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Google has said that this is just an approximation of the number of results. Think of the extra computing power that would be required to give an exact count of the number of results for each query, and think of how very few people care of the exact number of results.
Don't worry about it, and devote your time to something that will make you money. 
I had something very similar happen, and in my case the part with very little bounce rate was where I had two GA scripts on my site at the same time without realizing it. It's a Wordpress site, and I had both a GA plugin installed and custom GA code to track ecommerce sales across a different domain.
Robert and SamHill, could you please send an email to help@seomoz.org with screenshots / info about the mozbar misbehaving so we can work on finding out what is causing these errors? Thanks so much, and we're really sorry you're seeing these quirks.
LunaMetrics is a respected company. I worked for a non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area that received some consulting from them, and saw them give a couple of hours of training in Pittsburgh when I attended a non-profit conference there. I've actually linked to their blog often in the Q&A section. They just worked with Raven Tools (Taylor Pratt used to work for LunaMetrics) to put together the GA configuration site that was released yesterday.
Hi Arthur,
Sorry for the long delay in a response. This is odd. I'm seeing just two (seemingly) random pages indexed in Bing. I highly suggest verifying your site in Bing's webmaster tools, as they have a a great webmaster tools dashboard as well, and can tell you if they're finding any problems.
Here's a good in-depth post about this from a day or two ago.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/01/10/people-talking-about-this-defined/
Hi Atul,
Just wanted to let you know that the questions in Pro are indexed and visible in Google right away. Right now, this post ranks #9 for that domain name on Google, so if your client searches their domain name they might find this post.
Hi Echolls, so sorry to hear that. Can you send an email to help at seomoz dot org and let our help desk know? Thanks!
Keri
Given that graph, Google is certainly visiting your site. It's just not always accurate when judging when something was published. We've published posts on SEOmoz, five minutes later I look in the SERPs, and Google says "nine hours ago".
I'd vote for doing the rewrite to the lowercase version. This gives you a couple of added benefits:
If people copy and paste the URL from their browser then link to it, you're getting all the links going to the same place.
Your analytics based on your URLs will be more accurate. Instead of seeing:
urla.htm 70 visits
urlb.htm 60 visits
urlB.htm 30 visits
You'll see
urlb.htm 90 visits
urla.htm 70 visits
Rick, I've noticed that that page and your site in general has some images that are fairly large in file size that aren't helping matters. One fast fix is to install the Smush.it plugin for Wordpress at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/. It'll help optimize images as you load them, and will also optimize all existing images in your media library. It's a lossless compression, so the image quality won't change, just the filesize. In the longer term, you might want to consider optimize for web in photoshop for some of your pictures.
Here's a great SEOmoz post about other things you can do to optimize your site. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/optimizing-page-speed-actionable-tips-for-seos-and-web-developers. Some are easy, some will take a while longer. First thing I'd do though is put in smush.it and have it attack what it can on your existing images, since your site is still getting a lot of press.
I've passed this one around internally for ideas too. Is this in a subject area where many people might be visiting in incognito mode? It is a bit of a head scratcher!
Hi Frederic,
Everything should be fixed now. Go ahead and hook it up, and let us know if you see any problems, but things seem to be working just fine now.
This thread just came out on Search Engine Roundtable today, which suggests Google may actually pay attention to content on an iframed site. I haven't had a chance to look at it in real detail yet, but it is interesting.
Michael, you might want to open a new question for this, as old threads don't get bumped when new content appears.
If you don't have any content or anything on the exact match domains, the 301 really isn't going to help you.
Hi Rick,
A huge congrats on how successful your post was! I see it just keeps getting more and more press, which is awesome.
What's the status on this question? Have you worked something out with your host or changed hosts? Are you still looking for some advice, or has this been taken care of?
Keri
Here's some information from a Googler on a couple of reasons why they change the title tags. It happens to all kinds of sites, including Apple, and can happen depending on the query used as well.
I've liked TigerTech.net for some time, and that's where Search Engine Land, Matt Cutts, and others are hosted.
