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Thanks for all the input.  Google does seem to crawl everything these days, so I'm also in conclusion if the files fit, they'll get crawled.  Sitemaps, internal links and optimized images are all a must.

What's the maximum amount of html pages that one should put in a folder, to get the best SEO GoggleBot crawl?  I'm aware that there's a limit of 10,000 on most servers, but was curious to know if a lesser amount of pages would be better, for crawling and indexing purposes.  Also curious on peoples opinions on whether .jpg and .gif files should follow similiar rules.

Disavowing the entire domain seems like the safest thing to do, because there may be other links that haven't caught my attention yet.  If Google doesn't require the exact location, then I think this is what I will do.

Do I disavow the entire domain, or just the url where the link exists?

I've been noticing a growing amount of spammy directories using my title Meta-Tag to create a link back to my site.  Since my title uses competitive keywords, these external links on spammy directories look over optimized and I fear an algo penalty might get triggered.  Should I be concerned and what can I do?

Looks like Google doesn't trust your site enough to offer the pages you think are logical as results for the query.  I'd say G Bot isn't confident about your content, and is triggering an algo filter.  True, internal links may be causing the confusion, but I'd also suggest checking your external link profile to make sure relevant sites are leading G Bot back to your blog.

Sounds like you've got a php site that's dynamically creating pages.  You have to find the person who wrote the script and have them edit the template to add a canonical tag that inserts the correct url when the page is generated.  Your not going to be able to insert a static canonical tag.

I do think NoFollow is more pertinent for external sites linking to your site, and not so much inner site links used for navigation.  I'd be more concerned with the amount of keywords used in the metatags.

Thanks all for responding and confirming my suspicion.  No need to worry about the slow or non-existent pr update.

I've got 100s of new pages over a year old, all with quality content, yet they're all still at PR0.  The main index page has a PR score of 4, yet all the other pages of the site are still at 0.  They're are all unique and highly relevant pages.  Anybody else notice Google's taking longer to rank pages?

Why is Google taking so long to update PageRank?

Thanks for the input SamuelScott.  Generally, I plan to keep the external links well under 100 per page, by breaking them into sub-categories.  I agree with your assessment that if it's good for the viewer, then it's good with Google because all they're suggestions on site design is geared towards the end user.

My main concern, as you've stated, is that by leading users off the site, would I not reduce the page rank, and ultimately ranking.  I appreciate that you seem to think, not.

Client is thinking of adding a directory to an eCommerce site which users would find useful.  It would help users find other services and vendors that are specific to the niche of products this site is selling.  My only concern is it would create a number of external links to other sites.  Even though they're related, would this diminish our standing with Google search?

I will give GSiteCrawler a shot.  I've been very impressed with the free ScreamFrog crawler, and if I were to select an alternative today, it be this.  Just debating with myself the cost for the paid version.

It's html with embedded cgi-bin eCommerce software that produces dynamic pages.

The trouble xml-sitemaps seems to have is with rich snippets and structured data. It seems to have trouble getting it to recognize pages with that code.  I was wondering if anybody else has had a similar problem?  Sites that I have without snippets, work fine.

I was wondering if everyone could recommend what XML Sitemap generators they use.  I've been using XML-Sitemap, and it's been a little hit and miss for me.  Some sites it works great, other it really has serious problems indexing pages.  I've also uses Google's, but unfortunately it's not very flexible to use.

Any recommendation would be much appreciated.

Yup, that's where I'm at right now.  Got an email reply from G stating to wait up to 7 days for whoever has control to contact us.   At that point, I'll contact G directly.  Thanks!

The 301 from the old domain is going to carry good and bad juice over to your new URL, consequently I think your doing the logical thing by trying to eliminate as many of the bad links as possible.  If you remove, the 301's, you'd be starting from scratch.  Since you've initiated 301's I'd hold your course, and start building new links to the current url.

The Google+ Page that appears under local listings in Google for a company I work for, was setup by an advertiser, such as Yellow Pages.  I'm not sure how they got control of it, but apparently somebody at this agency set it up, and verified the url.  The G+ page is now outdated, and needs to be updated.  More importantly, I have to manage the page, and not this third party.   I sent a request to Google to transfer ownership.

