Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Cindy,

Check out: http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/your account number/keyword-difficulty/

With your account number, you will see that points are given to keyword rankings that use the word in the URL, however also notice that its domain and page authority that are king. So even if you change domains and 301 the old domain to the new one, that the quality of links your website receives will out preform any URL name you choose. Also check the old domain for bad link juice before you go through with the renaming decision. It may be carrying with it links you may not want to have associated with your new URL.

My best advice is to focus your efforts on obtaining quality links to the URL you already use.

Hi Guys,

I personally believe in updating a sitemap often so that any changes made in your website are reflected in you Google sitemap which keeps them up to date, and you will see Google's spiders hitting your site for the new data.

Use a sitemap generator like Screaming frog which may be downloaded for free here: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Generate your new sitemap.xml file (which is something you could do on a regular basis), then upload it to a place of your choosing. Now in Google Webmaster Tools list your new sitemap.xml file and your off and running again. A very simple procedure.

Garden Pet,

Do you mean they don't plan to change the content to those pages? Because if you meant to say that your client plans to 302 redirect to pages that have NO CONTENT then your asking for a huge problem they may never be able to recover from under their base URL.

If the old page is being redirected to a page that has no content the new URL will eventually get crawled, nothing will be found, and the black hat flag will get raised for the new page.

Jeseph,

We have a similar structure in our web-store. However we don't use WordPress, our company has the same concerns. To use your example we also have a "Child 1" problem, at least as far as our thoughts about duplicate content are concerned. Our experience is that Google has NEVER marked our "Child 1" as duplicate. However our "Parent A" through "Parent C" categories have been marked as duplicate. So we have made changes in or categories to try and stem the issue.

After doing some research on Google duplicate content, they specifically say they only consider duplicate content when the content is similar when the base URL's come from two different sources. What this means to me is that: www.site1.com\Parent-A\Child-1 is a duplicate content to www.site2.com\something-new\Child-1

Where www.site1.com\Parent-A\Child-1 and www.site1.com\Parent-C\Child-1 are not considered duplicate content.

Vince,

Lets remember that Moz and Google are two completely different and independent company's. They have different spiders programed to do different things. One company could not "take" or "scrape" the others data. A good example is the fight that ensued between Google and another well known search engine that was allegedly "scraping" Google's data, and presenting the data formatted differently as their own. You should NOT expect Moz's data to exactly reflect what's going on at Google. Moz is a fabulous tool, to use as reference to the changes you make to your website. They come to your web project on an advertised interval, and provide reference data for the changes you have made.

Have you tried this area of MOZ? http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/account number/rankings

Substitute "account number" above with your pro account number. The results page shows your keyword results. Next to each keyword there are two icons. The Icon that looks like an EKG symbol will take you to a report that does exactly what you want. Shows your page ranking relative to other websites. You get 50 free extra keyword checks per week.

Holger,

You did not say what internet browser you are using. The problem probably stems from the browser default font being something difficult to read.

In Chrome click on the upper right corner hash box, choose "Settings" then scroll to the bottom of the list, and open the advanced settings. Here is where you may specify the font style, and size. Internet explorer is very similar.

Alejandro

I really hate it depends type answers, but you have some choices to make, and only you can answer the question about starting over.

First how easy was it to get the links required to get the PR 3 result? Do you already own the domains that brought that type of page rank. Or do you have a friend that you may contact to quickly build the links back? How about negative baggage the old domain brings with it. Does the old domain have links that that are non desirable that you may want to separate yourself from? Is the new website a completely different idea than the old website? If the new domain and old don't share a similar idea, the spiders may look at the old domain redirect as a negative for the new domain. An example might be if you had a chat room about camping products, and the new domain is related to Indy race cars, your not doing yourself any favors doing a 301 redirect.

Jason,

We have had experience with this, and here is what we found. First it did NOT hurt our SEO scores from any of the measuring company's or metrics.

Where we did see an improvement is our website performance. We are now on a stand alone server, so our performance has greatly improved, and we are able to present a page much faster. In addition, server crashing has greatly improved. Where we have seen a hit is our ability to automatically send an e-mail "order shipped" response. Our e-mail message is getting refused by certain e-mail hosts, specifically ATT based address. Somehow the server space provider has a block of IP address that have been marked as not so desirable. We never send out spam, but it seems that someone close to our IP address block does, so the entire IP block is rejected by ATT.