There is a bug that's being worked on right now, and I think a fix will be out within the next day.
Often I'll find Q&A questions indexed in less than an hour. Google tends to be pretty speedy with their indexing of this section.
Just a side note, it's still easy for the search engines to tell the sites are connected when you're using the same Google Analytics account. Check out http://spyonweb.com/www.caliriver.com
Please email help@seomoz.org and let us know via the help desk. There may currently be a glitch with this right now, and opening a ticket (via the help email) will help us track it down. Thanks for doing that, and so sorry for the difficulties you're having.
Here's a sample robots.txt from the wordpress.org site itself:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_Wordpress#Robots.txt_Optimization
Alhallinan, in all fairness, you said in your comment "Coming up with kick-ass content isn't the issue. We're really good at that. Its getting people to LINK to the kick ass content that is the problem. " and "But we can't get people to link to it for the life of us. We know its funny, great content, but no links in 12 months. What the heck?"
I believe EGOL was trying to address a couple of your comments in his response.
In looking at that link that you shared, my first thought was "this was written for keywords, not for the user". Specifically, "Hire SEO Expert Tip" doesn't read very naturally. Second, you'll likely have a hard time having other people in the industry link to a post that has four "tampa SEO" links for your five tips. It's obviously optimized for your terms and that talks about your company specifically. It's just not a stand-alone resource that other people would link to.
Hi Erik,
This is a dwindling bug in OSE. As OSE has had deeper crawls, it's come across downloadable files and wrongly counted them as links. We've tweaked things and mostly fixed this problem, but you will come across a few strays (or more than a few in this case). The number of wrong links like this is generally going down with each index update; check back in a day or so when this latest index update is posted and hopefully it will be reduced for you as well.
Keri
I've had good experience with TigerTech for hosting (they've always been quite responsive, prices are good, and they are easy to use). I've never had a spike like that, but Matt Cutts hosts his blog there and he purposely got on Digg or Slashdot and they were able to handle the spike just fine.
No matter your provider, the next time you see a spike like this happening, give them a call before the server totally melts down. Tell them you've gotten some great press and it's a legit spike but only temporary, and can they make sure that your site doesn't go down.
There is also some Wordpress plugins you can use for caching to help your site through a spike like this.
Today's YouMoz looks at ten examples of good linkbait pieces and dissects why they were successful. It might help you get a couple of ideas for your pieces too.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/10-extraordinary-examples-of-effective-link-bait
Here are some SEOmoz blog posts that can help provide some inspiration.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/outreach-for-linkbuilding-whiteboard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-create-and-promote-a-link-worthy-resource-list
I just watched a TV show yesterday about buildings being built in Saudi Arabia and the double-paned windows that are actually eight inches apart and have outside air blown up through them to help keep the building heat down. It reduced air conditioning needs by 2/3. That's some pretty amazing content there!
My husband and I watched this while we sat in our rental house with no air conditioning of any type. What about some content for the millions of renters who want air conditioning but can't make permanent changes to their house or apartment? Such as how to safely install an a room air conditioner when the windows only go side to side vs up and down, how to keep your house secure, what size air conditioner do you need, what's the budget option vs the high-end option.
Give me all kinds of info about how to choose the right air conditioner so that I feel comfortable that I'm getting the right thing from your online store and I won't just head on down to Fry's or Sears and buy something there. Give me calculators about how big I need for a particular room size, give me worksheets for properly measuring my windows I buy the right sized kit for sealing the rest of my windows, etc.
Hi Rob,
Here's a helpful post that Barry Schwartz did about why Google may rewrite your title tags. They do this often, and it includes all kinds of sites, even Apple computer. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023139.html.
Hi Gary,
One answer would be footer links. It looks like there are links to that site in the footer of http://www.newportoc.com/ that could account for thousands of links but be from only one root domain.
Hi Sebastian,
Can you share more information about most people tending to use hyphens when typing in a name? I haven't seen studies on that before and it sounds like really valuable information to have. Most of the advice I see is to avoid hyphens in the domain name itself as multiple hyphens can look spammy and it's more difficult to say verbally.
