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They are different and you need to setup 301s to correct, also check all your menus etc to make sure that you use them consistently - this includes in emails etc - consistency is the key.

You can go with slashes or no slashes, as long as you are consistent, I have run sites both ways.

I will disagree with Jesse one thing - I would strongly recommend using the ending slash.  I have several reasons why.

1. The url ending in a slash traditionally represents a folder with pages/documents/images inside that folder.  Used to be that we would use a URL like /folder/index.htm with index.htm being the default page.   It used to be that if you did not designate any file as an index file, assuming the permissions on the folder were set correctly, you would see all the content in that folder.  Later, you could designate a default index file and so when you left it blank by ending in a slash it would show the content of the default page without needing the index.htm to be included.  Now this issue can cause duplicate content problems (but that is another story).

2. Knowing all that above, many of your web analytic and other reporting software would create reports using a given folder  Google Analytics is a good one.  If you use the conent drilldown tool, it automatically organizes your reports by looking at the slashes and then grouping pageviews and visits according to the folder structure.

3) Separately, you had development code that used the folder system in the url as a way to parse what the user wants and then deliver a page.  This is why you can now have a url like /article/file  and you do not need a .htm or .php or .html at the end as the server knows what to do with it without seeing the final extensions.

What happens then is that you end up with URLs like this

/toys/age6-8

/toys/age6-8/redball

/toys/age6-8/blueball

/toys/age9-10

/toys/age9-10/remote-car

/toys/age9-10/remote-control-train

You can see this is a toy store and they are grouping toys by age.  Balls are better for younger children vs remote vehicles for older children.  In your GA reporting, if you assume that a slash indicates a new folder

/toys/age6-8  would not be included in the report with the products as it would be seen as a page within the /toys/ folder.  Same thing with /toys/age9-10

You have your most important page not grouped with all the products it contains.

This is one of the reasons that I prefer ending with the slash.  Can you do it the other way, sure, but it just adds more hassle.  The folder ending in a slash is a convention that most people follow and frankly, you will find that users also tend to end in a slash when they put in a url.  You end up with links to your site where they have a slash and one is needed.

Old habits are hard to break and so this is why I recommend going with the ending slash.

Just to understand your question, do you want to setup your site with 301s so that it self corrects URLs from Camel case to all lower case or are you asking about a filter in GA to do this so your reports in GA are all consistent?

Thanks!

Yes.  Put those 301s back.   If  you have sites linking to version 1 and version 2 of your site still, Google will crawl those old URLs and look for the site.  You were probably getting some link equity from those old sites still that was being passed to the new site via the 301s.

Google will crawl them again, so put the 301s back up and see what happens.  It may be a little while, but you should see traffic come back as the rankings come back and the 404 errors go down.

I run various sites that use Geo-location to place related links in navigation menus on a page.  For example, if you land on the home page, we will see that you are in Florida and then in one of the content boxes on the page, show job listings that this site has in Florida.   We also give the option to search for other jobs or use other navigation options.

The idea is to try to help the user along the best we can, but .....

What opinions do persons have here on if these links should be nofollowed as GoogleBot will always see links to places in California etc. - wherever Googlebot is crawling from? Would this then be confusing as we are a site that focused on the entire US and not just California etc

Thanks!

You could put the content in an iFrame and then noindex the iFrame (or robot.txt it). That way you are not allowing Google to browse that part of the page as it is actually from another page you are blocking.

I honestly like the image option.  I think you have more options that way to make it "pretty" and it also keeps it pretty much out of Google.  Google can do some OCR work, but could not see why it would penalize you are you are trying to hide keyword stuffing  The solution with the iFrame would for sure keep it out.

Good luck!

Ok good to know.  I think though still, this should be easily answered by the Moz product folks to explain how they look at things like this.  It will be helpful in understanding the reports.  I would assume that once you have the 301 in place, the Moz report should be fine, but maybe they are looking at something else and if they are - that data should be in the crawl report.

Glad you asked this question!

Did the crawl occur before you had the 301 setup?  The other thing is that if you have any links on your site pointing to the old URL, update them to point to the new one.

