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Hi Joe, The ranking factors are not appreciably different for Bing/Yahoo than for Google, but you will always see some disparity between them. One suggestion I would offer is make sure you are as diligent with your Bing Business Listing as you are with Google. Otherwise, look at those ranking ahead of you and see what they are doing you are not, then see if you can manipulate a page to rise in the rankings. Another thing to do would be to use Bing Webmaster Tools like you are probably using Google Analytics. This will surely provide some insights into which pages are rankings and which ones might need to be tweaked for Bing.

Hi Joe The index updates are manually processed and are not on an automated schedule. We have a release currently in progress which you will see the updates immediately directly in OSE at moz.com/researchtools/ose and within a day the data is imported into campaigns. Hope this helps

GWT numbers sometimes ignore parameter handling, oddly, and can be hard to read. I'm only seeing about 40 indexed pages with "ref" in the URL, which hardly seems disastrous. One note - once the pages get indexed, for whatever reason, de-indexing can take weeks, even if you do everything correctly. Don't change tactics every couple of days, or you're only going to make this worse, long-term. I think canonicals are fine for this, and they should be effective. It just may take Google some time to re-crawl and dis-lodge the pages. You actually may want to create an XML sitemap (for Google only) that just contains the "ref=" pages Google has indexed. This can nudge them to re-crawl and honor the canonical. Otherwise, the pages could sit there forever. You could 301-redirect - it would be perfectly valid in this case, since those URLs have no value to visitors. I wouldn't worry about the Bing sitemaps - just don't include the "ref=" URLs in the Bing maps, and you'll be fine.

How is your transfer page working, technically - it seems to be resolving as a straight 200 for me. Those transfer pages are usually where affiliates start to get creative (they might 302, for example).

Thanks Andy. We don't really get enough "images.google" traffic to justify the effort needed to rejig everything for that reason alone. However, that does raise a secondary question of whether we should be improving our image search SEO. Do image search rankings contribute to regular search rankings? Does anyone think it would be worth redirecting the old image file paths to the new ones instead? I can't think of many cases (if any) where it would be necessary to have these redirects but I know that in the process of past migrations my predecessors have done this.

Thanks Mike. We're going to run with it for a while on one of our sites and see how it performs. I'll try and post any meaningful results here at a later date.

That will work, but don't try to game it too much.  I optimized a site where there was a ton of account info before any of the content.  So I used Absolute Positioning and moved all of that content to the bottom of the page, (but still displayed correctly).  This allowed the most valuable content and links to be crawled first. Not sure if I would try to move content about the nav. Your most important links will be in order of appearance to search engines.