So to answer your question the IP address has not caused a SEO reset or degrade of our Authority or rank, however you should be cautious about what your neighbors are doing with respect to sending out e-mails. Perhaps you could get a list of IP address that your hosting provider uses, then check those address with respect to spammers, before you commit to a hosting provider.

Seda,

Have you submitted a sitemap to GWMT?

That will greatly help the Google spiders crawl your site. Kind of like telling someone how to find your business vs providing them a road map. They will get there a whole lot quicker if you provide a map on how to find all the different locations.

There are quite a few different sitemap generator programs available. These programs will index your site and build the sitemap.xml file for you. Now you can save the file to your website root directory, then point GWMT to the sitemap.

Ash.

Sounds to me that your not considering the default webpage as a source for links.

If in the server system you set up your default webpage as Home.htm, and the server will sometimes use a list of default webpage to try and look for as the default starting page. But installed as a web store you are using a website for instance written in ASP and that website software has a web.cfg file the web.cfg file will set a new default home page for instance Default.aspx

SO basically there are two different qualified pages that will start your web store but different names.

You could just type toe 2 different names in a browser to see what webpages are being used as the default, then 301 redirect the lowest result to the larger.

JM67,

Mike is probably on to something. 200 status is usually followed by OK which means you are good to go.

I would suspect that you may have a different issue when it comes to MOZ page rank. When you go from a good page rank to an F rank It usually means your are somehow linking the wrong  Keyword to the page. So in your case check for something as simple as having "HTTPS" vs "HTTP" or www version vs non www. That makes all the difference.

Allen

Rachel Johnson

The links may be difficult to find with just a cursory look. We use a service called LinkDetox. It is a charge for service but you would be surprised at who links to you! There are lots of these types of services so LinkDetox may not be your first choice. But they will provide a report of the good links along with the cautionary links, as well the bad links. I just bet you will find bad links that you are not seeing by using GWMT or a MOZ links report.

Rachel,

Ready for some bad news? It means that the spiders crawling your site have found links to your site that are from low quality (trust) sites. Hence if you have low quality sites providing links to your site it could bring down your trust.

We both hope that these are not your doing. What that means is that just going out and soliciting links to your site, without first checking out the domain trust, content, and page rank of the site you are trying to receive a link from, you may just be asking for trouble by accepting just any old link.

So if that inset bad enough here is even worse news! Rouge websites could possibly provide a link to your site just to do evil deeds to your site. Its worth checking into where the links to your site come from. Here is where the link disavow comes into play.

I am not saying that is what happen in your case, so please check it out instead of ignoring it, and hoping things will improve in the future.

Wish I had better news for you,

Thanks for the help guys, but .........

Well maybe I left out a few important pieces of information, because we need more accurate information.

First we are not on a shared server, and don't use c panel. We are on a stand alone server. We don't use GoDaddy for anything other than that's where the domain name was purchased, so they currently have the DNS record pointer. We are running our website alone on a windows server enterprise 2007 edition.

So even though EnvoyWeb above provided a detailed answer, those directions don't work under our edition of windows server.

Any incite? Please?

Yes we already have chosen the preferred domain in GWMT, but that only effects Google spiders. We are hosted in a windows based IIS environment so there is no .htaccess file.

So I guess my real question is how do we setup the redirect? Is that in the DNS server Godaddy? How to do that?

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen.

I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record

So here is the response from IT:  " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain.  301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names.  Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank.

It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?

KempRugeLawGroup

The Canonical page reference is supposed to be used to tell the spiders that these 2 pages are identical. Sounds like if you have different links on 2 separate pages then they are no longer identical.

That being said there are all sorts of reasons why you may want to canonical one page to another. Hec if I could get Microsoft to Canonical their website to my storefront I would jump at the chance to pass their link juice to my site.

So here is what we are seeing with our Canonical pages. The original or lead page, page A in your example improves in its link juice, and becomes the dominant page, the second page, or page B in your case does not loose importance or have less link juice, it only serves to bolster page A.

So what this effectively does is tell the search engines how to order their results for 2 identical pages. But how does this work for two different pages? If we are selling widgets, and thing-a-ma-bobs. Neither page looses its importance in search engines as long as we are targeting different keywords and optimization for each page.

but once they are identical, then we are ranking the more important page.

jessential

Yes you can update the in the home destination. If you are "Tracking" the results you will need to STOP the report. Re-check that the keyword used to test the page is correct, and then ensure that the URL for the page being checked is also correct. I have missed the prefix "Http" vs "https" and that of course will return an F grade as well. So once everything is correctly set, then you may want to restart the tracking/reporting option.

jessential

If you are looking at your on-page report card from within your account and the on-page checker you have setup for your keywords, that page caches the results to a predetermined URL.