I know that in GWT that it takes a while sometimes for things like this to clear up even after you have a 301, but not as familiar with how Roger treats it within Moz.

Agree with Chris, thumbs up. I would just add that "ideally" you would have manually gone through all the links ahead of time and had the 301s in place prior to launch.    That way there is no downtime/confusion to Google on what they are supposed to do with these pages.  If you think about it you have 600 pages that are in limbo and so after a while Google will just say, well, I guess those pages are dead and start to crawl them less often and eventually drop them.

I would make it a priority to go through those pages and setup the new 301s ASAP.  Google will keep trying a old page for a while (few months) if it 404s or even if you have a 301.  It knows that mistakes happen.  So in the case of the 301, it will still crawl the old URL for a while even after it sees the 301 the first time, just to make sure that the 301 is really permanent.  You have a bit of a grace period so take advantage of it to get things cleaned up quickly.

2. use robots.txt vs the meta tags - robots.txt is preferred.

I know this is not exactly the answer to your question, but I would also do some additional research around keyword ranking.   Look at what content is duplicated on the sites then search the title tag or the opening sentence.  See what site shows up across a group of pages (be sure you are logged out etc).   You should see a trend of one site that shows up more often than others.   Use that as one of the "votes" in addition to things like PA in OSE for those pages and also the amount of traffic that the pages are getting in comparison to one another (again, comparing the results for duplicate pages across sites).  You could put all this into a spreadsheet and it will start to point you in the right direction.

At a domain level, you can put 5 domains into OSE at any one time and get a quick analysis.  That shows the same as what you mention that the lead is www.borealcanada.ca

Seems like you just need to 301 all the other domains page to page to that one.

Thanks for the example.  It seems that for a server there would be more information about it that that paragraph.  Processor information, RAM, disk space, ports etc.    I just did a search and found this info

https://www.avantidataproducts.com/product/ibm/7379c2u

I think the bigger problem is not differentiating these pages from each other on your own site, but differentiating from other sites.

This is just good old content development.  You need to see if there is a way to tap into people rating and leaving comments.  Do you have any case studies on this product etc.  Can you find any other media on it, can you create it.  Go to Zappos.com they produce a ton of videos that just describe a pair of shoes.  Do you have someone who could be your video representative and you shoot a bunch of videos on your top products and embed them.

I think otherwise, you are just going to be similar to everyone else with the same product.

That is a completely valid question.   This is why setting up the separate GWT account for the dev.domain.ext vs www.domain.ext.   When you submit the removal request it will only be in the dev.domain.ext account.

The only thing you want to watch is that if you setup robots.txt in your dev environment you want to make sure that it does not get pushed out to your production server. That is the only gotcha as I see it.

Hard to say without seeing the products and so you may not get much response here more than "it depends".   Sit down and be creative, you may be able see if the differences can be highlighted enough that they are different from the others and so you can use them.

Here is what I would do.  If you have 4 versions of a widget, create 1 page with information on all four of them.  Then you can talk about all of them at once and optimize around the 4 versions.  Lets say you have a red, blue and green widget - those are the only differences and everything else is the same.  The page should talk about how great the widget is, talk about the 4 colors, have pictures of the widget in all 4 colors, let people vote on what color they like the best, have links to PDFs on each of the 4 widgets etc.  This may be the better approach.

I am just not sure about using of the canonical as people probably need to be able to find the different versions of the widget and so you need to make sure that the information is out there.  If you setup a page for the 4 versions and then canonical 3 of the versions to the 1, you are still "de-emphasizing" the other 3 versions that people may be searching for.

I really try to only use canonicals if there is an exact duplicate (say a printer friendly version of the original) or I use it for business purpose.  Example: I have one site that has city and zip search options for locations - I canonical all my zip result pages to the parent city page - I do this as I know 1) for this area people do not search in the SERPs by zip code so no use optimizing around zips, and 2) the zip pages are pretty much dups of the city page anyway.  I only leave the zip pages on my site as an option from a usability for people once they hit my site if they want to search that way.

Good luck!

