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You sir are a genius.  Thank you very much. Also mad props to the MozBar for picking up on this. Some observations... We've had these noindex tags on there for almost a year and just now Google found them or decided to honor them. We had a recent situation where Google was basically probing our website with fake URLs to see if anything turned up.  Source? incorrectly parsed URLs from JavaScript on houzz.com.  I think they are making some big changes on how they crawl JavaScript recently. One of these "problem" pages has some links pointing at it with a query string.  Nothing changes on the site because of these.  Google indexed the page with a query string despite the noindex.  Weird.  I guess Google does not always honor the noindex directive. One of these "problem" pages would come up when looking up the cached version in Google but could not be found in the index.  Odd again. Lesson to me is don't count on the meta robots tag for two reasons ... Google inconsistently implements it It's dangerous as a little bad code can take your whole site out of the index.

You could use the Segment dropdown to see the data by Network. It will display 3 rows, so you can see that broken down. You cannot however, isolate the Search Partners using a filter. It'd be a good request to make to Google.

I'm not sure that I totally understand your question: are you building a site and wondering if you should make it beautiful with AJAX or readable for search engines with a clear category structure? Or do you already have a site with AJAX and now you've taken the time to come up with a category page structure, but you're hesitating to implement it? If it's the first, I don't think that you should think that your choices are 1) be usable/beautiful, or 2) be search-engine friendly. There are a lot of ways to make an HTML site beautiful. You can use new enhancements in HTML5, or build a standard HTML site and then use JavaScript to make elements more interactive. If it's the second, I'd go with Thomas's suggestion and test your AJAX site to see how readable it is for Google. AJAX isn't readable by Google, but the underlying HTML is, so there may be enough HTML links that Google can still get around your site. Once you've tested how readable your site is, then you have to decide if this interface is worth pages being missed or ranked lower by Google. My guess is that you can probably keep your site the way it is primarily, but you'll have to make some tweaks. It's hard to give specifics without knowing specifics, though. Good luck!

There is no need to do all those variations in keyword order if you are using broad, or modified broad match keywords. The ordering of the keywords do not matter for broad or modified broad, so you only need one query structure. e.g X Y Cyber Monday Z and Cyber Monday Z X Y will BOTH get triggered by the BMM (broad match modified) kw: +X +Y +Z +Cyber +Monday. It may not even be necessary to include Z in the query pattern but that all depends on impression volume.

In your shoes, I would send a short reconsideration request and explain the situation: that you don't do link building, that what you think it might look odd is that link but you didn't requested, is natural so you can't touch it - and see the reply - if you have some manual action in place or not. They are not hunting us down - but they do send a lot of notices like that to innocent people so it's worth dealing with it so you won't be colateral damage in this spamy link war. Cheers.

Not just search volume mind you. Do you think mentions on sites around the web have an impact as well?

yep try crowdbooster , they give you a summary of your own activity in terms of busiest days of the week as well as that of the followers and the ones that you are following.

So, when being linked to ... or even mentioned without a link something like... "Dell Personal Computers" or "Xerox Copiers" I tend to agree with you at face value only I have done back-link analysis on the competitors coming up as brands and stores and I have many many more links like this than they do on quality sites (not being discounted) I think search query volume might play a part in all of this ... anybody have experience with that?

Yes i do, some will argue that each pages stands on its own, but relevancy plays a major part, you wan to be in a relevant link neighborhood, both external and internal