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We have 2 keywords that are synonyms we really need to rank for as they are pretty much interchangeable terms. We will refer to the terms as Synonym A and Synonym B. Our site ranks very well for Synonym A but not for Synonym B. Both of these terms carry the same meaning, but the search results are very different. We actively optimize for Synonym A because it has the higher search volume of the 2 terms. We had hoped that Synonym B would get similar rankings due to the fact that the terms are so similar, but that did not pan out for us. We have lots of content that uses Synonym A predominantly and some that uses Synonym B. We know that good content around Synonym B would help, but we fear that it may be seen as duplicate if we create a piece that’s “Top 10 Synonym B” because we already have that piece for Synonym A. We also don’t want to make too many changes to our existing content in fear we may lose our great ranking for Synonym A. Has anyone run into this issue before, or does anyone have any ideas of things we can do to increase our position for Synonym B?

We have a site that pull data from different sources with unique urls onto a main page and we are thinking about using the canonicalization tag to keep those source pages from being indexed and to give any authority to the main page. But this isn’t really what canonicalization is supposed to be used for so I’m unsure of if this is the right move.
To give some more detail: We manage a site that has pages for individual golf courses. On the golf course page in addition to other general information we have sections on that page that show “related articles” and “course reviews”.
We may only show 4 or 5 on each of those courses pages per page, but we have hundreds of related articles and reviews for each course. So below “related articles” on the course page we have a link to “see more articles” that would take the user to a new page that is simply a aggregate page that houses all the article or review content related to that course.  
Since we would rather have the overall course page rank in SERPs rather than the page that lists these articles, we are considering canonicalizing the aggregate news page up to the course page.
But, as I said earlier, this isn’t really what the canonicalization tag is intended for so I’m hesitant.
Has anyone else run across something like this before? What do you think?

I’m having an issue with Google Webmaster Tools saying there are 404 errors on my site. When I look into my “Not Found” errors I see URLs like this one:   Real-Estate-1/Rentals-Wanted-228/Myrtle-Beach-202/subcatsubc/ When I click on that and go to the “Linked From” tab, GWT says the page is being linked from http://www.myrtlebeach.com/Real-Estate-1/Rentals-Wanted-228/Myrtle-Beach-202/subcatsubc/ The problem here is that page has never existed on myrtlebeach.com, making it impossible for anything to be “linked from” that page. Many more strange URLs like this one are also showing as 404 errors. All of these contain “subcatsubc” somewhere in the URL. My Question: If that page has never existed on myrtlebeach.com, how is it possible to be linking to itself and causing a 404?

The site, www.myrtlebeach.com has been having an issue with the way it displays in search results for the keyword "Myrtle Beach hotels". It is showing as a bulleted/itemized list similar to what's mentioned in this Moz article I'll begin with a little background. When I started working with the site it would display in SERPs as: Myrtle Beach Hotels - Reviews, Deals, & Photos - MyrtleBeach.com
www.myrtlebeach.com/hotels/
70+ items - Compare Lowest rates & see reviews on Myrtle Beach Hotels
from $76. Holiday Inn Club Vacations Myrtle Beach - South Beach offers a ...
from $27. Located among the south end Myrtle Beach hotels, Holiday Sands ... We did not want the site showing as an itemized list with 70+ items. We wanted it to show with the meta description we provided. 
Our first attempt at getting the SERP to display our normal meta description was to simply change the meta description. That didn't work. Our second thought was to use pagination to reduce the number of items on the page. A few days after we implemented pagination we saw our normal meta description displaying in the SERP. Shortly after that we saw the SERP had reverted, but this time was showing 15+ items rather than 70+. This is when began seeing the SERP display change between a normal meta description and 15+ items. In another effort to stop the 15+ items from displaying in SERPs, we added relevant blog content like "Top 10 Oceanfront hotels" and "Best Kid Friendly Hotels" to break up the hotel listings on http://www.myrtlebeach.com/hotels/. Again, our normal meta description displayed in the SERPs for the next few days, but shortly after reverted back to 15+ items. Since then we have been seeing the SERP switch between our normal meta description and 15+ items with no rhyme or reason. Because our listings are not using , I'm not really sure why the site would be displaying this way. Since I have been regularly monitoring the SERP for the keyword "Myrtle Beach hotels", myrtlebeach.com/hotels/ has ranked as high as 5 and as low as 10. I open an Incognito Window and I take screenshots almost daily. I then record how the site was displayed in the SERP and its rank. I also look at organic visits and a Value Per Entry metric I've created. (I looked at Value Per Entry to determine if someone seeing 15+ items was more apt to convert) Average Visits on days with a normal meta description - 182
Average Visits on days with itemized 15+ description - 174 Average Value Per Entry on days with a normal meta description - 131
Average Value Per Entry on days with itemized 15+ description - 120 Average Rank on days with a normal meta description - 7
Average Rank on days with itemized 15+ description - 6 This data shows that performance is better on days when the normal meta description is displayed regardless of rank. I have linked 2 screenshots for reference. The 2-6-14 screenshot shows the SERP display with 15+ items and the 2-7-14 screenshot shows the SERP display with the normal meta description we provided. My questions are:
1. How does Google determine if a site should display in SERPs with an itemized or bulleted list?
2. Is there something else I need to change on myrtlebeach.com/hotels/ to prevent it from displaying in SERPs with 15+ items? m4znToY PRdDXZf

We have a site that got hit by a non-manual penalty in July really hard. I submitted a disavow file for the site placeyourlinks.com which had a bunch of clearly spammy links to the site listed in Webmaster tools. But the site itself was down for a long time so I couldn't see where the links even were. Then those links disappeared from the links file. I thought the urls were removed or the site was seen as being blank. But now they're back...and the site itself is shown as just being a blank page. I don't know what to do since I don't want to disavow those links again if it wasn't even addressed the first time and there is obviously no way to contact the site. Help! Also, I've done a bunch of work on the site to increase the amount of content while I was waiting to see what happened with the link disavow. But now all that is done and our rankings are still waaaay down. I'm considering getting really, really aggressive with link removal and disavowing if needed but I'm not sure what I should focus on removing/disavowing. Really bad sites with only one or two links? Sites that have a lot of links to the site? Sites with keyword stuffy anchor text? Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Our company hosts a booking engine that feeds to a lot of hotel properties in our area. We also own and run a site that is competing for a lot of the hotel related keywords. We are wondering if there would be a benefit (and how much) to moving  that booking engine to be hosted on that site that is competing for the hotel related keywords. On a subdomain would be easiest. Has anyone ever dealt with something like this before? I imagine it would help from an inbound link perspective since all these hotels will be pulling information from that site and when someone books it would send them to a page on that site, but could it also be seen as an outbound link from that site which might help the property sites? Any help with this would be really appreciated.