Try this instead: Go to this URL http://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader this page does not cach the results and requires you to enter your keyword and page URL each time you check a page. So it will have the information from your live webpage. I bet you will see a big difference.

Bob,

The answer is an easy one. "Quality of links!"

look at this:

Our competitors out ranks us at times as well, so we did some research into the ratio MozT/MozR. In your case 5.9/5.57=1.05924 your competitors MozT/MozR is 5.57/5.19=1.07321 which is .01397 better than yours!

So their ratio is much higher than yours which we presume means that someone may have more links but their just junk links as shown by the ratio. You can see this ratio come into play at MOZ Tools rank checker.

We will kill John Deere in everything but still rank lower because of their MozT/MozR ratio.

Scott,

I'm not sure if its the right answer but here is what we found.

Our compitation out ranks us at times as well, so we did some research into the ratio MozT/MozR in your case 5.42/4.38=1.23744 your compeditors MozT/MozR is 5.37/4.23=1.2695

So their ratio is much higher than yours which we presume means that somone may have more links but their just junk links as shown by the ratio. You can see this ratio come into play at MOZ Tools rank checker.

We will kill John Deere in everything but still rank lower because of their MozT/MozR ratio.

Edward,

Same thing happens to me! But it turns our its operator error. Try checking you on page grade here: https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader

That is the moz webpage to check your page grade, a compleatly diffrent page than probably the one you are using. The page in the MOZ Champaine manager is using a chached representation of your url. So by using the above page grader you will see the new changed page you have presently hosted.

Hi Beastrip,

In our opinion it wont make much difference for quit a while, however a ship shape website is what we should all strive for, and what Google likes most. If you were to put the hours of labor into correcting this issue the return on investment will disappoint you. So you should never let the problem get that bad, where you are being penalized in the first place. A clean ship will be handsomely rewarded, one that is in disrepair and neglected will not reach the same results, and will struggle to regain what it could have had if well maintained.

Alex,

I would make the category page Toy cars with the separate product links: Blue toy cars, Red toy cars, Racer cars, etc. By linking one higher category page to a lower product page you are establishing your own page ranking "Score" that is read by the search engines as higher or lower in authority.

Your meta descriptions will further reinforce this higher archery by having the category pages describe most of the terms used in the lower level pages. Then be very specific on the separate product pages.

Now if someone searches for toy cars your category page is a higher result offering an entire selection of toy cars. But if your customer wants to type a longer search term "Blue racer toy cars" they will be directed to your specific product page.

Steve,

You diden't give any details about what you have done so far with linking you MOZ account with Google and Facebook, so here is what we have done, and our stats are working perfectly.

First go to the MOZ website, log in with your credentials. Then go to the "Profile" tab. Or go to this page: http://moz.com/community/users/account number. account number is replaced with your number. Click on the edit button, and you will see your different Social networks along with your social network account numbers or links. The google+ social account only needs to have your Google+ number in it. that will look like "110264763816136484790". it may take a day or two for the information to pass correctly. (Ours worked whither 5 minuets)

As far as the facebook profile all you need to do is put in your facebook name.

Now back from the profile page you should be able to see the full and correct address link to your social network. You should be able to now click on the updated social networks and be whisked away to that page. If not then you should try and change the information by modifying the address until is does work.

Don't forget to read about linking your Facebook account and what that number actually represents. If I remember correctly it doesn't represent "Likes" it represents "Shares"

Allen

Ciaran,

Don't forget when looking at GWMT that is a one sided view of the world. Meaning that you are only getting reports from Google, about Google, and their view of the world.

By using MOZ you are receiving a more balanced blend of the world as they see it. So I would suspect that if you used Bing webmaster tools you would notice as we do yet a completely different opinion. That's not all bad thing, its like getting different peoples view on a discussion point.

In our demographic Google is the 800# gorilla. So we base our decisions skewed towards Googles WMT and temper our efforts on what others sources are saying about the metrics.

Nenad,

We have a similar issue, and we Canonical any paginated pages to the show all page. The Show all page does not need to be canonicaled because it is the root of all the products.

Fabrizo,

Google loves when all your keywords, Page titles, Meta Descriptions all are in the same order, length, spelling and so forth, even though meta keywords show little or no effect as of late. Same goes for the URL's.

