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I've recently written a blog about this very subject, you might find it interesting:

http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/34/google-rankings-dropped-after-switching-to-joomla/

I think the first thing to do is contact your competitor (if you're certain is it they who are behind this) and ask them in a kind and open email to remove this kind of aggressive advertising. If they are unwilling to comply with this request, you might want to consider legal steps against them.

Noindexed pages are pages that you want your link juices flowing through, but not have them rank as individual entries in the search engines.

• I think your legal pages should rank as individual pages. If I wanted to find your privacy policy and searched for 'privacy policy company name', I'd expect to find an entry where I can click and find your privacy policy

• Your search results page (the internal ones) are great candidates for a noindex attribute. If a search engine robot happens to stumble upon one (via a link from somebody else for example), you'd want the spider to start crawling pages from there and spreading link juice over your site. However, under most circumstances you don't want this result page to rank on itself in the search engines, as it usually offers thin value to your visitors

• Blog archive and category pages are useful pages to visitors and I personally wouldn't noindex these

Bonus: your paginated results ('page 2+ in a result set that has multiple pages') are great candidates for noindex. It'll keep the juices running, without having all these pretty much meaningless (and highly dynamic) pages in the search index.

Getting a web page to display your content as TRUE utf-8 requires everything to be set at the utf-8 encoding. 'Everything' includes: your database, your database tables, your database fields, your connection from php to your database, you header as set by php, your header as set by html, your content itself etc.

The following resources were extremely helpful to me when I was switching to utf-8 (which is by far the better encoding over ISO):

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8/mysql

Bonus tip: make sure your content and files are saved as utf-8 without BOM (Byte Order Mark), this will save you lots of trouble later!

You can optimize pages for multiple keywords, but I'd be careful about using your URLs for that. The URL should preferably contain the subject the page is about (which could or should coincide with your major keyword). Adding to many different keywords to your URLs will look spammy and you don't want that.

The information you've requested is found on the following link: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot

The on-page SEO is shaky at best (try using the SEOmoz tools to improve the score for your targeted keywords).

With regards to the off-page SEO: what pops up first is that your domain has inlinks from only 22 different domains (according to the SEOmoz toolbar). Considering 'Arizona real estate' is a pretty popular keyword, you'll need a LOT more (strong and preferably topically related) backlinks with anchors texts including terms as 'Arizona', 'real estate' and 'Arizona real estate' to gain page one rankings for your desired keywords.

Good luck!

Yes and no. Depending on how you define 'choose' you will rank optimally for the keyword that you put in your title tag, or the anchor text that you let others use to link to you, or the keyword that you choose to target on your pages otherwise. However, you will very likely start to rank for the other variations as well (but less well, since there is no exact match between the keyword that was searched for and the one you 'choose').

Page 5 for a 1% keyword at Google, with normal rankings at Bing and Yahoo looks like a -50 penalty from Google to me. The dodgy insurance content that was on the domain before might be the cause of this.

More on Google penalities:

http://smallstepsseo.com/types_of_google_penalties.html

http://www.ksl-consulting.co.uk/google_penalty.html

Two posts on the SEOmoz blog might help you further, the first is about the actual value that a DMOZ placement has these days, and the second one describes a way to get listed:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-a-link-from-dmoz-isnt-worth-what-it-once-was

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/want-to-get-listed-in-dmoz-become-an-editor

Rand has written a blog about this a while ago, how not all links on webpages are created equal, you might find it interesting:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

There was very recent blog by Dr. Pete on the SEOmoz blog about this very subject, you might find it interesting:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-keywords-do-i-rank-for

Even though the page does render correctly, it also returns a 404 http status code (which you can verify by the firefox add-on 'HTTPfox' for example). It seems something in your website or webserver is mis-configured which is causing this incorrect http status code (404 error) to be fired instead of the 'all good' code (200) it should be firing for these pages considering they are perfectly accessible.

Have you tried contacting your technical staff or webhost about this issue

Even though I'm not a SEOmoz employee, I think I can answer this answer on behalf of them.

SEOmoz will not make your website more visible or accessible as a direct result of your payment. If you decide to take a PRO membership with the site however, you'll get access to premium resources that will enable you to take your website to the next level with regards to SEO, and keep increasing that level over time.

By using the (premium) tools that are available to PRO members (such as the campaigns that you can use to monitor weekly crawls of your selected websites), you can see very clearly which mistakes you've made on these sites and what you can do to improve your SEO.

I'd say Google isn't seeing this as a partly duplicate title. Especially considering both words contain no spaces (and even if it would, I'd doubt Google would see it as duplicate if both versions had significant search volume individually).

I must add though that I can't recall any hard evidence stating either way, but I suppose others that reply can.

When analyzing your bounce rates, make sure you take into account blog and non-blog traffic separately. Blogs are known for a high bounce rate because people often land on them with long tail keywords, find what they want, and navigate away again.

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If the association has explicitly requested a link back, I think it would damage the trust between the client and the association to make that link a no-followed one. Yes, the value of a one way link is greater than that of a reciprocal one in most situations, but in this case the trust of the association (which already links to you!) should be worth more than the 2 milligrams of extra link juice you might earn by no-following the link.

Did this actually happen or are we talking about a hypothetical situation here? It could be that there is a link to the demo directory you've overlooked? Has the /demo folder perhaps been used in the past and there were still old links to it?

As a meta-solution to this problem: prevent crawlers and nosy people from accessing the content by adding a .htpasswd login to the area used for client approval.

A search on Google (how ironic) for 'google vs bing seo' will bring up several dozen articles, including one semi-recent by SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements