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I just had a smack upside the head moment. I had all of the links in the main nav as absolute but my links in the footer were all relative. That was giving me my 404 errors. Hopefully this will get me back on Google's good side. We dropped in the ranks a little for some of our main keywords.

No worries Brandon - best of luck!

Local = the volume within the whole region. So, Local is not really "local" as you might think of it. As you seem to be in the US, if you set the Local region to the US, that is the number you get back in that column.

I'm using the "All in One SEO" plugin and checked  the option to no follow tags and archives.

Hey Josh, Wasting more time on it is what I was going back and forth on this morning when I saw where they placed our site. I'm kind of scratching me head as to why they would completely ignore the category that I had requested. Our company offers both products and services but our core business is our services, so says our home page and supporting content. Not sure why they placed us in a category for our products. It's a little disappointing but the pages PR is the same.

Great! Thanks, I may take you up on that! -Brandon

Personally I would use your first "Maker of Blue Widgets..." title. It does a couple things in my opinion. First, since your brand is not very strong but possibly the widget is well known, the release is more likely to get picked up by media (though sadly awards press releases seldom do in my experience). Second, assuming you are buying the upgraded "SEO" package, it themes the press release more about the widgets than your brand. As long as you use good link text as well, this will make the links to your site more about the widgets than the brand. Of course if you are looking for brand recognition then go the other way.

Thanks Marek, I didn't realize that Bing was also now in control of the Directory. -Brandon

I think the terms of service of Google Analytics is against collecting that level of personal information as well. I'd feel violated too!

Thanks for the suggestions! Recently I was trying to convince a friend of mine that he was charging too much to list in his directory. I explained to him that if I stumbled across his directory, looking at his domain rank which was 23, I would pass on his $40 submission cost.

Hi Brandon If you haven't seen this already, an awesome video here on SEOmoz entitled "I'm Being Outranked by a Spammer - Whiteboard Friday" is well worth a view, it was posted last Friday and Rand has some really insightful and valuable information to share. I would suspect, though obviously can't know, that the links from this .org site to your competitors will not be the reason they are ranking so highly. If those links are being counted, it will be a small part of those rankings, takes a lot more than 1 good link usually. Just because it's from a .org doesn't mean that the links carry any weight, it sounds like a site with little value from the way you've described it, I'd suggest focusing on creating and distributing some valuable content rather than chasing the links of competitors.  Link Analysis of competitors is of course important, just don't worry too much about individual links, especially if they are questionable such as in this case.  With some great content, you can attract some valuable links of your own that your competitors may not have. I hope that helps, Regards Simon

No, I would not recommend that. Keyword cannibalization becomes an issue when you have multiple pages on your site that target or focus on the same exact keyword phrase which results in pages competing with each other.

Yes, I did misinterpret when to properly use rel canonical. Google seemed to respond the way I was expecting though. All of my new pages went into the index while the old pages were ignored. Once a 301 is in place, is it safe to remove the old page from the server?

Thank you for the responses! The reason why I thought it may be effective is because I had seen it done on a few sites. Specifically when a CMS is used to manage the sites content. If you place a h1 tag into your header file it's going to care through every page of the site. I will definitly be changing that strategy ASAP! Thanks for the help.

I personally don't think it is necessary. The worst that can happen is that a competitor knows you are checking them out. Any good company checks out the competition. If you are trying to hide your origin, it would be better to search from your personal account as the company IP maybe more easily identified. Again though... I wouldn't worry about it at all. You don't need to be stealthy.

Thank you for the advice everyone!

Gyi Tsakalakis I actually went to management with three sites that ranked on page one of Google for our most important keyword and asked them to verify that the companies were our competition. Management countered me by printing out some pages from a competitor that they knew of but ranked no where near the top of Google. So I think they kind of missed the point of what I was trying to prove. So I've had some difficulty even getting off the ground.

When changing the title meta tag to: KW | Company Name I have a little extra room, should I add the City and State to the end of the meta tag?