In any case, if you do opt for the hyphen, ALSO get the non-hyphenated domain. Otherwise someone else will get brandglobal.com and capture a ton of your traffic from when people don't type in the hyphen.
You might reach out to brentdpayne on Twitter. He worked for the Tribune for a number of years and gave SEO training to reports and may have some resources and tips he could share with you.
Thanks for letting us know, and that's great to hear!
Dr. Pete doesn't cover case (though it's mentioned in the comments), but just about everything else you might want to know about duplicate content is talked about at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world, including ways to remedy it. It sounds like you've got a plan here, but I'm also adding it for the benefit of others looking at this thread.
Going along with what EGOL has said here -- are you giving people a reason to link to your site in the way of excellent content on your website? Not just content below pictures that's for the search engines, but content for users.
etc etc etc
We generally update the Linkscape index once a month. There were two releases in November (one at the very end), and then there will be one this week. It's a little later than usual because of the downtime for the holidays. The Calendar that Jgower shared will always show you the upcoming release date and the previous release dates.
You may want to look at companies other than just those listed on Topseos, or at least search this forum and the internet for commentary about the companies that are on that list and how they get there. It's not necessarily a representative sample of what SEO companies have to offer, so you may want to broaden your search to see what other types of companies offer.
We did have some cases of crawls not happening.Send an email to help@seomoz.org with your information and we'll get things working for you. So sorry about the problems.
Then you need to make sure that:
a) your analytics are installed on every page and working
b) your robots.txt or meta robots are not blocking the site from being crawled
c) you have the site verified in Google and Bing webmaster tools and they have no warnings letting you know that you're not in the index.
If you use Firefox to view your site, right click on an image and select view image info. You'll see something like the screenshot below, which shows you the size of all of the images on that page, both in dimensions and in the size of the file.
Here's a good Whiteboard Friday about image optimization in general, and it talks about image file size.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday
Here is an in-depth post about site speed. Don't worry about the advanced stuff, mainly look at the tools to use to find the load speed of your page.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/optimizing-page-speed-actionable-tips-for-seos-and-web-developers
The part about directories was in the alt or title tag for the image itself; I can't reference it now that you've removed the image reference.
Regarding the links at the bottom..look in your analytics, do you get anybody coming in on organic traffic using any city-related words? If not, you know for sure it isn't working. Also consider just removing it on all your pages for a week and see what happens.
Hi Diane,
What does it look like in Google Webmaster Tools for your crawl stats? Do you have any warnings in there?
The date you are seeing in the SERPs is a date Google tries to pull that is related to the article, not the date that Google crawled the page. Look at the cache of an individual page and look at the cache date for that information.
When you're in Google Webmaster Tools, crawl the site as Googlebot to see what it is seeing. There might be a setting on your site that's showing one thing to Google and another to your users.
Jared, I'm seeing her keyword phrase in the H1 tag; can you explain what you meant?
Diane, all of the links in Q&A are nofollowed, so putting in anchor text in your questions in Q&A won't help your site, and the admins often remove them anyway.
I'd remove the spammy-looking screen of text with all of those cities at the bottom of the page, that's not going to help you at all.
You appear to have a broken image on that page as well, at the very bottom that links to In2Town. That link doesn't make sense either, as it says that there is free advertising there with the directories, but I know from previous questions you're targeting that site as a lifestyle magazine.
If you're concerned about page load time, take a look at your image size and resize the images before they're on the page, not in the code. That one about the results is quite large and could be probably 1/10 the file size that it is now without a problem.
For anyone interested, here are the TAGFEE bracelets that Dr. Pete had made:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150291508411246&set=a.293920196245.153433.8489236245
There's a known bug at the moment that we're investigating that has some crawls suddenly dropping down to only a page or two. I believe both of you have sent your information to the help desk, and they'll help you from there. I'm making this comment so anyone else searching the forums in the next couple of days can see this answer as well and just contact the help desk directly.