Here is a Google documentation on how to use the GWT to remove a page/directory/site and then the interaction with robots.txt

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/url-removal-explained-part-i-urls.html

"In order for a directory or site-wide removal to be successful, the directory or site must be disallowed in the site's robots.txt file."

Side story.  I once had a subdomain that I needed to take out, but I could not modify the robots.txt file properly (long story).   So, we used the GWT tool and the meta noindex tag.  It still worked, but I think that would only be a backup approach to the one suggested by the documentation.

Usually, this would be true that you would need to use the noindex tag to get things out of the SERPs and need to leave the robots.txt "open" to the crawlers.  But when you are working with the remove URL tool in GWT,they rx that you then put the site in robots.txt to keep them out of it

The removal tool in GWT takes care of Google taking the URLs out and then the robots.txt keeps the bots from coming back.  Just a different sequence than if you were to use the noindex meta.

If you create the GWT account for the dev site and you submit for removal, GWT requires that you either a) have the site blocked in robots.tx or have a noindex meta tag on the pages. Otherwise they will just crawl you again later and you are back in the index.  See my post from earlier.

Short answer - no dev sites should be public to start with to anyone (let along Google et alia).  The simplest way is to put an htacess password on all your dev sites.  You can do a password per person in your company, or just one general one that everyone on the dev team shares.

If you do have a dev site in the Serps, the simplest way to get it out is to setup a GWT account for that subdomain and then e.g.  dev.yourdomain.ext  and then go into that account and request removal of all pages.  You just leave the form blank for the page to be removed and it takes out the whole site.  You then need a robots.txt on dev.yourdomain.ext (different from the www. version) that disallows all pages all crawlers - that or use the noindex meta tag on all page.

After about 1 month (or you see that the pages are all out of the serps), then I would put up a password on that entire site and be done with it.  Key point, dont put the password up until you let google try to spider and it sees the robots etc.

Also, if you have any other staging sites that are out there like  test.yourdomain.ext etc.  If they are not indexed, go ahead and put the password up on them to limit your exposure.

Public dev sites are the fastest way to get duplicate content into the index and to jack with the ranking of your current site.  It is key that all of them are locked down. If one of your developers say it is no big deal, call BS, it is a big deal and it can cause a big mess.

I forgot to add.  I use a canonical on all my printer friendly versions pointing to the original page and then I have a self canonical on that page - again on thousands of pages.  AOK.

No problemo.  Take a deep breath.  In your scenario

www.1099pro.com/index.asp

has a canonical link to

www.1099pro.com

and since they are duplicates

www.1099pro.com

will canonical link to

www.1099pro.com

That is no problemo, double aok, extra sprinkles on top.   Have a page canonical link to itself is actually a best practice.  If anyone scrapes your home page - you have a link back to your site and for other good reasons.  I have a site with thousands of pages that self canonical and it is no problemo.

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

From Dr. Pete

" ... is it alright to put a rel=canonical tag on the canonical version of the URL, pointing back to itself? Practically speaking – yes, it is, but you don't have to. Early on, there were hints that both Google and Bing preferred that you not overuse rel=canonical. Over time, though, their stances seemed to soften, and I’ve seen no evidence in recent history of a properly used, self-referencing canonical causing any harm.

This is often just a practical issue – many URLs share common templates, and the code needed to display a rel=canonical tag on just the duplicates and not the canonical version of a page can get messy and increase your chance of mistakes. Personally, I believe that the search engines recognized the reality most webmasters face and adjusted their initial, conservative stance"

Ditto.  We do this internally, but we ask folks to not +1 everything, just what they like the most etc.  That is more of an organic pattern anyway.

It would act like any other 301 as you will see a dip and then it recovers.  Here is a QNA on Moz that talks about things to consider beyond just setting up the 301s lines up with what we are talking about

http://moz.com/community/q/splitting-one-website-into-2-different-new-websites-with-301-redirects-help

Yes.  Best practice is to have 1 page optimized per keyword that you are targeting.  What you are proposing would be consistent with this.  Google Keyword Slios and that will give you some interesting reading.

