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It looks like I have done it correctly with the rel canonical.  Open Site Explorer shows it as two different pages.  I suppose that is just the way OSE works.

This line:

is in the header of both www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/default.asp.

www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/default.asp are both showing up in open site explorer.  How do I make sure that these are not being interpreted as two pages when they are the same page?  (Both in search engines and OSE.)

Yes, I was specifically referring to Penguin.  I am seeing uplift in rankings for specific keyword phrases that dropped last October.  These keywords had backlinks disavowed in March 2013.

I just had a page/keyword that had an algorithmic penalty jump in rank significantly.  Once was ranked 3, ranked 80+ since October 2012, overnight it jumped to 31.

Google search is creating 4 sitelinks for a website.  One of these is the blog (blog.website.com).    Webmaster tools allows for site links to be demoted, but there is no way to demote the blog we which we don't want to show up since it is not a "/" extension.   Is there a way to remove it as a site link?

Volusion is based on programming that is over 10 years old.  It is difficult to customize as much of the programming is not touchable by the site owner.  They moved their hosting from Rackspace to their own servers.  Up time reliability is not what it needs to be.  They spend money marketing their product and not enough money on customer support.  Communication is not very open.  When a problem occurs, they blame it on third parties.

In short, they are riding on previous success and not making the needed customer requested improvements.

A couple comments:

On where to place you emphasis:  Both products, categories, and home page should be used for SEO.  You will capture the greatest number of long tail phrases this way.  Product pages will capture searchers with specific intent for individual products.  Category pages will capture searchers who have a more general intent.  Home pages can be leveraged for a few items or categories you want to spotlight. (Often used for new "featured" items).

Search term:  Basket ball shoe  - goes to category page

Search term: Nike 980 size 11  - goes to product page

On your Volusion / Magento issue:

Your Volusion issues with bandwidth can be solve with offsite hosting of images.  This will save you the bulk of your bandwidth problem.  (There are other issues with Volusion, but this one is easy to solve)

Magento seems to have speed issues when you scale up your web site to thousands of products and high order counts.  I have been looking at Megento, but do not use it.

Google isn't seeing the "hover", Google is seeing the code for the page.  If your menus are made with html, Google will be able to read the links just fine.  If you are using Java, Google has historically had a difficult time reading Java Script.  I have programmed menus that are html, but will substitute fancier Java code when the client can use Java.  This has given the best user experience while making sure that Google can read the links.

We are getting many crawl errors listed in Google webmaster tools.  We use some faceted navigation with several variables.   Google sees these as "500" response code.  It looks like Google is truncating the url.  Can we tell Google not to crawl these search results using part of the url ("sort=" for example)?  Is there a better way to solve this?

I always go for the "like".

The more "likes" you have, the more potential future interactions you can have with your customers.  This is what creates the "shares".

I would be concerned about some of your outbound links in your SEO text block at the bottom of the page.  You may be linking to sites google doesn't trust.

Here is a text block from your search result

:Homes for sale in Casa Grande AZ Casa Grande AZ real estate is now more in demand than ever considering the benefits

When I use this text as a search phrase, I am finding a bunch of other sites with near identical text.   You need unique useful content.  Your site seems cookie cutter and spammy.

You could easily by making to high a density of keywords on the page.

If you use Vimeo, you may still want to put videos on Youtube.  This will get you increased exposure through Youtube when viewers look at competitors videos.

It can benefit you as long as the back links exist.   The problem with this method is that there are a few companies that specialize in buying domains when they expire.  They are normally able to grab ownership faster than you could.  Go for it, but if it has a power back link profile, good luck in getting it.

Present the buttons to your visitor at the point in time your visitor is most likely to want to follow you.  (We called this the "point of maximum like")

For most ecommerce sites, this is not before they make the purchase.  Don't distract them with social stuff when your focus should be on converting them to a purchase.  Give them an option at the end of the checkout or in a follow up email.  We increased social shares and follows doing this by such a large percentage that made our previous efforts (share buttons on all pages) seem insignificant.

Random presentation of items is not what you want.   You want to tightly control which items are displayed on your front page.

Reasons to display items:

Hot seller you want your customer (who might not have searched for it) to see.

New Item you customer may not know about you want them to see.

Items you want want a little extra juice to flow to so they rank higher in search results.

Items you want to get crawled faster (often new items)

As someone who is getting close to adding several thousand videos to product pages...... I now have a new concern.   I would love to see an expanded topic / research on this.

A couple comments:

On where to place you emphasis:  Both products, categories, and home page should be used for SEO.  You will capture the greatest number of long tail phrases this way.  Product pages will capture searchers with specific intent for individual products.  Category pages will capture searchers who have a more general intent.  Home pages can be leveraged for a few items or categories you want to spotlight. (Often used for new "featured" items).

Search term:  Basket ball shoe  - goes to category page

Search term: Nike 980 size 11  - goes to product page

On your Volusion / Magento issue:

Your Volusion issues with bandwidth can be solve with offsite hosting of images.  This will save you the bulk of your bandwidth problem.  (There are other issues with Volusion, but this one is easy to solve)

Magento seems to have speed issues when you scale up your web site to thousands of products and high order counts.  I have been looking at Megento, but do not use it.

I am familiar with Volusion.  You will want to take your time.  Get get the new site set up on a test server.  Make sure it is working the way you want.  To do this right, this will take a while.  Make the switch AFTER your busy selling season is over.   For most of us, this is after Christmas.  You will want to do 301 redirects.  You could try to do them for all pages, but I think it is important to do them for the pages you are currently receiving inbound links.  This will flow the juice and authority to your new web site.  Is there a way to get a the old website de-indexed faster?  I don't know the answer to this.

You will loose some SEO rankings at first, but Volusion has some decent SEO tools.  Make sure you use SEO friendly URL's.  Set up all the meta tags (title and descriptions).  Use canonical tags for your pages.  block crawler access to your shopping cart.

You will be tweeking things for months, but take the time to do it as much of it as you can correctly from the start.

We have experiments up and running with youtube, wistia, and vimeopro.

So far we only see the youtube video's are indexed.  (they indexed in just a few hours).

At this time, the youtube are NOT imbedded.  In one case, it took the first position, in another, it took #3.   Our related web page is still showing on the first page.

We will monitor and see what results we have over the next week.  Curious to see what the imbeds do.

I use a subdomain for a blog.  I would prefer to have a blog that was abc.com/blog, but that is not possible with Volusion.   You may want to consider hosting images offsite.  This will save bandwidth overage charges.  Those fees can eat you up.  Make sure you don't host video on your Volusion server.