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An odd and slightly scary thing happened today: we saw an affiliate string version of our homepage ranking number one for our brand, along with the normal full set of site-links. We have done the following: 1. Added this to our robots.txt : User-agent: *
Disallow: /*? 2. Reinserted a canonical on the homepage (we had removed this when we implemented hreflang as had read the two interfered with each other. We haven't had canonical for a  long time now without issue. Is this anything to do with the algo update perhaps?! The third thing we're reviewing I'm slightly confused about: URL Parameter Handling in GWT. As advised - with regard to affiliate strings - to the question: "Does this parameter change page content seen by the user?" We have NO selected, which means they should be crawling one representative URL. But isn't it the case that we don't want them crawling or indexing ANY affiliate URLs? You can specify Googlebot to not crawl any of particular string, but only if you select: "Yes. The parameter changes the page content." Should they know an affiliate URL from the original and not index them? I read a quote from Matt Cutts which suggested this (along with putting a "nofollow" tag in affiliate links just in case) Any advice in this area would be appreciated.  Thanks.

On a page that lists products (thumbnail text repeating the same word when you sell variations of the same thing) and also has copy at the bottom, are the product names crawlable? Is it better to avoid repeating the keyword in the copy? Can you get penalised for it?

Hi all, Has there been an update in the SEOmoz crawling software? We now have thousands of dupe content/page title warnings for paginated product page URLs that have correctly formatted canonicals. e.g. http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx ... has following pages with identical content that have been flagged: http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=6 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 ..plus 4 more URL's. But they all have canonical set. There's even a notice at the bottom of report that tells us there's a canonical set to http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx What gives, SEOmoz ?? Thanks Michael

We're currently using meta refresh tag to check if  JavaScript is enabled or not in users browsers. And if not then we redirect them to jsnotfound.aspx page: <metahttp-equiv="refresh"content="0;url= default.aspx?jse="0"/"></metahttp-equiv="refresh"content="0;url=> It's being flagged in SEOmoz tools so our developer tried solution  highlighted in this Question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/meta-refresh-nojavascript-url ...but he couldn't get it to work. Is it really imperative we don't use the meta refresh for this purpose? Thanks in advance. Michael