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I don't think the two have anything to do with each other. If there's not much - or any - competition for keywords, than ranking without trying is't unusual. And sometimes you think you don't optimize but do optimize, just not as best as you could. If you have a page, and there's content on it, and Google indexes it, it's going to associate it with keywords of some sort. I have pages that rank for things we never intentionally optimized for, either.

I feel like there could be conflicting answers on this one Social sharing has been such a popular thing to push for, more I think conceptually than for reality. Very few pages within a site do well with sharing - it's just usually not the type of info users want to share (no matter what marketers want to believe or what industry experts want to tell us).

The proof is in the numbers - so start there. Are people sharing your content? If they aren't, then what have you lost by removing it? (And I realize you kinda answered this question for yourself.) I'm of the belief that it works best on pages where there's content worth sharing - news, white papers, contests, etc. - if your system allows for specifics like that. And if the change with the social sharing overall will improve the user experience (like with load time), then is that a better trade off?

Since websites can have such different CRMs/platforms/coding, there's many things (I think ) that can play into performance or issues. Like, you resubmitted that trade show page and it may have jumped because Google hadn't crawled it in a long time, vs. because the social sharing changes. Just a possibility.

We have a "mega menu" that also has a lot, lot of links as part of the drop down. I agree with ThreeDesign - the user experience is very questionable (which is why we are moving from that format). I don't know how much those thing "hurt" SEO anymore - it used to matter but the popular opinion has trended away from it. However it's not a best practice by any stretch so the question is what's the value and is it worth it?

Correct; on google.co.uk it came up on the first page.

Yes, great starting points. Some of the fields may be different but the overall concept is the same as page SEO (page title, headline, text, etc.). Adding it through their site is also great as is social sharing.

I've had some problems lately with things taking excessively long, too. Generally nothing should take that long. I had one campaign report crawling for 10 days. It's so individualized - I suggested contacting the help team. They can hit whatever trigger or check with engineering (if needed) to get it squared away.

Well, if this work you are doing is relatively recent, it can take time to get rankings. Especially if you have limited inbound links - it's not easy for people to find you. So what else are you doing besides SEO to get the word out about your site - blogs? Inbound marketing? What are you doing to drive traffic?

It seems like you may be keyword stuffing "Malta" and "Malta hotels" to the point where it seems spammy - this is a bad thing. It doesn't read naturally for the user. Your main page and why Malta pages also have similar page titles - you may want to tweak that; your main page title tag is really stuffed. And, keep this in mind: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/your-guide-to-googles-emd-algorithm-update/49915/

Just a few initial thoughts.

I think you answered your own question - there's confusion for the search engine. Similar keywords can do that- even though you say it's clear to you what page is optimized there's some data to prove that the search engines aren't in agreement. (I have a lot of pages and run into the same issue.)

Have you run the competing pages through the Moz optimization tool to see what feedback it gives you? If you see each page is an "A" for the same term, there's some information you can work with to start reworking your content to "un" optimize the pages you don't want to rank.

I like this article Rand wrote that addresses how to correct this issue: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

And throw in Screaming Frog. Depending on the site, 500 URL crawl is free; any site with more pages is 99 pounds. It will crawl any site like a crawler and can sometimes give additional information outside of SEOMoz. (Moz crawls 10,000 pages at a time and I have more than 50,000.)

Check out Keywordspy - you can get some OK data under the free offering and SpyFu's free part of it's tool can also round out competitive information.

The assumptions of what to expect from using robots.txt may not be in line with the realities. Crawling a page isn't the same thing as indexing the content to appear in SERPs and even with robots, your pages can be crawled.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions

Very easy; here's some options: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/face-off-4-ways-to-de-personalize-google

I should clarify: Screaming Frog is not a monthly fee, it's annual.

If they can't track their current site, then you are right, they don't care enough. Good thing they can't get what they want, because if it were that easy to de-list a site without having any back end access to it,  then competitors would be doing it to each other non-stop.

If they refuse to make contact then they get to have everything working against them. If you can make contact, then the action items Matt suggested are the next steps.

Good luck with them as a client

Good for you for checking to see if what you are being offered may be worthy. First, how did they get these words? The reason I ask is because the biggest keyword battle I fight is figuring out how our SEARCHERS search, not what we think our customers/potentials use.

What do I mean? I'll use an example. "Benchtop printer" is the company term but people are searching for a "desktop printer." Optimize for benchtop printer and you'll never connect.

So, make sure that whatever you pick maps back to your users/customers. If you don't know, then you are risking everyone on nothing.

As far as this list goes, assuming it's vetted, there's a difference between head, or short tail "software" and long tail "online invoicing software" keywords - long tail DO NOT automatically cover short tail. Even plural terms aren't interchangeable with singular. Head, or short tail, terms are usually way harder and competitive to rank for.