A perfect page would have the exact same URL, as Page title, Keyword, and meta description. So if your starting from scratch that may be a target to aim for. As far as URL length there may be a limit but its going to be a high number like 2083 characters.

I guess probably the best yay to choose the URL is to take a look at the Page Title name guidelines which is 20 to 70 characters. Now you can match the URL to page title with 70 characters.

Brittany,

You need to come up with a strategy and stick with it. You didn't say what type of page your "No Index" page is. But you may have a very good reason why you classify it a no index page. It just seems counter productive to no index that page or a group of pages, but yet encourage social media to link to it.

Heck no one wants to go back later and optimize a page that should have been optimized to begin with. Normally we use a template when building a web page so that all of items we want to index for are conveniently available to drop into the page being built.

A sound strategy of how pages are linked, keywords to use for each category, and titled will in the long run be easier to maintain, and make upgrading later so much more easy, rather than trying to go back and change an ever increasing mountain of pages later as your strategy changes.

SSiebn,

I have had some success in speeding things up, but only to a point.

Google webmaster tools is a GREAT tool that fortunately for us Google allows us to use, and its free!

I'm sure you probably already use the service, but I have found a few ways to use the tools to improve their scan rate. First block the spiders from crawling any pages you don't want indexed, for instance your backend files, this allows more time to be spent on the pages you want indexed. Second ensure you pages link to each other in the site, this allows pages to be linked by flowing through to each other, (no dead ends). Third use "Fetch as Google" from WMT, you are allowed up to 10 fetches. These fetches can be configured to follow linking pages, once crawled, you may submit the results to the Google index, with up to 500 fetches. It may be beneficial to submit for "Fetch as Google" your main categories. Lastly check your "Crawl Rate" to ensure that you have chosen "<label for="recommendedType">Let Google optimize for my site (recommended)</label>"

Snoop,

If getting more online visitors is the goal, then using some of the online page grading services might help improve the skeletal structure of the pages.

Just my quick scan of the landing page indicated the page title is too long and a H1 title tag is missing. In addition there are two images that are missing an "Alt=" tag. These two missing tags represent an opportunity for you to promote you keywords further.

A page that is easily indexed, and optimized for your keywords will rank higher, and attract more visits.

Mike may be right, I see that same thing all the time, however MOZ isn't in the business of making work for themselves, by producing pages that don't mean anything. They try and anticipate what the search engines may look at.

Yes we have competitors that outrank us, that get an F in the on-page report. However I suspect the out ranking is due to other factors, such as inbound links, or website age.

I have to go back to what Google keeps saying to us. Good Links, Relevant content, Page Speed.

Besides learning how to construct a great page comes in handy the next time you want to build a new one, rather than trying to go back and fix one that is questionable.

As far as your question about how to fashion the keyword your optimizing for? I subscribe to simpler is better, web searches are preformed by folks that want to optimize their time, otherwise a Iowa couple would order a phone book for Las Vegas and look up the information that way. Perhaps you use both keywords, and cast a wider net. You never know what your customer is going to search for.

Since it seems it takes so long for Google to revisit a changed page, we sort of loose track of changes made trying to optimize a specific URL for a keyword.

Any sense of how many times is the optimum number of times to use a single keyword on a single page? I'm referring to the total including Title, Description, Content, Alt=. The whole shooting match.

I have seen our Google results improve after we have removed several iterations of a keyword

Thank You

Niners52,

Should work for a fully qualified URL. I just tried it for my root domain www.davenporttractro.com as well a one of our deep product page URL www.davenporttractor.com/p-896-be-careful-plate-a-b-g-r-50-through-820-1948-1956.aspx

So I'm not sure what URL you are trying, but try and remove the http:// portion of a URL you may be inserting. This made a big difference in my experiment.

I suspect that you may not be able to use the wildcard /

Uesat,

I like Michael's response, looks like he put some effort into what he provided. I just wanted to add a point that might help you, and perhaps others concerned about the same thing.

We have used a company called Link Research Tools. They charge for their service, but I have found it invaluable. They may be found online here http://www.linkresearchtools.com Their spider will index your site for all of the inbound links, then report back on the possible impact of the link. The report provides all sorts of data about the inbound link, if it is indexed by Google, webmaster contact information, number of links that the inbound links receives, inbound link subject matter. You get the idea. They also suggest if the link is possibly impacting negatively on your ranking.