My question is, has anybody had any luck in getting control of a Google+ page which was setup by the wrong party, back?  As a backup, I've initiated a plan of creating a new Google+ page with the account info from the WMT's account of the url.  I figure, that might have more authority than a page erroneously setup by a third party.  My hope is it would eventually replace the Google+ page the currently shows in local returns.  Any thoughts or comment would be appreciated.

I'm tracking keyword results in Rank Tracker, but I can't confirm the positions when I do a Google search for the tracked keywords.  Does anybody know why RT says the site should be #23, but is not actually in Google?

Is there a way to check Google results from different data centers?  If I recall, Google allowed the option to view results from different cities, though I don't know if they still allow this.

Sounds similar to paginate issues, and the potential to create duplicate content in the eye's of google, particularly if you're using a template.  Not a serious issue if this occurs for 1 or 2 clicks, but if viewer are going to do this for 5 or more times after the initial landing page, it might be a problem with the meta-tags.

It's my experience Google indexes everything on your site, over time.  Logic is to place most important pages in the upper tiers because googlebot won't get everything at once.

May concern was these screwed up links would somehow impair ranking, but I guess not.  Thanks for the link.

I'm not saying I want to chase them.  I'm not about to submit emails to each of these sites, since it's obvious they don't speak English.  On the other hand, I do possess all the urls, and I would like to report them...somewhere.  This is abuse, and should be stopped.

Below is a sample link...not the word "hollister" used throughout the page..

http://web-tutor.in/content/add-your-customs-table-views?page=3

Whether is accidental or intentional, there's got to to be something I can do to get back at these jokers.

What if this is intentional?  Furthermore this problem is spread across many sites.

Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra".  Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's.

Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?

Exactly, I removed some URLS, and tweeked the priorities, in Dreamweaver, then saved.  I want to make sure nothing got messed up.   WMT has the ability to test before submitting, which I just learned.  I used xml-sitemaps.com stand alone, which passed the WMT test.  Now I'm going to do some editing, and try it again before submitting.

Before submitting to Google, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for testing sitemaps out before submitting?

Thanks guys! Upon further research what's happening is "Entity Escaping", where symbols have to use a code...ie & = &, so it's all good.

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

I've been creating sitemaps with XML Sitemap Generator, and have been downloading them to edit on my pc.  The sitemaps work fine when viewing in a browser, but when I download and open in Dreamweaver, the urls don't work when I cut and paste them in the Firefox URL bar.  I notice the codes are different.  For example, an "&" is produced like this..."&".  Extra characters are inserted, producing the error.

I was wondering if this is normal, because as I said, the map works fine when viewing online.

I'm assuming you changed the name of all the urls' to some degree?  If you kept the structure of the site and the name of the pages the same, I don't think you'd see this happening.  If you did restructure and rename, you may have triggered an automatic algo penalty.  I would check the external link profile to see what keywords are linking back to you.  If the new urls are different from the old, that may have been the cause of the drop.  404's are always a concern, especially with old sites since there could be hundreds of pages that you may have thought were dormant, but Google keeps visiting.  Even though these pages may not be linked anywhere, Google has them indexed and is still visiting.  Same goes with images!  They may be missing on the new server.  But from what I understand, such 404's will correct themselves over time, as Google will un-index them.

Marketing and success are both in the url, so having a / or a - isn't going to be the final determinant on how you rank.  The thing I'd worry about is "marketing/success" implies marketing has greater importance than success, in the root scheme of things.

You can 301 to any place, so if it's beneficial to change the structure the site, now's the time to do it.  Beware though, when you change the structure of the website, and are placing pages in different folders, you're changing the URL, so it will affect your ranking, hopefully for the positive.   I think what you're proposing would be an improvement.

Sounds good, LinkFool...Thanks!

PDG-Commerce

Thanks StreamlineMetrics....I do have a lot of older files that somehow got indexed, that I have no relevant new location to send them to.  Do you think I should avoid deleting them as well?