The answer is yes, this could negatively impact you.  You need to reach out to those sites and email them to get removal.  Document everything that you do.   Then you can then use the disavow tool to tell Google to ignore.    You can also Google link removal software to get help in the first part of the project.

Yes you can do this.  The 301 can go anywhere.  As far as SEO impact, as long as the page that you are sending people to is semantically related to the page they are coming from, you may lose a little bit, but over time it should all be fine.  Also, it is best if you have a one to one relationship on your 301s.  If you take all the links from Section 1 on Domain A and then 301 them to the home page of Domain B and likewise take all the links from Section 2 on Domain A and 301 them to the home page of Domain C, that is suboptimal.   You are likely to lose the semantic relationship and then the SEO benefit would be damaged.

This goes beyond what I know at this point.

I went to a presentation by Greg Gifford (here is his blog post) and the merge is a nightmare between Google+Local and Google+Business

http://blog.autorevo.com/2013/02/merge-google-plus-local-wit-plus-business/

http://blog.autorevo.com/2013/02/how-to-tell-difference-between-google-plus-pages/

So I have stayed back on this. I assume there would be some bulk merge tool to use at some point and this would be your answer. (I have not looked into this).

Post that as a separate question here and see what you get.

I would agree with this point.  You keep the local number so Google associates properly, but then corporate can manage the listing.   Works for me.

Good to hear.  Does lend support to the trend that GWT link data can be slow to update and in this case even go off the rails.

Read out loud what you just wrote "12 footers on the bottom of each page" and "these sites are part of the same large company but are not related in any way".  I am frankly surprised you get traffic from this as if I see 12 footers and many of those are non related to the present site that would not be useful to me as a user.

Forget traffic referrals.  Does that traffic convert?  Figure out if is does, the "considerable traffic" may not convert at all and so while you have less traffic, it does not impact your bottom line.  You may also find a middle way from just deleting everything etc.

Generally site wide links are not useful or can be ignored so you are really not doing yourself any favors.  It may be that if you update, you rank better in Google and get traffic that way.

If you own all the locations in the 38 cities, Google has a bulk upload function.  It is done via a spreadsheet.

https://support.google.com/places/answer/178024?hl=en   You are then able to verify in bulk .

Step 6: Request bulk upload verification

It's important to verify your authority to manage your initial upload, because unverified listings will not appear on Google Maps. If you are the business owner of all of the bulk uploaded listings in your Google Places account, you will need to request verification for your bulk upload. Simply click the “Verify your locations” link and fill out the subsequent form. It will be submitted to our team for review. A reviewer will respond to your request at your Google Places email address.

That said, I would not use a central 800 number if each of the local businesses has a local number that they are already associated with at a give address.  Phone number is KEY to Google connecting the dots between what you submit, what they already have in their databases and what they find out on the web in other directories and from other business databases.    If you change all of them to a central 800 number you may actually be messing up your local search results as now your NAP information in Google is different.    It is not about where the local number routes, but the consistency of that number over time.  If these are well established locations with well established phone numbers for those locations, changing the phone numbers via the bulk upload may negatively impact you.

I am not familiar with bulk uploads at the other resources you mention, but a quick web search should set you up.  They will probably also be more responsive than Google.  Just did this for you

More on Google - http://searchengineland.com/google-places-launches-new-bulk-listing-management-tool-120552

Bing - https://www.bingplaces.com/Home/MoreFAQ

Yahoo does not have this option - http://www.rioseo.com/local-seo-bing-places-bulk-upload/#fbid=mUJJOb8Zyi6

Yahoo - http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local-listings/

Yelp - http://www.yelp.com/topic/charter-township-of-clinton-business-with-multiple-locations-sign-up-help

"If you send an email to feedback@yelp.com they can help you with multiple biz locations. Just send them a list of the locations you want to claim. "

Also http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-yelp-best-practice-for-updating-multiple-business-locations

You need to get a developer who understands a lot about http requests.  You will need to have one that knows how to basically run a spidering program to ping the website and look for changes and scrape data off of those sites.  You will also need to have the program check and see if the coding on the page changes, as if it does, then the scraping program will need to be re-written to account for this.