Hate to admit it, but this report can also be run on your competitors website, which may help you discover new quality links to go after or avoid for you own website. They even provide an automated Disavow tool.

Check them out

Primo,

The more focus you can place on the keyword for a particular page the better (to a point). Moz has a GREAT tool for that, its called the on page grade. This tool will focus like a laser on the submitted url with feedback on every aspect that the search engines find appealing. If you don't grade an A on this test, I would invest time in improving your score.

Improving your score involves doing things like you are trying by changing the URL, but here is the caveot! Any link juice that you may have built up under the old URL is instantly lost, along with other errors this could bring by changing the address. here is a short list:

404 error for the old address. Did you remember to also change other pages that may have linked to the old address. Loss of link juice from old address. Sitemap.xml file is out of date.

Phew, lots of things to consider.

So here is what I would recommend: Create either a 301 redirect for the old page address, or a Canonical tag. THis will preserve any link juice. Remove the page address from the Sitemap.xml so spiders no longer are directed to look for it. Include the old address in your robots.txt file as Disallow (so you don't end up with a 404 error). Check your back links to see if other websites forward to the old address, and get those corrected (helps in the long run).

Some folks call our SEO work snake oil, but as you can see its just plain old hard work and good practices

Theresa,

Not sure if I would call it a "Black hat tactic" but it will definitely hurt your google ranking. Google will penalize your site if it has site links from sites that are not indexed by Google, and Google wont index a site with no content. You could protect yourself by disavowing these links, but if you already own them just stop redirecting from them.

A better way to do what you want is to have your domain name, then under it, pages with good content that use your keywords as part of the page name.

Owning the domain names of the products may help by keeping them out of general circulation (Squatting), so a compeditor cant purchase the domaine name of a product you want to sell

Camc,

I did a search in google for a portion of your title "Modern Bathroom Furniture & Home Furnishings in Toronto On Canada" and there you were the #2 result. Probably because its such a long, and unusual term. However when doing a search for "bathroom vanities" your website was not on the first 3 pages I checked.

So first of all your website is operational, and being indexed by google, and on the first page of results when an extremely long and unique search term is used. However just because you have "bathroom vanities" in your title doesn't mean you will automatically rank for that keyword as high a a more unique keyword that has a lower competitive score.

I'm sure if I had enough patience I could look through enough of the google results and eventually find a result for your site. But the bottom line is how well is your site optimized for your keyword "bathroom vanities".

So here is the good news. you are able to do the research here at MOZ to find out how well you site focuses on that keyword. Go to the keyword analysis page found here http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER/on-page. and have a look at your url and determine how to increase the page rank so that you will rank higher in the search results.

I think you may have already done that, and just not relized you have.

An example would be Binding #1 set up as yourdomaine.com and the second binding set up as www.yourdomaine.com . Check the SEOMOZ "Site explorer". First do a report on yourdomaine.com noteing the results, now try it on www.yourdomaine.com notice the differance in the results. and your right about the answer. The sub domaine does retain some of its DA.

I'm not sure if it is the correct thing to do, but in GWT, I have manually chosen to have Google use the higher ranking DA name as its default.

Just my thoughts.

Joe,

Your NOT being overly cautious, but I do think your not thinking outside the box. The box being your 1 Meta Description you are trying to use.

Think about it this way, you cant control your customer, and you cant control their mind, you cant control what they search for. So your perceived problem is actually an opportunity to have 20 ways to describe your 1 Meta description. If the meta description your going after is "Pet Products" the chance that 100% of you audience is going to be searching for that exact term is pretty slim. One customer may search for "Pet Shampoo" yet you want them a customer or at least the opportunity to sell them "Pet Products" as long as they are a vertical, you might sell them something else.

So in my opinion you actually have 20 opportunities to optimize those pages for different keywords and cast a wider net at capturing a customer for your website.

Rachel,

Wow the upper limit! That depends on the browser. Opera can take 190,000 characters before it chokes. Probably a better question would be, help me find a product/path structure that makes sense to me, and my customer.

Also remember SEO points are awarded by the search engines if the product your trying to optimize for is used in the URL. So if your selling brown paper bags, the using the URL www.mydomaine.com\bags\brown-paper-bags is a better choice than 190,000 hard to read letters or symbols.

Hey guys,

Yes make perfect sense. Not sure that this is the best place to ask the question though. A web server IT site would probably be the best place.