Beyond that, because I don't know how you are grouping your site content or what your hierarchy will look like, I won't comment on what to keep or what to leave. Just picking keywords in no way ensures good SEO.

What access are you referring to - SEOMoz? (You didn't clarify, but I'll assume you mean SEOMoz; people post about all kinds of sites and programs here, so being specific can really help how fast you get a response.)

They don't have a multi-login feature, (yet - however it is something they are working on). Before I joined I used a colleagues login so I could access under her account, so - since that's the only current option, if you are comfortable you can do that.

If not, then as of March 2012, Moz still wasn't sure when a multi-login feature would be implemented.

I'd actually go a different route and do one site with separate pages for each location. It'dbe better for the overall issue of content/avoiding duplicate which can become a huge issue. Four sites is a lot more to manage and track and keep up and running.

But it depends on what the online strategy is, too. Google is constantly working to get localized results, too, so it's not as though there has to be four totally independent sites to get results targeted to a certain neighborhood.

I'm not saying this is the best site ever, but one hospital network that comes to mind, Beaumont, has theirs set up this way: http://www.beaumont.edu/

I'd target both; short tail words can be harder to rank higher for, and the long tail can help sooner since they are often less competitive.

And, keep in mind - if you use a tool to find out (about) how many backlinks your competition - or, the the top 3 sites for whatever keywords you are targeting - has, you just need more than that. Even better if you can get .gov/.edu links to help give you heft.

How this is done will determine if Google is OK with it and it's debatable because there is opportunity to get yourself into a pinch.  To get to your primary question, yes, most likely, assuming you are covering some of the same keywords and industries, you will be competing against yourself for rankings (and possibly confuse your audience).

Multiple sites for one company or brand work best when there's better differentiation between them; for example, Honda has a site for cars and powersports, but a different one for financing. However, Ford pretty much rolls everything under one. So, again, the outcomes will be based on how you do it and what it means for the customer experience.

As for registration, we own a lot of domains and it's never been a problem.

While this is a direction I'd never advocate for, in your case, you don't mention why you want to go down this route, so I don't want to guess at your strategy and goals.

This article has some good details on risks especially in the comments ("Is Google OK with this?": http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/uncover-competitors-using-multiple-sites-for-multiple-first-page-rankings).

A few things - too many links on a page happens all the time. I know it's a message I get, but because of the way my site is built, it's the way it is. It looks like the way your menus and such are set up that it could be just part of what you have to accept about your design. It's not going to kill you - but unless you want to make deeper levels to your site so people have fewer links to click through at the main page, then that's how the "issue" will render itself. You are not alone in having this happen to you.

As for duplicate content, something to think about: your point of it being two different songs is how you as a person look at it and you need to look at it as a crawler. Most everything else on those two pages is the same, except for the song featured in the center and maybe some of the songs listed to the right. Even the page titles are similar. I'm taking a random stab, but that means only about 15% of the content between the two is different  - most noticeably the featured song. Again, this is part of the outcome of your site design; you aren't alone in having this problem. Either you need to redo your site design  or add more differentiated content (change the page titles, change what data feeds into the "more songs" section, etc.).

I had had this happen several times. It's not normal. Contact support - they are very helpful. For my situation, they had to have a developer/engineer step in to get things back on track.

It's not going to get them deindexed and it's unlikely it could be the root cause why they wouldn't rank high.

There's honestly not much content on each page, nor it is easy to tell what keywords you are targeting since they kind of cannibalize each other, and that makes it harder to rank well.

Welcome! My two cents (and the great thing about this site is that you'll get plenty of opinions) is that I like one campaign per domain. For me,  it's really about seeing what's happening within mysite - and, using your example, www.kibin.com/essay-editing is a page within your kibin.com domain.

Focusing on just a subfolder, like your essay-editing section, just limits your overall visibility into what's going on within your site. Personally, I look at the big picture then whittle down into the subfolders and whatnot.

Why do I have that preference? The pages have to live within the overall domain - I look at the relation between them, how they each rank, where I may cannibalize one vs the other, what page ranks well, what doesn't. This is what Moz campaigns are great for.

Moz will tell you which pages rank for which terms. You could learn that, again using your example,  a different page is ranking for "'essay editing" than the one you seem to want, www.kibin.com/essay-editing.

(Although, having just looked at your main domain and your essay-editing page, they look exactly alike so there's duplicate content and possible cannibalization going on - or something isn't functioning properly and the page won't load; I didn't dig into it.)

Now, since you can set up multiple campaigns, there's nothing to stop you for doing both, either. You can always try it that way and see what data you see and then tweak as you'd like.

I'm bandwagon jumping - the title Google is using is a bit better. The one you have could be keyword stuffing-ish.

Agreed. You need to look at individual pages and associate those with those keywords. It's not surprising you're getting "jack of all trades, master of none" type data back.

You can also enter all your keywords into a tool like Rank Tracker and have it pull data so you can see which page on your site ranks for which of those keywords.