Ideally, those sites would have some sort of data API or XML feed etc to pull off of, but odds are they do not.  It would be worth asking, as then the programming/programmer would have a much easier time.   It looks like the site is using CMS software from http://www.cts-america.com/  - they may be the better group to talk to about this as you would potentially be interfacing with the software they develop vs some minion at the help desk for the dept of motor vehicles.

Good luck and please do produce a post here or a YouMoz post to show the finished product - it should be pretty cool!

Just to clarify.  You have a main page or node page, and off of that node page you have various comment pages that are commenting on the node page.   The comment pages are canonical linking to the main page.

I would say this does not make sense.  You would want the comment pages to rank potentially or at least add more to the main page.   I would consider making the comments on the same page as the node page - much like they do on Moz.  Or if you had to break them out, I would make them paginated pages off the main page and then use rel next prev to show the relation to the main page.

Google treats the canonical like a 301 and it usually means that something is a copy of the original.  As new comments are not copies of the original and actually may add to the main page, using the canonical does not make sense.

Different example, I use canonicals for the printer friendly version of a page. It is a duplicate and I want to make it clear why and which one is more important for ranking.

You want to go page to page (your second example) as much as possible.  Google prefers more of a one to one vs a many to one relationship with 301 redirects.  That said, if you have a bunch of garbage pages with garbage links with not much traffic to them, you may just want to let them 404 and die out of the index.  Take some time looking at your Analytics and you may find you can just drop those pages.

If they are paginated and you are showing say 100 pages of blog posts, I would use rel next prev to connect one page to the other and show the relationship then I would use the same title on all of them, but on pages 2 through N, I add the page number to the title and the description.

So if your title is "Worlds Greatest Widget Posts" and description is "These are the best posts on widgets on our site." you would use that for the main index page.

Then Page 2 title would be "Page 2 of Worlds Greatest Widget Posts" and description is "This is page 2 of the best posts on widgets on our site."

You get the idea.  I use this very effectively to tie them together but make them unique.  Another pointer, if you use Printer Friendly versions of pages, you can add "PF" or "Printer Friendly" in the title and descriptions of those and then you can also use the canonical link to canonical the PF version to the actual version.

It all depends on how the site works with Google.  Google has a "First Click Free" concept

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/74536?hl=en

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html

Basically, it allows Google (and everyone else) to have access to new content the first time they crawl it

This was modified to 5 clicks in 24 hours only

http://paidcontent.org/2009/12/01/419-google-modifying-its-first-click-free-program-for-subscription-sites-5/

According to this article

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/mar/26/telegraph-paywall

The Times is behind a full paywall.  You need to do some digging, heck ask the Times.   If they are not letting Google crawl it or a modified portion of it, you may not get SEO benefit "directly" (a la M. Cutts )

That said, there is a ton of indirect SEO that you can get from you.  If there are a bunch of people reading the paid version of the Time, they are going to tweet about it, talk about it on FB, mention it on blogs.  You will get direct referral traffic from it as well.  So, is it the same as a link from a publication that is completely free an online, no. I would not say that it makes it worthless.

Look at your analytics, how much traffic is coming from the Times?  Does it convert well?  If the answers are "lots" and "yes" - then keep doing it!  The other indirect benefits that I mention are gravy.

Google keyword siloing.  You can setup a structure of pages like

/widgets/pre-owned.html

/widgets/used.html

etc

You do not want to canonical these pages to each other as a canonical is treated like a 301 and so you would only get credit for 1 page.  i.e. if you canonicaled or 301 "used" to "pre-owned" you are not doing any favors for the "used" page.  Another way to say this, the use of the canonical link or 301 in your example that you are suggesting is not the way those directives were meant to be used, so you would not get the benefit that you think you would be getting.

Beyond all that - do each of these words have enough search volume for the effort?  Can you make enough original content for each page that it makes sense?

If "pre-owned" has traffic that is way larger than the other two, it may not be worth the effort above.  Add the other key words to your pre-owned page as you can sometimes optimize for 2 or 3 sets of words.  You have to make that call based on search volume and if you think you can make pages that are unique enough and are "linkable/likeable/clickable/shareable" enough to stand on their own.  Otherwise, the other pages are just duplicates and can harm you.