What your asking is easily possible if you are the Administrator for your web server. All you will need to do is create another binding in the IIS Administrator panel. Just like you created the domain name example.com and the binding www.example.com you can create a third binding example2.com

Iskender.

Our experience has been YES. Google does follow your Robots.txt file and will ignore indexing those pages. If they have a problem, the problem will disappear.

My concern is, what is causing the "Low-quality" error message? In the long run, wouldn't it be better to correct the page to improve the quality? I look at each page as a way to qualify for a greater number of keywords, hence attracting more attention for your website.

We have had several pages flagged as duplicate content, when we never wanted the duplicate page indexed anyway. Once we included the page in the Robots.txt file the flagged error disappeared.

KempRugeLawGroup.

I'm not the expert, but we have seen the same issue, and the best answer we have discovered is that patience is a virtue.

We have seen SEO results all over the board over the past 11 years we have been working SEO. The best thing to do is NOT chase results. After all the information gathered by a spider and then later reported on is automation at its worst. We are subject to automated spiders doing their thing un monitored, left to their means and not 100% supervised.

Its not until after lots of results or non results a supervisor will reset things and set automation back in motion again. By chasing a single bad result or two will throw your SEO efforts into a tail spin.

My advise? Go get a cup of coffee and wait for the next round to happen.

Hoping for the extra points here, so here goes how we handled the problem.

The solution is a lot simpler than all the thought needed, or used by us to rationalize the answer, and it has been working beautifully. Our Google webmaster tools show constant improvement weekly without us doing any additional work.

We Canonicalized the first paginated results. ".com/productcategory.aspx" not ".com/productcategory.aspx?page=1" so now all pages link their juice back to the main page ".com/productcategory.aspx". GWT doesn't even care about setting the parameter "Page=" And we didn't include the Canonical tag for the product pages, because each product has its own link juice that we want to preserve, so that each product may "Star" as its own as a google result.

So all we did was to include a single canonical tag for the paginated category page and wala the hole solution works in GWT.

Marcy,

I would be Leary of the answer if anyone chose one domain over the other. Perhaps they have something to gain by doing so. I believe the best answer to be "Do your homework". You might start by using SeoMoz to find information about each of the domains you chose.

First go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and check out each of the options you chose. Which has the highest domaine authority? Where are these competing domains going to place your blog? If it is on a "No Follow" page then what good is the blog doing you? Or if your blog is located on a high Domain authority website say 80, but your blog ends up on a page authority of 3 verses on a Domain authority website of 65 but a page authority of 45

Each of the parameters listed on SeoMoz have a high degree of importance to your SE results. Check out each of your blog hosting choices to help you estimate how highly ranked your blog might be.

Si,

Your concern about sending search engines back to the "Root" page is unfounded. Simply the search engines WILL index not only your category page but also your individual product pages.

So if you had a category, lets say "batteries" and that category had 100 different batteries, each category page having 10 of the different batteries. All 10 of the category pages should be Canonicalized to point to the first battery category page. That page is now receiving link juice from the lower 9 pages. But your 100 individual battery product page has its own link juice and they should NOT be directed back to the category page.

Andrew,

Log into your account, now go to >Campaigns.     then >View this Campaign. Scroll down to "Keyword Rankings", then click on >See all Keyword Rankings. Hover over the keyword you would like information for, then 2 icons will appear. Click on the rightmost icon that looks like an EKG chart.

Scroll down to the "Ranking Analysis on" portion of the report. There you will find 34 parameters your keyword and URL are graded on. You will find a button just below and to the left of "Ranking Analysis on" that says "Run Full Report" you get 50 free report per month. So knock yourself out.

Seems that your putting all sorts of work into an issue, and trying to solve it a way that is the most difficult, and still not getting the results you want, which leads you to do even more work.

Try breaking the issue down into several categories: "Do not index", "Please index", and "Group these together"

Now in you Robots.TXT file use the syntax "DISALLOW:  \high-level-path"  which tells the google bot not to index ALL the pages in you site that have "\high-level-path" an any other additional lower domain structure  in their url. So if you were to use DISALLOW: \mydomaine.com, Google will ignore your entire domain.

second issue instead of trying to include all the "Rules" in GWT it would probably be simpler to include all  the URL you definitely want indexed in your "Sitemap.xml" file.  The free program " Soft Plus Gsite crawler" will automatically build this file for you.

Lastly: The Canonical tag is an easy way to tell Google which pages are similar, like your "Page" parameter