I have the bad habit of renaming a html page sitting on my server, before uploading a new version.  I usually do this after a major change.  So after the upload, on my server would be "product.html" as well as "product050714".html.  I just stumbled on the fact G has been indexing these backups.  Can I just delete them and produce a 404?

Thanks for your insight Marty.  What I've discovered, that categores with the most pages, are the ones most adversely affected.  For instance, if a category has 20 pages, it ranks horribly, whereas a category with only 1 to 3 pages does good.  Consequently, I think I'm running into a duplication threshold penalty on the larger categories.  Figure since I have nothing to lose, I may try hard coding on a couple of the 20+ page categories and sees what happens.

I have an eCommerce site that dynamically creates category pages, which produce canonical tags in the header.  For multiple page categories, it adds the page number to the URL.  For example, this category has 3 pages....

Because most categories have too many products, I can't follow Googles suggestion of creating a "view all" page. Furthermore since all these pages use the same template, I'm unable to insert a NOINDEX tag in all the pages after the first page.  Also, in this scenario, I'm unable to insert the discreet code for Next/Previous, which is also suggested by Google.

My only option for maintaining these dynamically generated category pages would be to hardcode the first conical tag in the template, which would then be produced on all subsequent paginated pages.

Consequently, every paginated page in this category would have the same canonical tag pointing to the first page.  Would this incur the wrath of Google and would I'd be better off leaving the pagination they way it is?

I agree many product pages with long titles is normally not a problem, so long as each title is different.  The only issue is due to the length, the most important keywords are diluted or may not even be indexed if they're at the end of a long title.

One time should not be a problem, but the only issue is will it give your new site the same boost?  Your taking juice away from one site, with no assurance it will work on the new site.  But if it works, it's brilliant.

If it's the category that the items on the page fall into, probably not.  If the inserted keyword leads back to a page outside of the category, it may be a little spammy.  From what I understand, breadcrumb produces codes based on where the viewers was on the site, so if the inserted code looks like all the other dynamically produced html, I don't know how G could distinguish that, other than it doesn't fit the content on the page.

The example you stated would prevent context and character tabs from being indexed in search engines.  If these are unique content, you should reconsider because canonical was originally created for multiple urls with identical information.  Place the tag anywhere in the header.

Databases organize the records, which in your case is a "listing", in particular way which define what they are.  These are usually categories and sub-categories which are assigned discreet codes.  Viewers click on a category, which leads subsequent subcategory, all linking back to the category and your homepage.  You want to use these codes to create the navigation menu and subsequent sub-menus which in effect become the internal linking scheme.  You want to make sure this is done logically and intelligently because this is probably all you'll have to do.

Internal linking can be fairly straight forward depending on how your database is structured.  Records should be broken down by categories and sub-categories, so if your data is stored in tables like this, if should be fairly quick and easy.  However, if the SEO has to break everything down for you, and do it manually if will be very time consuming because every page will have to be edited individually.  You should ask questions regarding how they plan to proceed, then see if there's anything you can do in preparation to cut down the billable hours.

Most shopping carts are set up this, so even though it may not be the most optimized, it looks natural and organic to G, and shouldn't hurt you.  You may have to add additional text and pics on these cat. pages to work up/down your density.

Option 1 is a very good idea if you think these links will hurt you, Google wise.  Since you says these are all duplicate content, this is probably what you want to do, but first be sure you don't want the link or authority juice from the old blog.  If the blog gets more traffic, has more authority, etc...the decision gets tougher to make.

Matt-Antonio suggested I send the 301's to a different site, which I thought was very provocative, though a bit risky.  Your suggestion of re-writing the 301 so it points to a non-existent page on the new site creating a 404, should work as well.  Now if I combine both of your suggestions,...why not just send the 301's on the old site, to a non-existing page on the old site, letting the old site produce the 404?

Thanks for the 404 advise, but I do think the drop is ranking is due to an automatic algorithm penalty that's the result of too many external links the have exact keyword matches to areas this site is competing in.  For example the ratio "Free White Widgets" on external links, to the actual url and in site links is tripping this automatic penalty.  By breaking these links, I how hope G will un-index, thus lowering the ratio.