Hello there!

When you read an IP address it is something like 45.452.456.77 - this is the actual "address" on the internet where your website lives.  It is like your phone number.   When you put a domain on top of it the domain "maps" to the IP, it is an alias (like speed dial), they type in the name and you are sent to the right number.

The IP address has sections separated by periods.  In my example above it would be aa.bbb.ccc.dd   The "C-block" (and dont confuse that when you are at a bar and your buddy cuts in on a conversation you might be having with a cute young lady), is the 3rd group of numbers in an IP address starting from the left, or in my example 456

Usually, when the "c-block" section of the IP address of two different websites is different, that means that the websites are hosted on separate servers.   Why does this matter?   It is very easy for sites to share an IP address or even to share C-blocks.   Kind of like houses.  You can share the same IP address, would be the equivalent of a lot of people in the same apartment complex, the street address is the same.   Having the same C-block is more like you live on the same street.  Having different C-blocks is like being on different streets, or even in different zip codes or cites etc.  Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.  Sites with different C-blocks are seen as more "separate" than those that share a c-block.

Why does this matter?

If you get a ton of links from sites that all share a c-block - it looks like a link farm or link scheme and Google may ignore those links or could penalize them for you.  Back in the day (not that I ever did this) you would setup a bunch of sites quickly and cheaply and they would share IPs or even be on the same c-block of IPs.   You could generate a bunch of links that way.  This was obviously spammy and Google cracked down.

Note that this could be one link per website linking to you, but if all the websites were in the same c-block it looks suspicious.

So, you can get links from the same c-block - it is not like an automatic penalty, but if ALL your links are from 1 or 2 c-blocks - it looks suspicious.  If you host websites that are truly different from each other, they all produce original content and it makes sense to cross link, I would talk to your hosting company and make sure that each site is on a separate c-block - just to be safe.  You could be "linking properly" from one site to the other, but the c-block issue could make your link pattern look suspicious.

Your host might say, "Well we cant control what IP we give you", blah blah blah.  They do use different ones over time.  What we have done is had one site setup on an IP, then wait a while (few months) then get a new IP for the next one etc.  Naturally over time, your host will be getting new IPs all the time and so you can work it that way.  You will need to update your DNS settings etc, so you need to be technically astute to change IPs, again if you think you need to (it may be that you do not).

Usually, worrying about c-blocks for links is not an issue assuming that you are getting links naturally, so this conversation may become old hat, but if you are hosting sites and linking them together, it is just something to consider.

One more, you can actually do a lookup of what sites share the same c-block.  If you find a bunch of p0rn sites on that c-block or other questionable sites, that could cause an issue with your site as you are seen in the same neighborhood.  Most hosts today you do not have to worry about and/or they keep those sites on separate blocks anyway, but just something to consider.

Re-read the Moz blog.  It talks about why it is not a direct impact on rankings but an indirect one.  Matt Cutts is an engineer and thinks in black and white, there is nothing "direct" but that does not mean there is not an indirect effect.  The indirect effect is what the blog post is talking about.  Read the "update" part at the bottom.

I am with Erwan.  You have essentially two authority sites, two authority domains that link to each other and support each other.  That is golden and you want to keep taking advantage of that

Sure, you can move the blog and use 301s, and it would "work" but I bet you would lose some ranking.

First and foremost when you finish all this - password protect your dev instances.  A url will leak out eventually and then this happens.  I know it is a PIA, but it is worth it.

To remove subdomains.  Go into GWT and register the subdomains as separate websites in GWT.  Create a robots.txt for each subdomain (not the one you mention, you need a robots that is specific to that subdomain that disallows all files.  If you cant do that, have your subdomains include a noindex meta tag on all pages.   You have to be careful with this as you do not want to push out your dev. robots.txt or the noindex meta tags to your production server, but it can be done.  Talk to your devs.    Then go into GWT and use the URL removal tool.  Just leave it blank and it will remove the whole site.

Poof.  Gone.  You can then watch the GWT accounts.  They will show errors for the dev site like "Severe health issues are found on your site - Some important page has been removed by request."  This is a good error as it confirms that that subdomain is removed.

