-123513

The best thing to do in the meantime is to just attempt to remove the links and file a request.

The meta description is not used for rankings and does not need to be unique.  However, Google often uses it as the description of your site that shows up in the SERPs, so you want to make it descriptive to entice searchers to click on the link.  Think of it like the copy for an AdWords ad.

Again, look at your competitor's backlinks in OSE.  Filter it down to external links that are followed.  It should list them in order of MozRank.  Go through the list, and for each link see if it is spam or a good link that you could also acquire.  If the former, ignore it, if the latter work on acquiring the link.

When you put your competitor into Open Site Explorer, where are they getting their links from?  It could be the case that they are using some large scale spam tactics, which will tend to get their site penalized over time (though not always).  It could also be the case that they just got sitewide links from really large sites, so all the links they are getting are from a handful of domains.

Well, Google isn't going to punish you for owning 4 different websites, it's perfectly fine to own multiple web properties that drive traffic to your business.  In fact, you're diversifying your risk by having multiple sites, since if one drops in rankings, you still have 3 others.

If the other sites are spammy, why would you want that content on your main site anyway?  Just include links from the 3 other sites, and point them all to your flagship site. That way your main site still gets the SEO boost, and you can build it out however you want, while you don't lose traffic from the other 3 sites.

Search Engine Land & SEO Roundtable are probably the 2 best news sources when it comes to keeping abreast of the latest algo updates:

• http://searchengineland.com/
• http://www.seroundtable.com/

Sounds like a big and risky endeavor, although there could be potential benefits.

Why are you considering merging the sites if they are already ranking well for their keywords?  Are they not ranking high enough?  If it ain't broke...

A better strategy might be to just build more links and add more content to the sites you have.  Another area you could focus your efforts on is conversion rate optimization.  You're already getting all this traffic for desirable keywords, so you can boost your client's ROI by figuring out how to turn more of that traffic into leads.

Sure, but you have a better chance of the press releases being indexed if they're customized rather than duplicate content.