We actually used this not on a dev site but on our www1 server that was indexed.  We use a load balancer with multiple copies of the site.  www1 was completing with www.   Using this above did the trick.

If you did that - now you have 2 URLs customers can reach you.  I know it would help people, but you now have 2 online "brands"/urls.

Technically - yes you can do it.  You can use 301 redirects and make it all work without too much of a hit.  You will get a bit of a hit short term and if you setup all the redirects properly, recover within 3-6 months.

I like Rands recent post to move to moz.com as a nice case study

http://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-domain-migration/

Now - throw out everything I just typed.  You have to consider that your "brand" online is the shorter URL.  People are used to it, they already have habits and bookmarks and emails, etc etc in place.  You could "screw up" your online brand and not need to.  Plus, longer URLs are a pain in the butt.  Why frustrate your users by making them type in a  longer URL?  Why frustrate all the people who want to email you when they have to type out a longer URL?  Why, why why?

Southwest Airlines uses southwest.com, American Airlines uses AA.com, New York Times uses nytimes.com, I could go on, there are big brands that use shorter URLs.   People are lazy, why increase friction when trying to get people to your site.  I know for a fact that people search more often for keywords "NYC $services" vs typing our "New York City $services" (service could be a locksmith or restaurant etc) - why?  Who wants to type all that out when you can just put in NYC?

You could argue about the technical reasons, but what will convince them is if you give them the reasons why customers will not like the new domain,  I think that is your best bet.

One other reason I like ending in slashes. GA and other software that crawls your site and then produces reports will look at the slash and then include that URL as the home page with everything else under it in the same reports.

Some developers like to leave off the slash and just have the index page as  .com/resume-tips

You then get people who will naturally add the slash at the end in links, or you have a footer where you add the slash when you did not mean to and then you have a duplicate content issue.

I like to end with the slash and just be consistent.  Seems like most reports "expect" that convention and so it just will help down the road.

Yes.  Google will use formatted data even when there are not Rich Snippets.  They will also pull from Lists.  See this articles here: http://moz.com/blog/how-do-i-get-googles-bulleted-snippets

It will keep on crawling.  I have seen 6 months to 1 year later they come back.  Especially if there are links from other websites pointing to your old URLs.

Why they do repeat crawls on 301s and 404s for that matter is that they know how much the web changes and assume that there may have been a mistake and so want to double check.    Also, you have to consider, they will not recrawl 1000s of pages all at once.  They will probably pick up the most popular URLs first as they crawl them more often and then the less popular pages later.

IMHO. You will need to find a long term solution in place.

Here is the why you dont want to use htaccess

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209209/htaccess-redirect-performance

One suggestion for Apache - RewriteMap

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritemap

That or all the developers who are telling you not to use .htaccess should have at least 2 solutions to use instead that should work.  Go back to them to solve the issue.

Thanks for the update Jesse!

Yes please.  It was my understanding that Moz Analytics was going to be rolled out to Pro members over the coming months. I know launches can be delayed, but had not seen anything.  I would like to see more info.

Thumbs up on Mike and Robs comments.  What you may want to do is to setup a GWT account for the dev.website.ext and then go in and delete it from within GWT.  That will truly deep 6 it and then the robots.txt is the final blow.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663427

Just leave the form blank when you request removal and it removes the entire subdomain.  The robots.txt then makes sure it stays out.

It would help to use the canonicals as you describe and it is proper the way you mention, but because the products are up for only 4 weeks, the new pages probably don't even have time to rank.  It would be kind of a moo point

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwYpSCrlHU

You need to probably focus on category pages that might point to the items as those will be more static and can build rank.  They can point to the "sold" archive item page and then when a new item comes up will already have rank on the related category to make the sale.   We have used this on job boards as it works the same.   Any given job will be posted for 1 month at the most, but the category page of $type job in $city will rank for that key phrase and then point people towards the ever changing job listings.   Not sure what you are selling, but think about how you might be able to setup an evergreen type of topic page that people would search for related to your products and focus on that.